• The average annual delay per commuter rose from 26 hours in 1990 to 42 hours in 2014—a 62 percent increase. The total number of hours of delay experienced by all commuters across the Nation reached 6.9 billion hours in 2014—more than twice the 1990 total.
• Urban highway congestion cost the economy $160 billion in 2014, of which 17.5 percent, or $28 billion, was due to the effects of congestion on truck movements. Highway traffic congestion levels have increased over the past 30 years in all urban areas, from the largest to the smallest.
• On average in 2014, to assure an on-time arrival frequency of 95 percent, drivers had to compensate for congestion by allowing 241 percent more travel time over that needed during free flow conditions.
• Amtrak’s on-time performance increased from 70 percent in 2005 to a record high 83 percent in 2012. On-time improvement was more prominent on long-distance routes.
• Barge tows on the inland waterways experienced an average delay of 2 hours navigating a lock in 2014, the largest delay on record and nearly double the delay in 2000.
• At inland waterway locks in 2014, scheduled maintenance and unexpected stoppages due to weather and operational issues resulted in more than 135,000 hours of lock shutdowns to traffic, almost 80 percent higher than the level in 2000.
• Over 21 percent of domestic scheduled airline flights (or 1.2 million flights) arrived at the gate at least 15 minutes late in 2014. Almost 10 percent (or 576 thousand) arrived at the gate more than 2 hours late.

FIGURE 4a Percent of Congestion by Time of Day: 2011 and 2014

 Table Version | Excel 

SOURCE: Texas A&M University, Texas Transportation Institute, 2015 Urban Mobility Report (August 2015: full report with exhibits), Exhibit 5. Available at http://tti.tamu.edu/ as of October 2015.

FIGURE 4b Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: 2014

SOURCE: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), 2014 Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters, available at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/ as of November 2015.