Corner Column

By Phil Major
publisher@wood.cm
Posted 12/31/69

You should be pleased to find out that none of the 1,860 busiest highways in Texas is in Wood County.

Thanks to our friends at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, you can sleep better tonight …

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Corner Column

Posted

You should be pleased to find out that none of the 1,860 busiest highways in Texas is in Wood County.

Thanks to our friends at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, you can sleep better tonight knowing that one of the reasons you live here – no appreciable traffic – is actually true.

Now if you were out and about sometime over the Thanksgiving weekend there were definitely some times when the traffic was much higher than usual. The highest percentage of that was no doubt from passers through on U.S. 80 and U.S. 69.

It will probably also come as little surprise that South Tyler is vying for a top spot on that list.

The 47th busiest highway in the state is South Broadway between the loop and the toll way. It was also 47th in 2020 after climbing from 89 in 2019.

The ranking is derived from the statistic that drivers lost 185,000 hours per mile due to delays on that 4.27-mile stretch over the course of the year, compared to the time it would have taken on the same section without congestion.

Compare that to the number one ranked location, Houston’s West Loop, which cost drivers more than one million hours.

The state’s other highway topping a million hours is Woodall Rogers Freeway in Dallas. I haven’t been on it in a few years and avoid downtown Dallas at all costs.

Other notable locations include the section of the Tyler loop from Broadway west around to Hwy. 64, coming in at number 135 with 91,000 hours lost.

Several other Tyler locations made the cut further down the list.

Gregg County’s best showing was the section of Loop 281 between Hwy. 80 and Hwy. 259, ranking 151 with 86,000 lost hours.

For those who travel toward the west, the section of U.S. 80 in Forney, always a nightmare, comes in at No. 147 while the section through downtown Terrell made the list around the halfway mark at No. 828.

Why does this matter?

The study, done annually since 2009, notes the following: "Researchers note that traffic delays impose an immense financial burden. Those costs – a result of lost time and wasted fuel – totaled more than $3.8 billion on the state’s 100 most traffic-choked road sections during 2021, about 10 percent lower than pre-pandemic levels. Truck congestion costs were $620 million in the same year, essentially unchanged since 2019.”

It’s a problem that’s certainly not going away.

“Traffic congestion isn’t just a big-city problem, and that problem is almost sure to get worse as our population surges by almost 20 million in the next 25 years,” says David Schrank, TTI’s lead researcher on the annual study. “With that kind of growth, Texas needs to use every possible means to keep people and goods moving. We need to add capacity, operate the system efficiently, and give people options for how to travel.”

Don’t expect much of that money to be spent in Wood County. We obviously don’t have the statistics to ask for much.

And that’s just fine with us.