Traffic congestion has a significant impact on the U.S. economy, global supply chains, and the trucking industry in particular.
According to the American Transportation Research Institute’s (ATRI) Cost of Congestion Report: 2024 Update, the nation’s highways are the trucking industry’s backbone. It helps facilitate the efficient movement of freight from warehouses to manufacturers and from farms to markets. When traffic volumes along critical freight corridors exceed highway capacity, the ensuing congestion impedes freight movement and creates inflationary increases in the cost of goods and services.
“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the congestion costs borne by trucking had been on a steady rise, reaching more than $87 billion annually in 2018,” ATRI said. “The pandemic offered a small reprieve in congestion costs as the number of vehicles on the road hit record lows in 2020 due to mandatory office, school and retail closures. Since that time, however, drivers have returned to the road and traffic has slowed. In 2021, congestion costs exceeded $94 billion. In 2022, congestion’s impact on the trucking industry was more than $108 billion annually.”
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act
Since the passing of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), congestion has been a focal point for collaboration between industry advocates, government, and local communities. In 2022, the federal government spent $52 billion on highways through a variety of programs, several of which were established by IIJA specifically to target congestion. State and local governments spent an additional $180 billion on highways during the year.
New York has recently been at the center of a controversial congestion pricing issue.
“It is clear through past research that investment in a modern interstate system is critical to the economic success of the United States,” the report said. “Recent research affirms that, in addition to improving supply chain efficiency, infrastructure spending is an effective fiscal stimulus.However, infrastructure investment must adequately target traffic congestion hotspots and bottlenecks. This report expands the existing literature by detailing the cost of congested highways to trucking as well as providing rationale for continued investment in strategic freight corridors and bottlenecks.”
Cost of Congestion Research
The report is a continuation of ATRI’s ongoing Cost of Congestion research. The Cost of Congestion initiative began in 2012 when ATRI’s Research Advisory Committee (RAC) ranked an ongoing analysis of congestion costs as a top research priority. In 2024, the RAC requested that staff update the Congestion research to capture any effects of transportation investments and/or economic fluctuations.
Data Inputs for Measuring Congestion Costs
To measure the cost of congestion to the trucking industry, three data inputs are utilized. These are average truck speeds, truck volumes and operational costs in trucking.
- Average Speed. Average highway speeds for combination trucks by geographic and temporal segment identify the deviation from free flow speed (and thus additional travel time). These data are derived from ATRI’s substantial truck GPS database.
- Truck Volume/Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). The volume of combination truck traffic by geographic and temporal segment measures the number of trucks that are impacted by delay. Truck VMT is the total of all truck miles traveled in a given year in the U.S. Truck VMT can be segmented by metropolitan area, state or region. These data are derived from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Highway Statistics Series.
- Operational Costs. The marginal unit cost per hour to operate a Class 7/8 combination truck can be multiplied by hours of delay to produce a total congestion cost for the relevant location. The operational costs data are derived from ATRI’s annual Operational Costs of Trucking study.
Average Speed
In 2022, the average truck speeds at the expanded bottleneck areas increased slightly to 52.41 miles per hour (MPH) from 51.95 MPH in 2021. The 2022 average speed remained below the sharp 2020 increase – when COVID-19-related workplace closures and quarantine orders significantly reduced personal vehicle traffic – but was still more than one MPH faster than average speeds in the period from 2016-2019.
This trend was largely consistent across the country. Only six states saw slower average truck speeds in 2022 than in 2021: Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Michigan, and Kentucky. The latter was the only state in which speeds slowed by more than 1 percent.
By itself, the increase in nationwide average speeds indicates a slight reduction in congestion. The cost of congestion, however, is also impacted by truck volumes and operational costs.
Truck Volume/Vehicle Miles Traveled
Truck VMT dipped slightly from 195,616 million miles traveled in 2021 to 195,049 million miles traveled in 2022. As a result, the number of truck miles impacted by congestion in 2022 went down slightly. This year-over-year decrease was driven by a softening freight market during the second half of 2022; that said, truck volumes remained well above pre-Covid levels.
Operational Costs
The most critical factor for the cost of congestion in 2022 was increased operating costs.
“The marginal costs to operate a truck include line-items such as fuel, truck and trailer purchases/leases, repair and maintenance, tires, insurance premiums, tolls, permits and licenses, and truck driver wages and benefits,” the report said. “These costs reflect a wide range of economic factors such as freight demand, global oil production, litigation and labor markets.”
In 2022, per-hour operational costs soared by 21.6 percent to a then-record high of $90.78. This steep rate of increase was driven by an array of internal and external factors, often unique to individual line-items:
- The price of diesel rose sharply following the U.S. prohibition on new domestic drilling leases in early 2021 and later the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
- Limited availability of new Class 7/8 truck tractors and components following the COVID19 pandemic – due to production backlogs and supply issues for parts like computer chips – continued to drive prices up in the new, used, and leased truck markets.
- Limited access to equipment meant that fleets had to run trucks longer than usual, resulting in significantly higher repair and maintenance costs. Growing inflation and backlogs further increased parts prices, while a diesel technician shortage drove up the cost of technician labor.
- A highly competitive U.S. labor market also fueled a 12.3 percent increase in total driver compensation (wages plus benefits). Rising wages in industries that compete with trucking for labor, a spike in inflation, and overall growth in the trucking industry all exerted upward pressure on driver wages. Consequently, it was costlier to do business in the trucking industry in 2022; high hourly truck operating costs made congestion delays more costly for trucking.
National Findings
The national cost of congestion rose to $108.8 billion in 2022, a 15.0 percent increase over 2021’s congestion cost of $94.6 billion.
“While truck VMT and truck speeds had modest fluctuations, extreme inflation had a major impact on operational costs,” the report said. “As a result, the upward shift in the national cost of congestion for trucking between 2021 and 2022 was largely driven by the historic 21.6 percent increase in truck operating costs.”
Slight fluctuations in speeds and truck volume resulted in a 5.4 percent decrease in the total hours of congestion. After hitting a high of 1.27 billion hours in 2021, total congestion time dropped to 1.20 billion hours in 2022.
Though the hours lost to congestion decreased, each hour lost was significantly more expensive when compared to the prior year. The congestion-related loss of 1.20 billion operating hours in a single year is, of course, a massive drain on supply chain productivity. One consequence of this wasted time is inefficient workforce utilization. The total congestion delay in 2022 was equivalent to 435,686 truck drivers remaining idle for the entire year, equating to idling 22.0 percent of all Class-A licensed commercial truck drivers. ATRI estimates that individual carriers and owner-operators saw a congestion cost of $7,588 per truck in 2022, or 2.8 percent of the average annual per-truck revenue in the truckload sector.
Regional Findings
“Following the national trend, the cost of congestion grew again in each of the five regions tracked in 2022,” ATRI said. “While the exact total for each region primarily reflects differences in size, the relative change from year to year can be instructive.”
The Southeast, where congestion costs grew at the highest rate in 2021, was outpaced by the Midwest and South Central regions in 2022. Congestion costs in the Midwest rose at the second-highest rate, closing the gap between it and the Northeast. The West, after two years in which high port activity had fueled higher congestion costs in that region, was surpassed by the Midwest once again.
Economic growth exerted partial influence on the changes in regional congestion costs. The Southeast experienced the greatest regional growth in GDP between 2021 and 2022, at 3.5 percent. That is consistent with its status as the region with the fastest-growing congestion costs.
State Findings
“Texas reclaimed the top spot in the state ranking of highest congestion costs in 2022, while California fell to second,” ATRI said. “This was due to a large increase in truck volumes in Texas, coupled with a decrease in truck volumes in California. It is notable that Hawaii experienced a near doubling of congestion costs between 2021 and 2022.”
Twenty-five U.S. states experienced a decrease in total hours of congestion between 2021 and 2022 (more than 1% decline).
Conclusions
Based on this analysis, the cost of congestion to the trucking industry is at its highest level to date. In 2021 the annual cost of congestion to the U.S. trucking industry reached an all-time high of $94.6 billion. Congestion costs in 2022 surpassed this level, with a national cost of $108.8 billion – an increase of 15 percent year-over-year. This was an increase in annual costs of more than $14.1 billion. The 2022 national congestion of 1.2 billion hours of delay is equivalent to 435,000 truck drivers sitting idle for one year.
On average, annual congestion costs per truck were $7,588, an increase of 11.1 percent per year. These congestion delays generate fuel and environmental consequences. This report estimates that in 2022, 6.424 billion additional gallons of diesel were wasted due to congestion, costing the industry more than $32 billion. The CO2 production associated with additional fuel use is substantial at 65.4 million metric tons.
The congestion cost increases experienced by individual states were primarily driven by operational costs. At the state level, the four states with the highest congestion costs were ranked as follows:
1. Texas
2. California
3. Florida
4. New York
These four states alone make up 29.6 percent of national congestion costs.
Congestion costs were highest in the New York City, Miami and Chicago metropolitan areas. Though congestion cost increases in these leading metros were only slightly higher than the industry-wide operational costs increase. Several smaller metro areas had costs increase at a much greater rate. Those include New Orleans (37.1%), Buffalo (28.6%) and El Paso (27.8%). These cities contain ports that experienced growth in international trade following the COVID-19 pandemic.
To read the full report, click here.
Dana Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who has been featured in multiple newspapers, books and magazines across the globe. She is currently based in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
