Measuring urban transportation performance : A critique of mobility measures and a synthesis

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While peak hour travel is a perennial headache for many Americans — peak hour travel times average 200 hours a year in large metropolitan areas — some cities have managed to achieve shorter travel times and actually reduce the peak hour travel times. The key is that some metropolitan areas have land use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak hour travel.

That’s not the conclusion promoted by years of highway-oriented transportation research. The Urban Mobility Report (UMR) produced annually by the Texas Transportation Institute and widely used to gauge metropolitan traffic problems has overlooked the role that variations in travel distances play in driving urban transportation problems.

This report offers a new view of urban transportation performance. It explores the key role that land use and variations in travel distances play in determining how long Americans spend in peak hour travel.
• Travelers in some cities - those with more compact development patterns - tend to spendless time in peak hour traffic because they don’t have to travel as far.
• If every one of the top 50 metro areas achieved the same level of peak hour travel distances as the best performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use two billion fewer gallons of fuel, at a savings of $31 billion annually.
• In the best performing cities the typical traveler spends 40 fewer hours per year in peak hour travel than the average American because of the shorter distances they have to travel.

In the best performing cities—those that have achieved the shortest peak hour travel distances - such as Chicago, Portland and Sacramento, the typical traveler spends 40 fewer hours per year in peak hour travel than the average American. In contrast, in the most sprawling metropolitan areas, such as Nashville, Indianapolis and Raleigh, the average resident spends as much as 240 hours per year in peak period travel because travel distances are so much greater. These data suggest that reducing average trip lengths is a key to reducing the burden of peak period travel.