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The latest report from traffic-data firm INRIX will likely leave many Oahu drivers scratching their heads: In the past couple of years, the company found, Honolulu has gone from having the second-worst traffic in the United States to having the 10th worst, just behind Atlanta.
Honolulu drivers wasted an average of 49 hours stuck in traffic in 2015 compared with 60 hours in 2013 when it was the second-worst city behind Los Angeles, according to INRIX’s Traffic Scorecard reports. The Kirkland, Wash.-based firm released its latest report with the 2015 data today.
Los Angeles kept the No. 1 spot on INRIX’s list for the worst traffic. Drivers in that sprawling Southern California metro area saw an average of 81 hours wasted in 2015, it found.
Washington, San Francisco, Houston and New York rounded out the top five. Those cities plus Los Angeles saw big spikes in the average hours their drivers wasted in traffic compared with 2013, the last year for which INRIX released a traffic report.
Honolulu drivers, on the other hand, saw a drop in their hours wasted in traffic — despite a hot building market, delays from rail construction and other road projects, and falling gas prices.
Cities with the biggest boost in jobs and the economy, along with plunging fuel prices and other factors — faced the biggest risk of worsening traffic, according to INRIX. Nonetheless, INRIX representatives were unable to explain Monday why Honolulu’s numbers are going in the other direction in its report. In recent years Honolulu and Los Angeles had regularly competed for the dubious honor of having the nation’s worst traffic.
Excerpts from the 2016 scorecard provided to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser ahead of its release indicated that Honolulu’s “space constraints” have kept it on the list, while other cities are on the list because they’re bigger and growing faster.
“Honolulu’s presence on this list suggests that a large population base and strong growth rate are not perfect predictors of traffic levels,” it stated. “Honolulu’s metro population is not especially large by U.S. standards … and its growth rate lagged behind the national average.”
Last week, city transit officials cited worsening traffic across Oahu’s traffic grid as one of the reasons why the Handi-Van paratransit service’s on-time-arrivals performance has steadily declined in recent years, despite their efforts to improve that performance.
“Every driver on Oahu … would say that traffic has gotten much, much worse,” Oahu Transit Services President and General Manager Roger Morton — a longtime local transit official — said March 7.
INRIX gathers its traffic data from cities around the world via GPS, smartphones and other location devices in cars and commercial vehicles, such as freight trucks, said Mark Burfeind, the firm’s director of public relations. The firm relies on 275 million data sources on the roads, and its data are more accurate than government sources for traffic, he added.
“Our data is granular enough that we can get down to city arterial roads” — not just major streets and highways, Burfeind said. Traffic speeds are monitored on a “holistic” level that includes a complete street grid, he said.
However, INRIX officials were unable to confirm Monday the boundaries of that grid in Honolulu or whether the firm gathers data from the broader island area.
Some communities in West Oahu regularly encounter some of the island’s worst traffic even though they’re generally not considered part of urban Honolulu. In 2014, when INRIX released a list of the worst traffic corridors in the U.S., it included only freeway locations in the urban core.
It’s “not representative at all” of Honolulu and “extremely questionable,” Panos Prevedouros, chairman of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said of INRIX’s local data, and “people are paying the penalty way out in the west.”
Prevedouros maintains that the recent re-striping to add lanes on the H-1 freeway from Middle to Punahou streets, allowing traffic to merge more smoothly there, might have helped improve Honolulu’s grade.
WASTED TIME
The 10 U.S. cities with the worst traffic rank in terms of average time wasted per commuter:
CITY HOURS WASTED
1. Los Angeles 81
2. Washington 75
3. San Francisco 75
4. Houston 74
5. New York 73
6. Seattle 66
7. Boston 64
8. Chicago 60
9. Atlanta 59
10. Honolulu 49
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