Gridlock Guy: Three reasons traffic lists don’t mean much

Atlanta has the worst commute in the nation - well, at least that’s what we tell each other when we are stuck in traffic day after day. That notion is both a pejorative and a strange, sick bragging right. It’s the Biblical way we rejoice in our suffering. But lists in recent years have shown Atlanta slipping in the rankings of the worst commutes, which really doesn’t mean very much at all.

First, these lists change all the time. Based on different measurements or degrees of specificity, Atlanta has either a horrid commute or an increasingly pedestrian one. A March 2015 Brookings report stated that Atlantans have the longest commute in distance in the U.S. The American Transportation Research Institute found in November that Spaghetti Junction in DeKalb County has the worst freight bottleneck in the U.S. A November Vox piece used a metric to score Interstate 285 as the deadliest interstate in the country, something we studied and downplayed both in this column and in my Atlanta Traffic Blog on wsbradio.com.

But broader looks at gridlock show Atlanta slipping on the traffic rankings list. A Texas A&M Transportation Institute study ranked Atlanta as having the 12th-worst delays in the nation in August. A local transportation official, obviously an authority on the subject, mentioned to me off hand that Atlanta is only the 15th-worst commute. So which is it? That depends on the measurement.

The next reason the lists hold only so much value is because the U.S. is filled with metro areas, dozens of them. If Atlanta is only 10th, 12th, or 15th, that’s still really bad. But when we’re stuck in a terrible commute, we hope we’re stewing in the worst one, not the 15th-worst, right?

That leads to the final reason the many different lists carry limited weight. When traffic is awful, other cities don’t matter. And is 12th-bad really that much worse to the individual person than the 5th worst or first worst rides? Probably not. Those studies measure entire cities as a whole and some cities have a higher total of horrible areas than Atlanta. And even if Atlanta is “slipping” in these rankings, traffic in most places is not getting better. It is only gets worse. Atlanta is possibly just getting less worse over time than other cities.

By the way, the study that ranked Atlanta as the 12th-worst commute ranked San Jose, California as the worst. Not many would have guessed that. And next year another city or cities could be slightly worse than San Jose, but that probably wouldn’t change how people stuck in traffic there feel.

Local officials don’t need lists to see how bad Atlanta traffic is. Go drive. Listen to or watch WSB. Pull up the traffic page on AJC.com. Whether Atlanta’s traffic is worst, 12th, 50th, or 190th, we still have the same problems and the same responsibilities of getting them fixed.