As if you didn’t know: Rush hour getting worse

Wednesday, Nov. 17, 1999 | 9:47 a.m.

Driving from here to there anywhere in the Las Vegas Valley? It's getting more important to avoid rush hour, according to authors of a national study on traffic congestion.

The Texas Transportation Institute study showed that Las Vegas' "travel rate index," an indicator of the time penalty paid by drivers during peak hours of traffic congestion, rose from just 6 percent in 1982 to 31 percent in 1997.

That means Las Vegas area drivers on average spent 34 hours a year stuck in rush-hour traffic and burned an extra 50 gallons of gas, the report found.

The time penalty for driving during the busiest traffic hours vs. off-peak driving is the ninth worst in the nation. But in terms of hours actually stuck in rush-hour traffic, Las Vegas ranks 32 of the 68 cities studied.

Las Vegas drivers burned about 34 hours stuck in rush-hour traffic in 1997, far short of the 82 hours a typical Los Angeles driver loses, the institute found.

"That's not to say there's not a road or corridor in the Vegas area that's as bad as anywhere in L.A.," said study co-author David Schrank, who explained that the results are an average of congested travel times.

In Las Vegas, the "peak period time penalty" rose 48 percent since 1992 and a whopping 417 percent since 1982, according to the institute. That puts Las Vegas in the top 25 percent of cities with the largest increase in that time penalty.

Still, it is far short of the national leader for the increase, Indianapolis, Ind., where the time penalty for rush-hour versus off-peak hours rose 1,000 percent since 1982.

The study's results didn't surprise Phillip J. Shinbein, Clark County's principal transportation planner.

"Commuter times have definitely increased," he said, and not just for rush hour. "Times for all trips for all purposes have increased."

Traffic congestion during rush hours is a function of increased population, limited road capacity and economic success, Shinbein and the study's authors agree.

Shinbein said he hasn't seen the institute data, but the results agree with what he sees on the roads.

He also warns drivers that not only is rush hour traffic getting more congested, but the busy period is getting longer as drivers try to adjust the times they leave home and work.

"The peak hour is turning to a peak two or three hours," Shinbein said. The economy tells the tale, said Tim Lomax, the other author of the report. Some California cities and many of the other areas where traffic did not get substantially worse went through recessions in the early to mid-1990s while most of the snarled cities posted economic gains.

"In a booming economy, the transportation system is always going to be a lagging factor," he said.

Hard as it may be to imagine now, two-thirds of peak-time travel in urban centers was freewheeling back in 1982, the first year studied by the institute. Now, two-thirds of peak travel is through moderate to extreme congestion.

Overall, the study says, the average driver in the 35 most-congested areas, among them Las Vegas, wasted four extra tanks of gasoline a year sitting in traffic.

That conclusion was reached by comparing the time spent on certain roads at rush hour with the time it takes to drive those routes at highway speed.

The institute examined traffic in 68 urban areas in a study sponsored by nine state transportation departments.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.