The spectacular vermilion orange span of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Hi, everybody, I'm James Hattori.
Welcome to NEXT@CNN,
this week from San Francisco's world famous landmark,
at the mouth of the Golden Gate straits.
42 million vehicles a year cross this bridge.
That gives you an idea of the often nightmarish traffic drivers
face around here, and of course, we're not alone.
Natalie Pawelski has the numbers on
what it costs Americans to cope with rush-hour traffic,
in time and money.
If you think traffic is getting worse in your town,
you're probably right.
There's a combination of factors;
it's the amount of people, the amount of roadway that is there.
It's sort of a demand/supply relationship.
You can think of it that way,
and a lot more demand than there is supply.
The annual Urban Mobility Report
from the Texas Transportation Institute
finds in the average American city
people traveled 85% more miles by car in the year 2000
than they did in 1982.
And rush hour drivers are now wasting
an average of 62 hours a year stuck in traffic.
Now that's not total travel time,
that's just the extra time spent going slow
or going nowhere because of traffic congestion.
The study says the worst traffic is in Los Angeles,
where the average rush hour driver loses 136 hours a year,
more than three work weeks, to traffic jams.
The runners up in the time drained category
San Francisco, D.C., Seattle, Houston, San Jose, Dallas,
New York, Atlanta and Miami where the average rush hour driver
loses an extra 69 hours a year stuck in traffic.
Once you get to a big system,
it's difficult to maintain the pace of the roadway
and transit system development and you wind up falling behind.
More congestion is typical in bigger cities.
The report says traffic jams aren't just annoying,
they are expensive.
For the 75 cities studied,
researchers added up all the extra time
and fuel wasted because of traffic congestion.
he price tag they figure is almost $68 billion a year.