If it feels like you’re spending more time sitting in traffic on Valley roads and highways, you’re right. You probably are.
New data from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute finds the average Phoenix commuter spent 76 hours sitting in traffic in 2024; that’s 13 hours more than the national average. Phoenix also ranked 11th among the top 101 American urban areas for total delay in 2024.
To help explain why, The Show spoke with Kartik Jha, research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and one of the authors of the Urban Mobility Report, and they started with summarizing what the report found for the Phoenix area, because it seems like things are maybe getting more congested here than they’ve been in the past.
Full conversation
KARTIK JHA: Yeah, you’re right, Mark. And we have seen that, and that’s what we’ve seen all over the nation. Travel congestion is coming back. Reliability is getting impacted because of construction projects coming back in and all that. So that’s a nationwide trend. For Phoenix, what we have seen is that there is a slight worsening of congestion and traffic.
I mean, not all of it is a bad indicator. I mean, if an area is growing in population as well as economic activity, that is natural. So sometimes congestion can be seen as a positive indicator. But if you tell that to someone who is stuck in traffic for a couple of hours daily, or an hour daily, and it ruins their day, that’s not good news to them.
MARK BRODIE: Did you see that there were shifting traffic patterns in the Phoenix area? Is it just more cars on the road? To What do you attribute this increase in congestion?
KARTIK JHA: Yeah, so we see a mix of things. Obviously, the total travel itself, which we measure as a metric called the vehicle miles traveled, VMT, so that has increased for Arizona as a whole, but Phoenix in particular, for sure.
The national average delay per auto commuter, so that’s basically the delay that an average auto commuter all over the nation — it’s a nationwide metric — that comes out to be 63 for 2024. For Phoenix, that number is 76.
So it’s above the national average, which is to be expected because we divide areas all over the nation in four population categories, and Phoenix happens to be in the very large, which is the largest of our four categories. So Phoenix is above the national average, but the silver lining is it is still below the category average of the very large areas.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, so let’s talk about some of those numbers. I’m curious about this total delay in Phoenix in 2024. You found more than 203 million hours, which is a 6% increase over the year before. Obviously, that is a large number for a large number of people, but it’s still a really, really big number.
KARTIK JHA: It is, yeah. And it has been growing. You can see, heading into the COVID pandemic, it was about 163 million hours in 2017. Heading into the COVID pandemic, it was about 170, 168 million hours, and now it is above 200 million hours. So it has been consistently increasing since COVID.
And even the ranks — so absolute numbers is one thing, but then the relative ranks is another indicator of telling you how that area, a particular area, is doing compared to its peers in the same population bracket. And there we see that the rank was, for Phoenix, for example, the rank was 14 all over the nation. That’s total delay rank was 14 for Phoenix. Now it has come up to 11, so it has kind of worsened in rankings.
MARK BRODIE: Is it surprising at all that the numbers are going up to the extent they are, given that there’s still a good number of people who are working remotely, working hybrid schedules where they’re in the office a couple days a week and not in the office a couple days a week?
KARTIK JHA: True. So assuming if we didn’t have the kind of work flexibility or remote working opportunities that we have now — although, I mean, it is changing. We see that on a monthly and a daily basis, how those things are still kind of in a flux, although things have stabilized a little bit. What we see immediately after COVID was that Mondays and Fridays dropped quite a bit. Even Tuesdays were not bad. But now we see over the last couple of years, in 2023 and 2024 data, what we see is basically the middle of the week, Tuesday through Thursday, it is actually carrying a lot of the traffic, not just in terms of number of cars, but also the delay.
The delay is, for example, if I talk about Phoenix, it has changed quite a bit from 2019 heading right after the pandemic. So now we see that the middle of the week has actually quite a bit of congestion, delay, a lot of cars. Friday still is close, but it has dropped. And Mondays are definitely lower than what they used to be before.
MARK BRODIE: Do the numbers you just cited, though, indicate that some large percentage of the congestion we’re seeing in Phoenix is work-commute related? It’s not like a situation like in parts of L.A. or New York City where no matter what time of day you get on the roads, you’re going to be stuck in traffic. It sounds like what you’re saying is, in Phoenix anyway, it’s still concentrated during the weekday, sort of during rush hour, people going to and from work.
KARTIK JHA: That is true, yeah. Still, commutes still kind of contribute to the majority of the delay. But then, especially for Phoenix, what I noticed was even the truck traffic contributes quite a bit of the delay.
We talked about rankings for the total delay, which includes all vehicles. Actually, even the ranks for the truck delay for Phoenix have worsened. It was at rank 14 all over the nation for total truck delay in 2017. Now it is at number seven. So that’s quite a jump in relative rankings.
So I’m suspecting that a lot of this delay is also being contributed by freight, trucks, people order more online deliveries, Instacarts, online shopping, delivery at home and all that. So that contributes to more truck traffic, plus the truck traffic now is also kind of peeking into the regular commute hours. We see some more, relatively speaking, some more truck traffic during those commute peak periods as well.
MARK BRODIE: Do you believe that increased congestion is just sort of a fact of life in a growing city? Is there anything that Phoenix or any other city can be doing to try to mitigate this?
KARTIK JHA: Absolutely, you’re right. Bang on. Congestion is kind of a fact of life in thriving areas, especially in regions with strong economies and steady population growth. Frankly, in terms of policymaking, you even want to see that sometimes because, you know, it is an indicator of growth.
But there are ways that agencies obviously use to counter that as much as possible. Even though you will see growth in congestion and traffic, but you can reduce that pace of growth and pace of deterioration.
So what opportunities agencies are seeing more now from now on is that, instead of just keep adding additional capacity, because the same traffic or a little higher traffic in terms of number of cars is spread across the week and spread across the day, state agencies, MPOs (metropolitan planning organizations), cities are looking at more and more TSMO, what we call TSMO, Transportation Systems Management and Operations.
So basically using the same system, but more efficiently in terms of signal timing, auxiliary lanes for trucks, any kind of variable message signs, dynamic speed messaging and all that. So people are trying to look at operational strategies in conjunction with adding capacity to make the best use of their funds in order for the existing system to be able to absorb more traffic demand.
LAUREN GILGER: Kartik Jha is a research engineer at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and one of the authors of the Urban Mobility Report.
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