Highway to Hell: 7 of 10 Most Congested Spots in Nation Are In Los Angeles

Los Angeles lives up to its reputation of having some of the most clogged freeways in the nation according to a study put out by the Texas Transportation Institute.

The institute came out with several rankings to explain all the different ways a trip on the freeway can go wrong: 3-Cup Mornings, Lunch Bunch, Dog Day Afternoons and Weekend Warriors. Where Los Angeles did particularly poorly was on the rankings of "Congestion Leaders." Seven out of the ten most congested stretches of freeway in the nation were in Los Angeles:

As you can see, three of those stretches were on the 110 freeway. At the top of the list was the 110 freeway from the 10 to Stadium Way at Dodger Stadium. (LA Observed notes that if those statistics mean anything, then AEG is trying to bring an NFL stadium to an exit off the most congested stretch of freeway in the nation.) The authors of the study noted, "While this corridor ranks first in delay per mile, it ranks 27th in total congestion cost because it is one of the shorter corridors in the study. This corridor has about 1.4 million hours of delay per mile."

It's not clear how the authors chose their particular stretches of highway to study or why they chose to compare very short stretches to very long ones, but the numbers are still interesting on their own, even if many of the comparisons feel like apples to oranges. The study estimated that the 27-mile stretch of the 101 from Ventura Boulevard in the Valley to Vignes Street in downtown had the most wasted fuel (6.2 million gallons) and highest congestion costs ($277 million) in 2010.

The numbers are — like all numbers related to traffic — pretty depressing. The top 21 corridors in this list had at least a half million hours of delay per mile in 2010. The study estimated that 284 of the corridors that they looked at had at least 100,000 hours of delay per mile in 2010.