Look no further than traffic and commuting statistics to outline what an outlier 2020 was. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute releases its Urban Mobility Report each year, which now takes in comprehensive traffic data from INRIX. INRIX’s travel numbers, taken from many sources that include real-time location data from phones, have revealed plenty of traffic insights in this column. Texas A&M cranked out all sorts of rankings and costs for both commuters and freight traffic and there are several interesting takeaways for Atlanta.

Traffic rankings are the least applicable stats from studies like these, but they also are the easiest to remember. Knowing how bad or good Atlanta traffic is versus other cities does little to change behavior. If anything, bad traffic rankings give people either comfort or discomfort that the jams they sit in daily might be some of the worst in the nation. That said, Atlanta still had bad standing in 2020.

Slow traffic in Metro Atlanta cost each driver an average of 37 hours in 2020, a metric only 12th-worst in the U.S. Atlanta commuters on average lost 78 hours in 2019, 7th-worst in the nation. That drop by over half is nearly in line with the 47% reduction in Atlanta traffic delays from 2019 levels.

Atlanta drivers lost almost 200 million hours total in traffic in 2019 before the pandemic-induced reduction in 2020. Delays in Atlanta have steadily increased for decades, plateauing or slightly dropping only around the 2008 recession. The sharp decline from 2019 to 2020 left Atlanta with early 1990s-level delays. Last year was a true anomaly.

The study’s Time Traveled Index (TTI) compares the amount of time trips take on free-flowing roads versus the length of trips in peak travel times. A TTI of 1.0 means the two times are exactly the same delay-wise. Atlanta’s TTI for 2020 was 1.1, meaning trips during rush hours took only 10% longer. That closeness in peak and regular trips made Atlanta only the 47th-worst in the U.S.

The TTI compares all other times of day to rush hour windows. Another reason Atlanta’s ratio may have been so small is that the remote working environments led to an increase of travel in non-peak times. With midday weekday travel seeing more delays than in years past, conditions then are closer to those in PM drive.

In theory, traffic rankings during a COVID-shut down shouldn’t change much, since the entire world was in a lockdown of some kind. An initial thought on Georgia would be that the state’s early reopening should have increased its travel delay-rankings. But that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Atlanta’s lack of comprehensive mass transit means that people’s weariness to take trains and buses affects very few. Staying off of MARTA did not add that many cars to the roads. But other cities, such as New York, saw corridors clog with commuters that weren’t taking trains. This trend was also prevalent in subway-heavy Europe.

The tail off in AM drive traffic has been very prominent since last March. Despite the fact that more offices are open in 2021, this trend continues. To put into perspective both that downward trend and the unpredictability of off-hours traffic patterns, Saturday travel in Atlanta between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. accounted for a larger percentage of the metro area’s weekly delays in 2020 than Mondays did from 6-10 a.m.

Freight lines lose plenty of productivity in traffic, no matter the status of the pandemic. Atlanta was the 8th or 9th-worst in the U.S. in 2020 for tractor trailers’ total delay-hours, fuel wasted, and cost. Atlanta has been 7th or 8th-worst in these categories for the last five years.

The average Atlanta driver lost 15 gallons of fuel in 2020 from traffic delays, the 9th-worst in America. 2019 traffic cost Atlantans each 31 gallons on average. So COVID-19 travel trends gained Atlanta drivers a tank of gas each. The total time and fuel cost added up to $869 for each Atlanta driver in 2020. Expect that to be far higher this year.

The lightened load on the roads in 2020 brought plenty of relief to drivers, but at a cost. The speeds and then the crash and fatality rates went up and continue to go higher, despite the return of volume to the streets. If the increase in erratic and inattentive driving continues to meet the increase in commuting delays, Atlanta’s 2021 traffic numbers could end up epic and in a bad way.

Doug Turnbull, the PM drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. He also hosts a traffic podcast with Smilin’ Mark McKay on wsbradio.com. Contact him at Doug.Turnbull@cmg.com.

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