Surprise, surprise – Los Angeles is the most congested city in the nation, according to a report set for release today by a traffic-information provider, the Daily Breeze reports.
And Thursdays from 5 to 6 p.m. are the absolute worst time for Angelenos to hit the roads, according to the first national scorecard report by INRIX, a Washington, D.C.-based traffic information provider studying America’s roadways.
“It’s striking the amount of roads and number of places in America that are perpetually congested,” said Rick Shuman, INRIX’s vice president.
Collecting information from global positioning systems inside 800,000 taxis, trucks and delivery companies, the company tracked speeds and travel times through 2007 across 50,000 miles of roads, said Bryan Mistele, Inrix’s CEO.
“Two years ago we bought the ability to collect nationwide traffic data from commercial vehicles with GPS trackers that report to us every few minutes how fast they’re going and where they are,” he said. “It was a new way to collect traffic data.”
Tracking bottlenecks around Los Angeles, the study ranked the Hollywood (101) Freeway at Vermont Avenue as the worst for gridlock. Vehicles see about 83 hours of bottlenecks each week on the freeway, where cars crawl at 13.8 mph. The area ranked 10th nationwide.
