Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Pay their
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vocal Bomb here. If you live in
Speaker 1: or near a major city and drive a car, you
Speaker 1: probably can't do much these days to avoid traffic, not
Speaker 1: short of inventing your own vertical takeoff and landing technology anyways.
Speaker 1: But what makes driving in some cities worse than others,
Speaker 1: or one road more congested than another. Well, according to RICS,
Speaker 1: a company that analyzes traffic and infrastructure data, it's traffic
Speaker 1: hot spots. They define these as traffic jams that occur
Speaker 1: at the same locations along a stretch of road. According
Speaker 1: to Mark Burfield, the director of public relations at RICS,
Speaker 1: key elements that define a traffic hot spot are that
Speaker 1: they are reliable and predictable. If a commuter travels along
Speaker 1: the same route at the same time every day and
Speaker 1: it's always backed up at the same intersection or merge point,
Speaker 1: that is a traffic hot spot. A recent study by Enrics,
Speaker 1: released in September of seventeen, named and ranked the worst
Speaker 1: traffic hot spots in the United States, one hundred and
Speaker 1: eight thousand of them in the twenty five most congested
Speaker 1: US cities l A, New York, Washington, d c Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and Dallas were the top five containing the most ENRICS
Speaker 1: conducted the study to learn more about the u S
Speaker 1: transportation network. Is sort of a check up on the
Speaker 1: well being of our roadways. The results will be used
Speaker 1: to help determine the best and most efficient ways to
Speaker 1: allocate money towards the country's transportation infrastructure. In other words,
Speaker 1: by identifying the worst traffic hot spots and how they work,
Speaker 1: public officials can make the upgrades that will have the
Speaker 1: most benefit to drivers. For the purposes of the study,
Speaker 1: ENRICS used its cloud based traffic analysis tool called Roadway
Speaker 1: Analytics to analyze areas with frequent traffic jams and then
Speaker 1: further narrowed those down to spots where speeds were typically
Speaker 1: observed to drop below six of an uncongested reference speed
Speaker 1: for at least two minutes at a time. In other words,
Speaker 1: in a hot spot, traffical slow to less than half
Speaker 1: its usual pace. The study also looked at the economic
Speaker 1: costs in terms of wasted time, lost fuel, and carbon
Speaker 1: emissions over the next decade. Using the data it gathered,
Speaker 1: ENRICS created a global traffic scorecard, which ranks the cities
Speaker 1: with the worst traffic and identifies the time and money
Speaker 1: wasted in traffic congestion. The Global Traffic Scorecard rate cities
Speaker 1: on a metric called the impact factor, which is calculated
Speaker 1: by duration times distance times the number of traffic jams.
Speaker 1: Here are some of the insights from the study. Though
Speaker 1: New York has more traffic hot spots than any other
Speaker 1: city in the study, drivers in Los Angeles pay more
Speaker 1: due to hot spots. In l A, there were more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and twenty eight thousand traffic jams just
Speaker 1: during March and April. Of The worst single hot spot
Speaker 1: in the country is near Fredericksburg, Virginia, on south at
Speaker 1: Exit one three A, and the researchers estimate that it
Speaker 1: will cost drivers there two point three billion dollars through
Speaker 1: a jam in this hot spot lasts thirty three minutes
Speaker 1: on average and stretches about six point five miles that's
Speaker 1: about ten point four kilometers. The report concluded that across
Speaker 1: all twenty five cities studied, traffic hot spots will cost
Speaker 1: drivers four hundred and eighty billion dollars during the next
Speaker 1: ten years. That's in lost time, wasted fuel, and carbon emitted.
Speaker 1: When extrapolated across the country as a whole, the cost
Speaker 1: of these hot spots is expected to reach two point
Speaker 1: to trillion dollars that's trillion with a t through. Connected
Speaker 1: cars and mobile devices are the key to this study
Speaker 1: since they can be tracked by GPS. For example, if
Speaker 1: you're using a smartphone to monitor traffic, researchers can tell
Speaker 1: when and where you speed up, slow down, and come
Speaker 1: to a stop. Though the data is anonymous, Intereacs isn't
Speaker 1: the only company that takes advantage of our connectivity. For example,
Speaker 1: if you use Google Maps to calculate a route and
Speaker 1: get travel time estimates, those estimates are also courtesy of
Speaker 1: real time GPS analytics. In addition to the tangible effects,
Speaker 1: hot spots contribute to hard to measure problems, such as
Speaker 1: a city's overall reputation for being a difficult or expensive
Speaker 1: place to live, work, or visit. After all, no one
Speaker 1: wants to go on vacation and wind up spending most
Speaker 1: of their time in bumper to bumper traffic. That means
Speaker 1: this data is extremely useful to cities that are trying
Speaker 1: to improve their roads or their economics. For ex sample,
Speaker 1: Chicago recently implemented strategies to ease congestion along I ninety,
Speaker 1: which improved rush hour travel times by for westbound commuters.
Speaker 1: A new lane was added on each side of the expressway.
Speaker 1: Buses and emergency vehicles are now authorized to use the
Speaker 1: shoulder lane, and real time traffic data, again gathered from
Speaker 1: GPS enabled cars and mobile devices, is provided to commuters. California,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and Washington are among states that have recently
Speaker 1: passed legislation to authorize funding for infrastructure upgrades. The goal,
Speaker 1: presumably is to pave the way for smoother traffic when
Speaker 1: or if autonomous cars become the norm, but there's no
Speaker 1: reason that American drivers shouldn't benefit from this technology now.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by Charis three Witt and produced
Speaker 1: by Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other big data topics, visit our home planet, pastaff works
Speaker 1: dot com.