Cost of Congestion to the Trucking Industry

Due to the critical role of safe and reliable truck movements in sustainable economic growth, it is essential to continually monitor and evaluate the efficiency of the national roadway system.

A key impediment to nimble supply chains is the level of traffic congestion experienced on U.S. roadways, and the subsequent costs that are incurred due to this congestion.

In 2014 the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) conducted research quantifying the amount of delay experienced by the trucking industry on the U.S. Interstate Highway System (IHS) in 2012 and 2013.

In an effort to continually monitor and quantify congestion, ATRI has now implemented a number of standardization procedures to enable the comparison of these figures on a year-over-year basis including:

• Utilizing publicly available highway usage figures for the year studied;
• Utilizing the national trucking industry cost of operation figure specific to the year studied;
• Establishing a standardized methodology for quantifying the amount of delay; and
• Establishing a standardized methodology for estimating truck volumes.

Incorporating these new procedures will allow this 2014 report to become a benchmark of comparison for future study years, as well as allow future year-over-year comparisons.

Additionally, the ever-growing nature of ATRI’s truck Global Positioning System (GPS) and truck financial data allows the research team to expand the analysis beyond the IHS.

While the National Highway System (NHS) is the primary focus of the analysis as its usage is more consistent, a high-level analysis of local road congestion was also conducted and is described later in this report.

Finally, it is important to note that due to the changes utilized in standardizing the methodology for future studies, the figures presented in this report are not directly comparable to those of the previous Cost of Congestion study.