Now that I’m commuting daily again, I have plenty of time to ponder the amount of time wasted sitting in traffic congestion. Now you can ponder it with me.
D.C. area commuters lose about 62 hours a year due to traffic congestion. Dividing this by 365 days (I can’t find a source on weekend hours lost), we have a daily loss of 0.169 hours per commuter (and we’re not counting passengers because we don’t have that number).
The I-95 corridor between DC and Occoquan sees about 80,000 vehicles a day. 80,000 vehicles x 0.169 hours = 13,520 human hours lost daily due to traffic congestion on the I-95 corridor between DC and Occoquan.
An average human lifespan is 77.5 years or 678,900 hours.
A human life’s worth of hours is lost to traffic congestion approximately every 50 days. That means that 7.27 human lives’ worth of hours are lost due to congestion each year just on that stretch of road.
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