Portland traffic ranks No. 8 for traffic congestion
Portland tied with Chicago and Washington, D.C. for the eighth most congested metro region in the nation.
The TomTom Traffic Index found that all three cities had an overall congestion level of 26 percent in 2015, meaning the extra travel time on both highways and non-highways anytime of the day compared to what should be free-flowing conditions. The 2015 TomTom Index was released Tuesday.
Nick Cohn, TomTom's senior traffic expert, was surprised Portland rated so high, considering the city's reputation for alternative transportation, like MAX trains and bicycling. But after analyzing traffic patterns in the Portland area, Cohn says much of the congestion is caused by people commuting to employers outside Portland, like high-tech companies in Hillsboro and Washington County, including Intel, the state's largest private employer.
(READ MORE: Portland Tribune)
1 comment
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Joe Cortright Thursday, 24 March 2016 10:26 Comment LinkTom-Tom's methodologies and data present a distorted picture of traffic, and
make sprawling cities with extra long commutes look better than they
actually are. Their method penalizes Portland for having such short
commutes. Its simply crazy and wrong.
Example: Portland scores worse than Houston: PDX has a 26% congestion
score compared to Houston's 25%. But Houstonians commute about 70%
further than Portlanders and so endure both longer commutes and lose
more time to congestion.
We've got extensive analysis of all these reports on CityObservatory.org.
We wrote about Tom-Tom's new report yesterday:
http://cityobservatory.org/tomtom/