Episode 84. Is Traffic Back to Pre-COVID Levels? That depends on where you live.

Bernie Fette (00:14):
Hey everyone. Welcome to Thinking Transportation conversations about how we get ourselves and the stuff we need from one place to another. I’m Bernie Fette with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. Researchers at TTI have been studying traffic congestion for decades. They’ve measured the intensity of roadway gridlock and its financial cost going all the way back to 1982. A lot’s happened since that time. Economic ups and downs, population growth, interstate migration, and even a global pandemic. All of those factors and more have influenced our daily traffic experience in profound ways. Joining us today for a conversation on that topic is David Schrank, a senior research scientist at TTI and the primary author of the 2023 Urban Mobility Report. Thanks for joining us. Dave. Another repeat appearance for you.

David Schrank (01:16):
I’m excited to be here. These are always a lot of fun.

Bernie Fette (01:19):
I was hoping we could start with something really basic and to some people, maybe something really obvious. What causes traffic congestion?

David Schrank (01:30):
It’s pretty simple. When two objects want to occupy the same space at the same time, it creates congestion. So the point is with traffic, you know, we have a lot of vehicles, a lot of people trying to move to similar locations at the same time, and that creates traffic congestion. You can probably go all the way back to the time of the Romans and chariots and horses and people on foot and say they had congestion back then. Similar to what we have today. And unfortunately we’ve been talking about congestion for a lot of years and we’re still talking about it. It’s great for the career, but it’s still frustrating as someone trying to get places.

Bernie Fette (02:09):
And I think I remember just in past years, us discussing this and thinking of it in terms of a supply and demand picture. You’ve got only a limited supply of roadway space, but you’ve got the demand in the form of more and more cars, trucks wanting to occupy that space that you were talking about. Is that still an accurate way of looking at it?

David Schrank (02:33):
It’s still an accurate way over time. How we handle the capacity, how we handle the demand has changed a little bit because of technology of developments and, and obviously now because of what we learned coming into and out of the pandemic with how we travel, all these kind of things affect it, but it still boils down to how much capacity you have and how much demand there is for that transportation system.

Bernie Fette (02:58):
Yeah, and as you said, this is a part of the research program at TTI that you and your colleagues have built a few careers upon with the latest addition of the Urban Mobility Report out now. And that report tells us that delay per commuter nationwide, that’s one of your primary measures in the study. That was 54 hours. 54 hours wasted in traffic per commuter in America by the most recent measure in 2022. Pre-pandemic, it was 54 hours. The same. So we’re officially back to normal, right? Or am I oversimplifying?

David Schrank (03:41):
Well, we have a lot of measures and then that one, it’s showing that we’re basically back to pre-pandemic. And I think you would probably, if you ask a motorist in every one of the urban regions in this country, you’d probably get a slightly different answer from them. What we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic, and again, what we’re talking about now is 2022 data, so it’s not too far post-pandemic, is that any given road in any given city could feel as bad or worse than it did to drive in pre-pandemic conditions. But what we’re still seeing is that a lot of cases, not every roadway in every city is back to the AM and PM peak periods of slogging your way through traffic,

Bernie Fette (04:35):
What we call rush hour.

David Schrank (04:36):
Take rush hours, the six, eight hours a day, where in some of these larger regions you might have slow traffic or even stop and go traffic. We’re not seeing it. It’s everywhere yet. And we’re not seeing that every city is back to where it was. We’ve seen a lot of growth in congestion in some of the, we’re not talking about the Los Angeleses and the Chicagos and the Washington DCs that have kind of led the list for years. They’re still up there. But we’ve actually seen growth in congestion in some of the ones that are around a million population, million and a half, the Nashvilles, the Salt Lake Cities on the list where they may never slowed down during the pandemic maybe. Extra people were moving there. Yeah. We don’t really know for a fact, but that’s kinda what we’re seeing in the list is that yes, generally the aggregation of the number says we’re back. Okay. But any given city, maybe not.

Bernie Fette (05:33):
I think you’re starting to get into where I was hoping to go next with our conversation, and that’s to look at the main takeaways from this year’s report. And again, I’m often guilty of trying to oversimplify these things, but just to help us get our brains wrapped around the conditions that are measured and illustrated in the report. I kind of looked at this and saw three takeaways, and so to the extent that I may be onto something here, please elaborate, and if not, then please correct me. But what I thought we were seeing is, first of all, traffic congestion, generally getting back to pre pandemic levels, which you just very briefly touched on. Secondly, that truck congestion, which is something that you guys started measuring several years ago, that wasn’t part of the original study I remember. And what the implications are for that increasing truck congestion basically everywhere. And then lastly, again, what I think you were just barely touching on a minute ago, how in some ways traffic congestion looks a lot like it did before the pandemic, but then in some cases it doesn’t look like it did before in terms of what morning and evening rush hours look like, what congestion looks like in the middle of the day. So would you talk a little bit more about where those things are true, whether they’re back to pre pandemic levels, where is that true? Where is it not, and why?

David Schrank (06:58):
Well, the why is a difficult question. Let me start with that one first because sure. There’s a lot of things at play for why we are traveling, but there are a few things that you mentioned when you were asking those questions that point to some of maybe the leading causes of kind of where we’re at in 2022 traffic. Um, and I’m pretty sure everyone listening to this is already thinking about what they’re seeing out their window today, which has changed since 2022. But put that hat on, I think a year or two ago. So you said, are we back? I would say we are nearing pre pandemic as a whole, but some of the interesting things, and I’m gonna kind of touch on that last question you had about, is it similar? Is it not? Yeah. What differences are there? ’cause this all goes together.

David Schrank (07:48):
Okay. So one of the things that we see coming outta the pandemic is that because of hybrid work, you know, we stayed home for work and then we started coming back into the office a little bit, and it’s gradually climbed a little bit more. But what we found is like traffic on Monday in a lot of cases was some of the lowest traffic for the week, whereas in the past it’s been just another workday, maybe not quite as bad as a Friday for motorists, but Monday was a pretty significant congestion day. Now what we see is Monday is the lightest of the five weekdays in some cases by far. And that has to do with the work from home. Actually taking that Monday and being, you know, maybe the one day I’m not going into the office at all, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, have climbed in their amount of the delay that’s happening for the week and Thursday’s, almost catching Friday.

David Schrank (08:52):
Friday was by far the worst traffic day of the week in the past. And a lot of reasons for that. Not only was it a workday, but you also had your business travel trying to wrap things up for the week before the weekend. You had your long weekend vacationers trying to get outta town at noon or whatever to start a weekend. You had things happening on Friday night, whatever, Friday was your worst traffic day of the week. But now Thursday’s catching up, but Monday is falling way behind the others, again, because of the hybrid work. What we’re also seeing now is the AM peak period, the morning rush hours don’t have quite the same feel they did before the pandemic. Yeah, there’s congestion there, that’s no question, but it doesn’t seem to be quite as severe as it did before or pronounced, you might say.

David Schrank (09:46):
And you know, there may be some reasons for that. One of the things, you know, I want everybody to step back and think about is, prior to the pandemic, when you wanted to work from home for a day, you did it by teleconference, right? You were on these conference calls and you didn’t see the people you’re working with. You were on a telephone number coming out of pandemic. Now we have all these visual programs that allow you to do teleconference with faces and both audio and video. And that’s allowing us to change how we handle our workday. And you’re hearing a lot of anecdotal evidence, but you’re seeing it a little bit in the traffic of maybe people are not getting in their car to drive in the am peak period and they’re waiting until traffic dies down a little bit because they can log in from home and be productive on things and then go in for that couple meetings they have to have in the middle of the day and maybe leave early before the PM peak, or maybe not, but they could avoid one peak or the other by shifting how they handle their workday.

David Schrank (10:56):
Some of the traffic numbers that we’re seeing, a little more congestion in the middle of the day, especially on the freeways, which kind of says maybe some of these long trips are happening at other times of the day. And that kind of points to maybe this hybrid work environment is having an effect not only in days of the week, but within the day itself.

Bernie Fette (11:19):
Would it be a stretch to say that people, by sticking around home in the morning instead of contributing to the morning rush hour, that we are seeing the creation of a different rush hour in the morning? Is that a case where we are creating a new normal?

David Schrank (11:37):
We’ll have to wait and see another year or two on this. Okay. But I mean, I am still seeing traffic numbers around the country, still hearing this anecdotal conversation that points to the fact that, yeah, I think we are sort of changing our traffic and travel patterns for when and where and how and why we’re traveling. And so the am peak, the morning rush hours maybe shifted a little bit in time, maybe not quite as bad as they were in the past, but they’re still there. Right. Exactly how it’s going to look going forward. Yeah, there could be some changes there. And of course, day of the week, who would’ve thought years ago that Monday would look, you know, like a pretty good traffic day. Yeah.

Bernie Fette (12:22):
And you’re also, I think, looking at the conditions in the evening rush hour, which you call the peak period for the end of the day. And it sounds like that looks a little more familiar to you in terms of what rush hour in the afternoon and evening used to be.

David Schrank (12:38):
I would say the evening looks more familiar to motorists. Okay. Than that morning. Yes, it’s probably in a lot of corridors. Again, not quite as bad as it has been in the past, but I would say it’s closer to what we’ve experienced. And again, there’s lots of reasons why the PM has always been worse than the am we all like to get home as quick as we can and we’re, we haven’t been quite as interested in getting to work as quick as we can.

Bernie Fette (13:08):
Okay. Just simple as that.

David Schrank (13:09):
So there’s a reason about everybody trying to get in their car right at five o’clock and head home. Okay. Whereas in the, in the past you might have left your house at 5:00 AM 6:00 AM or whatever else, to kind of avoid things. So a lot of reasons for it. It goes back to your conversation about supply and demand. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Bernie Fette (13:25):
Talk about truck congestion, if you would. What are the implications for e-commerce as a a new normal, not perhaps normal, but a much more common way for people to shop?

David Schrank (13:36):
Well, I’ll start before you even get to that one. If we all think back to the early, well, not just the early days of the pandemic, when you couldn’t find toilet paper and you couldn’t find bottled water and things like that on the store shelves, and later on you saw prices spiking on goods that you needed to have for the house and even groceries and those kind of things. We had an issue where our supply chain and logistics that we had come to know were stretched and strained because of this complete overhaul of, you know, sort of how we were working and living for the better part of over a year. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so that supply chain stress caused a lot of changes in our network, in our system here in the us. If you remember, if you’re driving around, I’m sure you saw these distribution centers popping up, you know, in places that they didn’t exist before.

David Schrank (14:36):
And so what is happening is that the companies out there are trying to figure out where they need to reposition themselves logistically to be ready to handle those peaks that we saw during the pandemic. And so number one, we had our ports, both waterway ports and inland ports were in a lot of stress trying to keep up with the demands of the pandemic. We had these new distribution centers and warehouses and things coming online. And so that’s changed truck traffic, truck patterns in the US right? Maybe now we have a few thousand more trucks on this freeway over here than we had five years ago. Then that leads us to how we do our shopping. Now you look at what’s happening to the sort of big box retail and how those are ebbing and flowing now with how we do our shopping, online shopping has grown dramatically in the last 5, 6, 7 years. And that changes where trucks are driving, right? Because now, rather than a lot of truck last mile deliveries to downtown office complexes, when we’re working from home, we’re having things sent to us, FedEx and UPS and USPS there. And so it’s changed the traffic patterns for the trucking industry and for all of freight. And so we’re still sort of catching up and trying to optimize that truck traffic in the US now with sort of our new norm coming out of the pandemic.

Bernie Fette (16:14):
We’ve talked a lot about COVID-19 and how that has impacted traffic, but the pandemic hasn’t really been the only teacher on that front over the course of the research that you guys have done. We’ve also had economic ups and downs over the past 40 years. Notably a rather memorable one back in 2008, 2009, that had a pretty huge impact, or at least a very noticeable impact on traffic and the economy at the same time. Can you talk a little bit more about how those historical examples affect the traffic that we experience from day to day?

David Schrank (16:51):
Well, you’re right, we have seen some of these, uh, I’m gonna say smaller because they were right as far as the overall national impact. These smaller occurrences in the past, as you mentioned, 2000 8, 09, and a lot of those were really felt more regionally. So it might be the high tech industry, which was primarily located in maybe a dozen cities in the US where there was heavy impact on high tech. You know, some of those kind of areas experience more of a downturn. And some have had a six months, a year, two years, or something of a lighter congestion than they had had before. So we’re not unaccustomed to those kind of things. What we saw in the last few years is across the board, everywhere felt the pandemic. And so, you know, for example, one of the things with 2008 and 09, you remember, is the fuel prices started going up.

David Schrank (17:51):
And so you started hearing for the first time about people looking at hybrid cars, trying to get better gas mileage. And so we’ve had some of those kind of things happen in the past. Again, knee jerk reaction, go get a hybrid car because the fuel price is going up with the pandemic. It’s been, we have people, you know, switching modes of travel into electric vehicles and things like that. But we also have them investing more in high tech gadgets and things to make their work from home easier, make their work from office easier and better. Right? Right. Because high tech now is way more prevalent in our day-to-day work, because you have to almost have a camera on every computer. You know, every computer is now connected to other people. And it wasn’t the case 10, 20 years ago.

Bernie Fette (18:45):
You’ve talked about how congestion patterns have been changing over the years. For instance, what constitutes rush hour has changed as well. Does that mean that the solutions have changed also, the solutions to traffic congestions are, if not solutions, the remedies for addressing it, that they have changed as well?

David Schrank (19:06):
I would say those are always changing, but it’s not completely overhauling those solutions as much as it’s improving upon them. But before I get to the hybrid conversation, you know, things that we have had around for a long time, incident management programs on our roadways to try to clear crashes and stall vehicles and stuff faster, freeway ramp metering, signal timing, something as simple as signal timing. All those kinds of things have been around forever, but we’re doing them better now because of technological improvements. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so that’s making us able to stretch that capacity a little further to keep roads open longer before they start to, you know, breaking down with, you know, slower speeds and things. But the one thing that we’ve always kind of wondered about was the demand side. And you mentioned some instances around where we’ve had some recessions and things like that, or slow downs in certain parts of the economy. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But this is the first time we got to see what happens with big, long-term demand changes. And what we saw is, you know, that a small amount of demand change could make a huge impact on delay reduction.

Bernie Fette (20:30):
That’s an intriguing notion, and I would appreciate, and maybe other listeners would appreciate. Why is that the case? Because it sounds like the benefit is disproportional.

David Schrank (20:39):
Well, I have to give my visual here for everyone. I think it was Washington State, DOT many years ago came up with the visual of how to talk about traffic. And that is if you pour rice, dry rice through a funnel mm-Hmm <affirmative>, it pours just fine until you get to a certain point. And that one grain of rice starts stacking it up, and then it takes a while for it to recover, basically, that you have to pour the rice slower into the funnel for it to recover. The same thing is kind of true with traffic. Okay. Sometimes it only takes one or two cars or a dozen cars or a hundred cars to get to that point where traffic says, okay, I’m not comfortable, I’m slowing down. And you start seeing the taillights and things come on around you. Sometimes it might be a few trucks, whatever the case may be.

David Schrank (21:29):
It oftentimes just takes that first start, meaning that that car, that whatever, that one extra one that we can’t handle, and that creates this backup. The same is kind of true here when we’re talking about this. Seven, eight, nine percent travel reduction created like three or four times that delay reduction. And so it’s when and where and how those cars are being pulled out. If you pull ’em out of the peak period when traffic demand is highest of the day, it can have a huge effect if you pull ’em out at two in the morning when there’s only a handful of cars on the road, less effect. So it’s about when and where, but also how many, and that’s a big deal. Plus now you get into this hybrid condition, and that’s one of the things that’s very different because if you think back about telecommuting conversations we had 10 or 20 years ago, it was all about, I’m going to work from home on this day.

David Schrank (22:32):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right? And that was it. That was the conversation. Now you go into your work week, and I do the same thing. I look at my work week and think, what days do I need to go into the office this week? Right? What days can I work from home this week? And then on Wednesday I can go in, but I can also come home early because I’ve got that midday meeting and it doesn’t require me there all day. So we have this flexibility now in our schedules that we didn’t have. And it’s great from a transportation perspective of we can now potentially squeeze a little bit more outta that capacity because we’ve lightened the demand a little bit. But it does create additional problem, which is the volatility of that traffic. Now, any given day, it could look like it did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, where we all get in our car, we in the morning, we all drive in, and we all wait, you know, until the peak and drive home in the evenings. We just don’t ever know what days those are gonna be now because of this telework hybrid work environment where 10 or 20 percent of the workers might be home on a day, or they might be back on the road on a day.

Bernie Fette (23:47):
So what would be the answer to that? For the hybrid work arrangement to be more structured?

David Schrank (23:53):
I think some of that’s gonna take care of itself as we continue to add months past the pandemic. We are starting to understand more about our commute when we have one. But some of that could be improved perhaps by a little bit of coordination between agencies and companies and things, right. In the given region, especially the mega companies in a region that have tens of thousands of workers that may be hitting the road on any given day. You know, if we can coordinate some of those kind of things going forward, you know, we have all this technology, right? It would be nice to be able to say, okay, this company is gonna be traveling on Tuesday and this one’s gonna do on Wednesday. Right. And let everybody know that that would be a big help going forward. Again, we would know more about that demand.

Bernie Fette (24:38):
And I’ll recall a study that TTI did several years ago that you probably remember as well, in which our research staff took a look at traffic on a couple of very specific holidays, state and federal holidays in Austin, Texas, and what not for telework, but the stay at home on a weekday conditions did for overall delay on some otherwise very congested on a daily basis, highways and major arterials in one major US city. So that probably takes the whole idea of structuring telework or structuring the hybrid work arrangement to something of an extreme where you had everybody that fit a couple of conditions or descriptions staying at home. But that would also seem, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth here, but it would also seem to lend some value to the structure that we’re both talking about. A little bit of structuring that hybrid work arrangement so that you don’t have the lack of predictability that you’ve mentioned.

David Schrank (25:45):
I do recall that. And just so everybody else gets a little bit of a flavor for it, I think we looked at a federal holiday. Yeah. And we looked at a federal and state combination holiday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so you got some benefit on the federal holiday, but not nearly like you did in Austin, Texas, where there’s a lot of state employees for the holiday that was both federal state and you know, maybe even schools and banks and others that have that same day. So you saw some benefit from some workers, you saw greater benefit from a much larger pool of workers. Yeah. And so what we would like to do going forward is have more of those and make the day more predictable. And you know, every now and then when the big company says, all right, we’re having our all hands on deck meeting today, make it known, Hey, this first Tuesday of the month is always our all hands on deck meeting, so be ready for it, everybody. Yeah.

Bernie Fette (26:42):
Yeah. You mentioned the phrase going forward, so that’s kind of what I wanted to ask you about next. You’ve been doing this research for quite a while. If a research sponsor gave you a blank check, no restrictions on the nature of the research, what would you focus on to try and understand the whole traffic congestion problem picture better than you do today?

David Schrank (27:11):
Is there a limit on this podcast for how long I can talk? Because this one could go on a while, but I think, again, I, we’ve talked about this. We’ve been doing congestion mobility research for 30 plus years, and the message has been congestion’s increasing and you know, what are we gonna do about it? And our message has always been, well, you’re gonna have to use some of everything to make a difference, right? Construction operations, you know, you name it, the full gamut. But I think now what we’re seeing is we’re actually seeing how complex transportation is, and while in the past we were, let’s build a road, widen a road, let’s operate it better, maybe manage it better. I think now what we’re seeing is it is way more complex. There’s a lot more layers to it. And we have to also look at things besides just that piece of road and how many cars or trucks or buses are on it, meaning that why are they there?

David Schrank (28:17):
Is there a way that we can do something different to get them to either make that trip at a different time, hybrid work example? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> to better coordinate this traffic so that maybe they, you know, that big company A is on Tuesday and big company B is on Wednesday. So again, that we are improving the efficiencies of how we’re moving to encourage more activities that don’t require that peak trip morning and evening. How that ties to downtown work areas. You know, it’s, it’s very complex. Do you need all the parking you’ve needed in the past? How do you redistribute that parking if we’re only gonna have 80 percent of the folks parking that have been there in the past or something like that, how does that relate to downtown businesses? This is a way more complex conversation than just how do we move more people.

Bernie Fette (29:16):
It sounds like rather than just studying the patterns of traffic congestion itself, you’re talking about understanding or working to understand the thought patterns of the people who are essentially causing it. Again, am I oversimplifying there or is that part of the approach?

David Schrank (29:35):
I would say that is actually pretty accurate. I would sum it up by saying a lot of it now is trying to get to the why’s. Yeah. Why are they traveling then? And how can we affect that travel? Is there a more efficient way to handle that? Whether it’s shift the time, whether it’s shift the mode, whether it’s not do it at all, and have it be a telework hybrid day. We actually can look at some of those things now, and data obviously is getting better for us to do those kinds of things every day. There’s so many things now that we’d love to take a look at to try to, again, pull apart these trips. The whys, wheres, hows, because we have data now and we have some new ideas since again, those layers of the onion Yeah. Have been pulled apart for us.

Bernie Fette (30:24):
Yeah. You’re asking questions now that you weren’t asking 10 years ago.

David Schrank (30:29):
Let me say I think that’s a good point. We’ve always tended to be more reactive to needs, and now we’re reacting still because we still have to provide transportation for residents, but we’re also trying to be proactive and figure out how we can maybe get ahead of some of that travel and make it more efficient.

Bernie Fette (30:49):
Last question, what is it that motivates you to get up and come to work every day?

David Schrank (30:54):
Well, that’s a good question. So again, from somebody who studied congestion for, you know, 30 plus years, the last five years has been fascinating because again, it’s led us kind of look underneath the hood at what’s going on, and it’s created all kinds of new questions now that we’re driving, ha ha, no pun intended toward the answers. And hopefully what it’s going to do is make us have a more efficient transportation system down the road for decades to come.

Bernie Fette (31:28):
David Schrank, senior research scientist at TTI and expert in all things traffic gridlock. This has been fascinating and enjoyable as usual, Dave. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

David Schrank (31:43):
Thanks for having me, as always.

Bernie Fette (31:47):
For many years, TTI’s Urban Mobility Report has been viewed as the industry’s definitive resource on the causes, conditions, and costs of roadway gridlock. Transportation planners and policy makers alike have relied upon the UMR to guide billions in infrastructure investment, and inform discussions that are aimed at making traffic flow smoother. It’s not enough to know that traffic is bad and getting worse. We also need to know where, when, and why. Thanks for listening. Please take just a minute to give us a review, subscribe, and share this episode, and please join us next time for another conversation about getting ourselves and the stuff we need from point A to point B. Thinking Transportation is a production of the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, a member of the Texas A&M University system. The show is edited and produced by Chris Pourteau. I’m your writer and host, Bernie Fette. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you next time.