Online Geography Resources Showcase

Traffic Facts and Figures

What it Costs

America's families spend more than 19 cents out of every dollar earned on transportation, an expense second only to housing, and greater than food and health care combined.

The individual cost of congestion exceeded $900 per driver in 1997, resulting in more than $72 billion in lost wages and wasted fuel.

Congestion results in 5.7 billion person-hours of delay annually in the United States.

Drivers in one-third of U.S. cities spend more than 40 hours a year (an entire work week) in traffic that is not moving.

In 2003 there were more than 6.3 million motor vehicle crashes reported to police. Of those, 38,252 crashes resulted in fatalities.

In 2001, crashes were the leading cause of death for people ages 4-33 in the United States.

For every passenger-mile traveled, public transportation is twice as fuel-efficient as private automobiles, sport utility vehicles and light trucks. (Source: Center for Transportation Excellence)

If one in 10 Americans regularly used mass transit, U.S. reliance on foreign oil could decline by more than 40 percent, or nearly the amount of oil imported from Saudi Arabia each year.

A regular rush-hour driver wastes an average of 99 gallons of gasoline a year due to traffic.

On-road vehicles are responsible for 44 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, one-third of all nitrogen oxide emissions and one-quarter of all volatile organic compound emissions.

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