Calgary commute a breeze by comparison
Calgary commuters who think their daily drive compares to gridlock in snarled cities such as Los Angeles and New York may have to hit the brakes on their gloomy outlook.
Think of cities such as Buffalo and Sarasota, Fla., and you’re getting much closer to how much time the average Cowtown driver spends in traffic annually, a sweeping global traffic scorecard released this month by Inrix Research shows.
The exhaustive survey of 1,064 cities in 38 countries, the largest study of traffic congestion ever, combined GPS data from 300 million connected vehicles and devices alongside traditional realtime traffic flow data to rank the best and worst commutes globally.
Calgary motorists, even those who brave Deerfoot Trail daily, have it pretty good.
The study found Calgary drivers spent 15.7 hours total stuck in peak hour traffic last year, which ranks it a mere 159th of cities surveyed, behind such metropolises as Cleveland, Ohio, which has a third of Calgary’s population, and Innsbruck, Austria, boasting a fraction of Calgary’s 1.2 million citizens at just 130,000.
Calgary compares favourably to commutes in other major Canadian cities as well.
Nine Canadian centres were saddled with more congested drives than Calgary last year, with Montreal and Toronto easily leading the gridlock sweepstakes, with their own drivers spending an annual average of 52 and 45.6 hours in snarled traffic respectively.
Coun. Shane Keating, who chairs the city’s transportation committee, said he isn’t surprised to see Calgary’s transportation network isn’t quite the nightmare it’s sometimes made out to be.
“The city, and transportation and roads have been doing everything the right way. They do have hot spots, for sure, but you can still travel almost anywhere in this city relatively unimpeded,” he said.
“Once we get the Green Line (LRT), it will be even better.”
Keating noted the planned light transit line will immediately take 35,000 to 40,000 vehicles off the road, further reducing congestion.
The study shows the average Canadian commuter spent 28 hours in peak-hour traffic last year, good for 14th out of all the countries ranked. That compares to the most congested nation on the planet, Thailand, which sees an average of 61 annual hours trapped in traffic.
On average, drivers globally spent about nine per cent of their travel time stuck in gridlock, moving at an average speed of 14.4 km/h. During peak periods, Dublin was the slowest major city studied with peak hours speeds of just 5.5 km/h. The walking speed of an average human is five km/h.
In Calgary, drivers saw eight per cent of their daily travel time mired in peak time traffic.
Last fall, the city released a survey of Deerfoot Trail users, gauging their opinions on the city’s busiest and likely most frustrating thoroughfare.
Of the 8,140 Calgarians polled, nearly 5,700 said they were dissatisfied with travel times, with more than two-thirds reporting they experienced delays always or most of the time.
Even so, 73 per cent of those who responded said they used Deerfoot daily, with nearly two-thirds saying their primary reason to use the highway was commuting to work.