North America is a pretty expansive place covering about 8,400 square miles with a road system including all highways and roads measuring a whopping 4,688,633 total miles. That is enough pavement to circle the globe over 220 times. Driving at 80 mph, 12 hours a day it would take someone (and a very reliable vehicle I might add) over 13 years to drive the total distance. One would think that with this many roads and so much wide open space that there would be plenty of high-way to go around.
Until you consider that there are 258,000,000 vehicles in North America as well. At a staggering 55 vehicles per mile, all of sudden the roads sound very crowded indeed.
Well, the fact of the matter is that human nature is such that we tend to be like-minded and flock to congregated masses all doing the same things in the same areas, so we have an grossly misaligned balance of road/population distribution. Namely city vs. country. On an given day it would not be difficult to find either a back country road where you don't see another car, or make a downtown commute of five miles that can last an hour.
Sure, variety is the spice of life, but traffic is quite simply put, hell on wheels.
Traffic congestion has gotten so bad in some areas that national road planners are soon going to change the very scale they use to describe it replacing what was once considered "heavy" as "medium." Trust me, you don't want to experience what comes after that. We are talking cars packed in so tight they might as well be a train with a length so long you can see it from space.
Nope, there are few things out there that will help you lose your marbles more effectively than the nice, old bumper to bumper on the way home from a long day at the office. Not surprisingly, this poor use of resources and inadequate infrastructure is costly in terms even more tangible than repeatedly bashing your head against your steering wheel with drool coming out of your mouth.
Traffic consumes some 2.3 billion gallons of fuel every year at a cost of roughly $800 per traveler. When you throw in productivity for lost time workers spend staring at their neighbor's tailpipe, and the total cost is estimated at over $63 billion. The amount of time the average traveler in a urban area with a population greater than 3 million is 38 hours per year. Commute your whole career and you will have spent 80 days wondering just what the jerk at the front of the line was doing.
If you ever needed an excuse to tele-commute my friends, this is your wake-up call. Or you could move to the middle of Idaho.
To read more interesting facts about traffic congestion, click here.
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