I heard about an interesting study by TomTom this morning on the radio. They analyzed traffic congestion in terms of increase in delay as compared to off-peak hours. The worst congested cities in Canada were ranked as follows:
- Vancouver – 35 per cent; 87-hour delay per year
- Toronto – 27 per cent; 83-hour delay per year
- Ottawa – 26 per cent; 81-hour delay per year
- Montreal – 26 per cent; 78-hour delay per year
- Calgary – 22 per cent; 71-hour delay per year
- Quebec – 22 per cent; 81-hour delay per year
- Edmonton – 20 per cent; 57-hour delay per year
Link:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/vancou...dlock-in-canada-traffic-study-finds-1.1850311
The one finding that really piqued my curiosity was that avoiding highways and using secondary roads or shortcuts actually
adds more time to your trip. In heavy traffic jams, I've experimented with either (1) staying on the slowly moving highway or (2) hopping off the next exit and taking local roads. I've always found that primarily due to traffic lights, the local roads really
didn't seem to be faster than driving slowly on the highway. Interesting that the TomTom study now quantifies this as true.
