A few of you may remember my post regarding the foolish waste of both time and fuel, caused by peoples' insistence on staying in the right lane at intersections when they are going straight. If you don't remember, here's a brief summary:

Conservatively, about 150 million of us encounter this phenomenon every day. At 45 seconds an instance that's an astonishing 1.875 million wasted hours (214 years) of good old American productivity wasted every single day.

Additionally that's 750,000 gallons of gasoline, burnt foolishly every day.

The yearly costs are staggering:

Yearly Time Wasted: 684,375,000 hours
Yearly Fuel Wasted: 273,750,000 gallons

That's a lot of waste, and it's not due to unavoidable things like congestion. It's due entirely to individuals who don't shift to the left lane if they don't need to turn right.

Well, now a study has been released that tabulates the cost, in both productivity and fuel of traffic congestion throughout the urban United States.

The numbers are staggering, according to Reuters:

Motorists wasted 5.7 billion gallons of fuel idling in traffic, the study showed.

The annual financial cost of traffic congestion as measured in wasted fuel and lost productivity is estimated at more than $63 billion, compared to $14 billion two decades ago.

The average cost per motorist was $829 per year

Those numbers are averages...it's even worse in major cities. Your average Angelino (citizen of Los Angeles) spends 90 hours a year idling away his or her smoggy life away in traffic, pondering, I guess, not only how much time he or she is losing, but also the unavoidable long-term effects of the acidic, poisonous smoke, billowing from the stopped car in front of them, wearing lines of weariness into his or her facial skin. At least real estate is affordable in Los Angeles...oh wait.

Washingtonians don't have it much better...they spend about 67 hours stopped in traffic...nearly three days of their lives just sitting there each year. New Yorkers average about 50 hours. You can read the full Urban Mobility report here.

Another bold pacetown prediction: in 10 years, half of us will be working out of our homes at least half of the time. Half of us could be doing this right now, given the wonders of internet communications. As video conferencing in particular gets more advanced and as bandwidth becomes cheaper and cheaper, people will be able to make almost seamless transitions to telecommuting, sitting couches and office chairs rather than car seats. This, I would argue, will increase productivity dramatically in the long term, provided there is accountability.

Just ask Claire Huxtable.

love it, hate it, there's more of it at pacetown.