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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Pay their

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vocal Bomb here. If you live in

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Speaker 1: or near a major city and drive a car, you

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Speaker 1: probably can't do much these days to avoid traffic, not

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Speaker 1: short of inventing your own vertical takeoff and landing technology anyways.

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Speaker 1: But what makes driving in some cities worse than others,

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Speaker 1: or one road more congested than another. Well, according to RICS,

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Speaker 1: a company that analyzes traffic and infrastructure data, it's traffic

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Speaker 1: hot spots. They define these as traffic jams that occur

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Speaker 1: at the same locations along a stretch of road. According

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Speaker 1: to Mark Burfield, the director of public relations at RICS,

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Speaker 1: key elements that define a traffic hot spot are that

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Speaker 1: they are reliable and predictable. If a commuter travels along

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Speaker 1: the same route at the same time every day and

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Speaker 1: it's always backed up at the same intersection or merge point,

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Speaker 1: that is a traffic hot spot. A recent study by Enrics,

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Speaker 1: released in September of seventeen, named and ranked the worst

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Speaker 1: traffic hot spots in the United States, one hundred and

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Speaker 1: eight thousand of them in the twenty five most congested

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Speaker 1: US cities l A, New York, Washington, d c Atlanta,

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Speaker 1: and Dallas were the top five containing the most ENRICS

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Speaker 1: conducted the study to learn more about the u S

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Speaker 1: transportation network. Is sort of a check up on the

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Speaker 1: well being of our roadways. The results will be used

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Speaker 1: to help determine the best and most efficient ways to

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Speaker 1: allocate money towards the country's transportation infrastructure. In other words,

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Speaker 1: by identifying the worst traffic hot spots and how they work,

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Speaker 1: public officials can make the upgrades that will have the

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Speaker 1: most benefit to drivers. For the purposes of the study,

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Speaker 1: ENRICS used its cloud based traffic analysis tool called Roadway

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Speaker 1: Analytics to analyze areas with frequent traffic jams and then

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Speaker 1: further narrowed those down to spots where speeds were typically

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Speaker 1: observed to drop below six of an uncongested reference speed

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Speaker 1: for at least two minutes at a time. In other words,

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Speaker 1: in a hot spot, traffical slow to less than half

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Speaker 1: its usual pace. The study also looked at the economic

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Speaker 1: costs in terms of wasted time, lost fuel, and carbon

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Speaker 1: emissions over the next decade. Using the data it gathered,

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Speaker 1: ENRICS created a global traffic scorecard, which ranks the cities

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Speaker 1: with the worst traffic and identifies the time and money

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Speaker 1: wasted in traffic congestion. The Global Traffic Scorecard rate cities

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Speaker 1: on a metric called the impact factor, which is calculated

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Speaker 1: by duration times distance times the number of traffic jams.

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Speaker 1: Here are some of the insights from the study. Though

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Speaker 1: New York has more traffic hot spots than any other

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Speaker 1: city in the study, drivers in Los Angeles pay more

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Speaker 1: due to hot spots. In l A, there were more

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Speaker 1: than one hundred and twenty eight thousand traffic jams just

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Speaker 1: during March and April. Of The worst single hot spot

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Speaker 1: in the country is near Fredericksburg, Virginia, on south at

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Speaker 1: Exit one three A, and the researchers estimate that it

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Speaker 1: will cost drivers there two point three billion dollars through

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Speaker 1: a jam in this hot spot lasts thirty three minutes

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Speaker 1: on average and stretches about six point five miles that's

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Speaker 1: about ten point four kilometers. The report concluded that across

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Speaker 1: all twenty five cities studied, traffic hot spots will cost

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Speaker 1: drivers four hundred and eighty billion dollars during the next

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Speaker 1: ten years. That's in lost time, wasted fuel, and carbon emitted.

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Speaker 1: When extrapolated across the country as a whole, the cost

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Speaker 1: of these hot spots is expected to reach two point

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Speaker 1: to trillion dollars that's trillion with a t through. Connected

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Speaker 1: cars and mobile devices are the key to this study

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Speaker 1: since they can be tracked by GPS. For example, if

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Speaker 1: you're using a smartphone to monitor traffic, researchers can tell

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Speaker 1: when and where you speed up, slow down, and come

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Speaker 1: to a stop. Though the data is anonymous, Intereacs isn't

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Speaker 1: the only company that takes advantage of our connectivity. For example,

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Speaker 1: if you use Google Maps to calculate a route and

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Speaker 1: get travel time estimates, those estimates are also courtesy of

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Speaker 1: real time GPS analytics. In addition to the tangible effects,

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Speaker 1: hot spots contribute to hard to measure problems, such as

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Speaker 1: a city's overall reputation for being a difficult or expensive

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Speaker 1: place to live, work, or visit. After all, no one

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Speaker 1: wants to go on vacation and wind up spending most

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Speaker 1: of their time in bumper to bumper traffic. That means

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Speaker 1: this data is extremely useful to cities that are trying

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Speaker 1: to improve their roads or their economics. For ex sample,

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Speaker 1: Chicago recently implemented strategies to ease congestion along I ninety,

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Speaker 1: which improved rush hour travel times by for westbound commuters.

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Speaker 1: A new lane was added on each side of the expressway.

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Speaker 1: Buses and emergency vehicles are now authorized to use the

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Speaker 1: shoulder lane, and real time traffic data, again gathered from

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Speaker 1: GPS enabled cars and mobile devices, is provided to commuters. California,

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Speaker 1: New Jersey, and Washington are among states that have recently

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Speaker 1: passed legislation to authorize funding for infrastructure upgrades. The goal,

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Speaker 1: presumably is to pave the way for smoother traffic when

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Speaker 1: or if autonomous cars become the norm, but there's no

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Speaker 1: reason that American drivers shouldn't benefit from this technology now.

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Speaker 1: This episode was written by Charis three Witt and produced

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Speaker 1: by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of

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Speaker 1: other big data topics, visit our home planet, pastaff works

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Speaker 1: dot com.