L.A. the Most Congested? Maybe Not

The Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report ranks the country's most congested cities, a list almost always topped by Los Angeles. But as Mark Vallianatos writes, the ranking misrepresents reality.

1 minute read

October 8, 2010, 1:00 PM PDT

By Nate Berg


"I had referenced this report myself without looking into their methodology.

CEO's for Cities new report Driven Apart makes the great point that the Texas Transportation Institute's main ranking scale, their travel time index, ignores distance and time, fixating instead on congestion."

As Vallianatos explains with an example, the methodology puts a worse ranking on a city where a 10-minute drive is congested for almost the whole trip than a 2-hour drive with only 5 minutes of congestion.

Thursday, October 7, 2010 in Streetsblog

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