Traffic Jams Double Commute Time In Most Congested Cities

Nov. 9, 2010 - PRLog -- What’s the nation’s most congested road?  New York’s Cross Bronx Expressway wins that dubious honor, with four sections of that 8.3-mile six-lane highway included among the country’s 10 biggest bottlenecks.  

But New York ranks second to Los Angeles as most congested city in the U.S., according to the annual National Traffic Scorecard by INRIX, which provides real-time traffic reports for CoPilot Live, the popular GPS navigation app for iPhones, Android and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Congestion adds approximately 35 percent to typical commuting time in the L.A. area, whose worst roads include portions of the Hollywood, Pasadena and Harbor Freeways.  Evening rush traffic on the Harbor Freeway northbound near 8th Street can inch along at an average speed as slow as 6 mph., which is one mph faster than typical Friday evening jams on the westbound Cross Bronx Expressway.

Although metro New York has nearly seven million more people than metro L.A., congestion is only 86 percent of what it is in Los Angeles, due to good public transportation systems.

Chicago ranks third, with less than half the congestion faced by L.A. commuters.  Washington, D.C., although ranked ninth in population, has the fourth most congested commute, followed by Dallas/ Ft.Worth, Houston, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Philadelphia, whose peak congestion is only 20 percent of L.A.’s.

CoPilot Live, an application that for as little as $4.99 gives a smartphone a highly sophisticated GPS navigation system with similar features found in $2,000 in-car systems, offers ActiveTraffic™, a new feature designed to help commuters find the fastest route based on  real-time traffic conditions..  Available as an upgrade for $9.99 for 12 months use, it uses high quality real-time traffic information from INRIX to identify congestion as it happens and instantly update your estimated time of arrival (ETA) to account for time spent in traffic ..  It offers alternate faster routes and shows the time you will save , so commuters can make quick decisions and find practical ways around heavy congestion.

It can be a real time-saver for commuters, unless you live in Ft. Meyers, Fla., which ranked #100 in the National Traffic Scorecard, where occasional traffic adds about two percent to the typical commuting time.  During the evening rush hour in Ft. Meyers, traffic may add less than 1-1/2 minutes to a 15-minute commute, compared to almost 28 minutes added to a typical 15-minute commute in Los Angeles.    

The other lowest-ranking traffic congestion cities are Sarasota, Toledo, Modesto, and Lakeland/Winter Haven, Fla.  

For more information, visit http://www.alk.com/copilot/?utm_source=prlog&utm_medium=r...

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CoPilot Live is a GPS navigation app from ALK Technologies, the leader in transportation navigation technology. Info at www.copilotlive.com