We all know that Americans waste a lot of gasoline because of congestion. Well, this is one of those times when what we all know is actually true:
The Texas Transportation Institute studies congestion in 85 urban areas throughout the United States each year. According to their latest study, the amount of fuel wasted due to congestion grew to 74 gallons per traveler in 2002, a total of 5.7 billion gallons of fuel.
That’s 5.7 billion gallons of gasoline that we could have simply poured on the ground and burned, for all the benefit we got from it. And the cost, aside from dollars, was huge: About 51 million metric tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere, from just the one year (2002) in question, CO2 we’ll be dealing with for many decades. If anything, I would expect that the congestion problem has become worse in the US since 2002, even if it’s dropped a bit since entering the current recession.
See the data for the above graph here.
