If you’ve been thinking highways are more crowded these days, you’re right. After dropping during the pandemic years, traffic congestion has returned with a vengeance, creating snarls and delays throughout the country.
And those delays are costing the trucking industry a bundle. According to the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), the nonprofit research arm of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), traffic congestion on U.S. highways added $94.6 billion in costs to the trucking industry in 2021. That represents the highest level in six years, according to the institute’s latest “Cost of Congestion” study.
While year-over-year congestion costs had decreased in 2020 due to the Covid-era lockdowns, they rose sharply in 2021, with a total of 1.27 billion hours of lost productivity. This increase in costs reflects the dramatic post-pandemic economic recovery, with high gross domestic product (GDP) growth and soaring freight demand arising from record levels of consumer spending, researchers said.
In fact, the 2021 figure represents a 27% increase from the report’s baseline year of 2016, ATRI said. That level of delay equates to more than 460,000 commercial truck drivers sitting idle for one work year and reflects a cost increase that is twice the rate of inflation. There was also an environment impact, with the trucking industry wasting over 6.7 billion gallons of diesel fuel in 2021 due to congestion, resulting in more than $22.3 billion in additional fuel costs.
