Photo provided by: da90027/Flickr

News website The Daily Beast crunches the numbers from the most congested areas in America and finds, to nobody’s surprise, that the worst driving commute in America is right here in Los Angeles.    The Hollywood Freeway ranks as the worst place to commute in the entire country based on rush hour congestion, the worst bottleneck, and the average amount of congestion per week at the worst bottleneck.

Los Angeles’ ranking in this survey is hardly a surprise.  A couple of times a year surveys are released that show Los Angeles’ car gridlock to create the most pollution, waste the most drivers hours, etc.  No matter the methodology, our highway system isn’t working.  What makes this survey interesting, is that they tracked down Metro CEO Art Leahy to explain why the congestion is so thick on the 101.

"I recall they would say things like it’s a 20-minute trip downtown on
the Hollywood Freeway,” Metropolitan Transportation Authority chief
executive Art Leahy says on traffic when he was growing up in Los
Angeles. “No one anticipated the congestion that would emerge."

It always amazes me that transportation professionals can look at the disaster that is our local highway system and comment that the traffic growth is a lot heavier than they ever thought; yet expect people to believe estimates on future traffic growth to justify expensive highway projects that won’t do anything to solve the long-term problem that there’s just too many cars on the road.