The worst traffic bottleneck in the country? Yep, it’s in Georgia - again

Anyone who’s made the trek up to Atlanta can tell the horror stories. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, cars whizzing to and fro, road work, crashes and general unpleasantness abound. But just how bad is Atlanta driving?

According to a study from the American Transportation Research Institute, a non-profit that studies issues related to commercial trucking, it really is that bad - at least in certain areas.

The study named one infamous Georgia interchange, Atlanta’s notorious ‘Spaghetti Junction,’ also known as Tom Moreland Interchange, as the single worst bottleneck for truck traffic in the entire United States. The snarl of highway connects The Perimeter, or I-285, with I-85, a major highway that runs northeast from Atlanta.

In fact, it’s the second year in a row the junction received the “honor.”

According to the ATRI data, the average speed on the interchange was 37 miles per hour, significantly below the actual speed limits on the highways. It gets especially bad during the afternoon rush hour, plunging to as low as 15 miles per hour between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m.

The other worst areas? An interchange in Fort Lee, N.J. took the number two spot and another interchange in Chicago took number 3.

Spaghetti Junction wasn’t Georgia’s only claim to highway infamy. Six other locations around metro Atlanta also made the cut for Top 100 truck bottlenecks, including the intersections of I-20 and I-285 and I-75 and I-85.

“Measuring the performance of freight movement across our nation’s highways is critical to understanding where and at what level investment should be made. The information provided through this effort can empower decision-making in both the private and public sectors by helping stakeholders better understand the severity of congestion and mobility constraints on the U.S. highway transportation system” the ATRI wrote in a summary of their findings.

Here’s how the ATRI made the rankings:

The group collected location data from the communications systems used in commercial trucks. They pulled data from their study population for every weekday of 2016 at 300 locations across the country.

Then they crunched the numbers to determine how fast those trucks were going at different parts of the day at those locations. If the trucks were traveling at below 55 miles per hour, which is what the researchers considered a reasonable speed of free-flowing traffic, for longer amounts of time, then that area was given a worse score.

The ATRI estimated that congestion on the nation’s highways resulted in $63.4 billion in costs to the industry and around 996 million lost hours of productivity.

This story was originally published January 26, 2018 at 1:47 PM with the headline "The worst traffic bottleneck in the country? Yep, it’s in Georgia - again."