The Next Stop: METRO's Podcast
Episode 69: Houston Drivers Are Wasting a Lot of Time and Money in Traffic
03-11-2024


Andy Marchant:  It’s gonna get worse, I think, because we are seeing a return to pre-pandemic level.   

Doug Delony:  I’m Doug Delony. On this edition of the Next Stop: Houston drivers lose an incredible amount of time sitting in traffic during rush hour. We are taking a look at the latest numbers.  

[Introduction music plays]

Doug Delony:  Today, on the Next Stop, we welcome Andy Marchant from TomTom. Welcome, Andy!

Andy Marchant:  Hey, Doug.  

Doug Delony:  Anyone who lives in Houston, works in Houston, knows that it just takes them a while to get anywhere. And it feels like traffic is getting worse. So, let’s talk a little bit about your company, TomTom. What is TomTom? What do you all do? 

Andy Marchant:  So, maybe some of the—maybe some of the people listening have heard of TomTom before. So, TomTom, we’re about 30 years old now, and we pioneered the personal navigation devices for drivers.  

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  So, our first products to market were back in the early 2000s, and it’s the so-called “sat-nav.” So, it’s the device that you stick to your windscreen. Fast forward 20-odd years and whilst we are still in that market, and we still sell a number of those devices, the whole industry’s changed. And now most of our applications, our services, are available built-in to vehicles. We’re still doing the same thing. We’re doing a lot more of it but just in a slightly different way.  

Doug Delony:  Yeah, I think of several companies have had to kind of pivot as the smartphone took over for everybody. It’s even impacted public transit and how we use public transit. I’ve even seen you guys—you have an interactive map just for Houston. It takes about the time…

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.  

Doug Delony:  …that it takes to get from one spot to another. And you also have something called the “TomTom Traffic Index.” What is that? 

Andy Marchant:  So, yeah, it’s, it’s, we released it at the beginning of the year. It’s its 13th year that we’ve released this. And it’s, it’s a report that we pull together—accessible for anybody to view. And it shows you the impact of traffic on almost 400 cities around the world. And we compare those against them. So, from number 1 on the list, who is the worst for traffic in terms of the time it takes for people to drive, right down to the city that has the least impact for traffic.  

Doug Delony:  Wow. And this is how actually we became aware of this Traffic Index. We said, “Okay. We gotta talk to Andy.” But, it sounds like, you know, given this technology, given the data we talked about, you’re not just sitting on the side of the road counting cars. [laughs]

Andy Marchant:  What we do is we provide data to a whole number of different organizations and companies, and those range from car manufacturers to mobile phone manufacturers and operators through to governments, cities, etc. And all of them use our data in a different way. But across the world, we have somewhere in the region of 600 million connected devices that connect into our network. And what that means is there is a device that has a GPS signal, and it tells us where that device is moving. Now, I think it’s important to say at this point that all of this information is completely anonymized. We have no indication…

Doug Delony:  Sure.  

Andy Marchant:  …of whose device it is. So, I can’t look up in the database and go, “Hey, there’s Doug. He’s traveling down this road in Houston.” 

Doug Delony:  [laughs]  

Andy Marchant:  All I can tell you is that there is a device using our service that is traveling down a road. And from that, we can pull some information. For example, we can see the speed that it’s moving, and we can compare that against the speed we would expect to see the road moving at that day or that time of day. And that gives us an indication about the traffic problem.  

Doug Delony:  And you mentioned close to 400 cities. Houston came in at number 312, which, at first, does not sound too bad, but then you factor in, according to TomTom’s list, the average speed in a Houston rush hour is only 23 miles per hour. And for every six miles you drive during rush hour, you lose 56 hours a year sitting in traffic. Many Houstonians drive four or five times that distance every single day, so the math there, we’re talking hundreds of hours lost due to gridlock per driver in Houston. That’s if you’re driving every day in rush hour.  If you take a look at TomTom’s Traffic Index for the United States only, Houston comes in at number 11 as far as our congestion level percentage. And if I’m looking at this full list—I see London at the top with the worst congestion, followed by Dublin, then Toronto. So TomTom’s Index isn’t just studying and comparing Houston’s traffic to others in the U.S. but also, I guess, cities around the world. 

Andy Marchant:  Yeah. I mean, you know, as I say, it’s close to 400 cities.  A large portion of those are in the U.S. and Canada, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. So, and lots of places in between. So, we have a pretty wide mix.  

Doug Delony:  Everybody always says, “Oh, no. My city has the worst traffic. We’ve got it bad. It takes….” You know, everybody has their perception of how bad it is. I know some cities actually have it worse than Houston. Houston is not great when it comes to trying to get around in rush hour. And it’s interesting to see different cities around the world try and solve this problem.  And for many people, for many cities, especially outside the U.S., they have fees or fines, and they charge you to drive into, like, congested areas, and part of that is pollution….

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.  

Doug Delony:  …Part of it is just trying to reduce congestion. But a lot of times the solution is just using public transit. For some people, public transit is the faster way. But if you are going to choose to drive in a car, let’s dive into the numbers in Houston here. In 2023, last year, I saw in your report that TomTom indicated an average travel time for a 6-mile trip was 12 minutes and 13 seconds. Is that right?  

Andy Marchant:  Yep. Yep.  

Doug Delony:  And it’s important to note, though, that actually sounds pretty good by Houston standards. I would love to get in my car and say, “Hey, 12 minutes that’s not too bad.” But it’s important to keep in mind that’s an average of 24 hours a day, right?  

Andy Marchant:  Yeah, yeah. That’s an average. And also, we, you know, six miles might seem like an odd, an odd number.  

Doug Delony:  Uh-huh.  

Andy Marchant:  What we did when we did all these calculations is we—most of the locations around the world use kilometers as a measurement.  

Doug Delony:  Okay.  

Andy Marchant:  So, that’s what we use, and we calculated everything on it per kilometer. Now, nobody ever drives one kilometer, so we round it up to ten. So, we said a ten-kilometer journey that’s what we’ll base our comparison on.  

Doug Delony:  Sure.  

Andy Marchant:  Obviously…

Doug Delony:  Okay.  

Andy Marchant:  …for the US, I’m a Brit, so we also use miles…

Doug Delony:  [laughs]

Andy Marchant:  …as well. So, we have to obviously give a local number that other people can relate to, so ten kilometers is approximately six miles.  

Doug Delony:  I had a feeling it was something with kilometers to miles and whatnot…

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.  

Doug Delony:  …but I wasn’t going to bring it up. But you brought it up…[laughs]…

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.  

Doug Delony:  …’cuz six miles was a bit strange, but, you know, that’s Americans for you. We do what we do with the miles. And surely, somebody hitting traffic, you know, or hitting the freeway at 4 a.m. on a Sunday is going to do a lot better than…

Andy Marchant:  Yes.  

Doug Delony:  …perhaps a Tuesday at 9 a.m.  

Andy Marchant:  I’ll give you a comparison. You know, the number one on the list was London.

Doug Delony:  Oh, wow.  

Andy Marchant:  And having driven in London an awful lot through my life, I can tell you it’s pretty poor. I think, I think the calculation we made this year is the average speed in London is 9 miles-per-hour…

Doug Delony:  Wow.  

Andy Marchant:  …which is pretty low. And I think, you know, we measure the six miles, and we talk about the length of time. I think London takes over 30 minutes to do the same…

Doug Delony:  Wow.  

Andy Marchant:  …we calculated.  

Doug Delony:  And obviously, a lot of the worst times would be during rush hour. And I know London and other cities have implemented, you know, restrictions for personal vehicles, people driving by themselves. Here at METRO, one of our really popular services is our Park and Ride buses. We also have the METRO STAR Vanpool. It’s where people are literally carpooling together. We have METRORail, which is the commuter train or the light rail train. But for those stuck in the main lanes, stuck in a personal vehicle, what did TomTom find about Houston’s rush hours? 

Andy Marchant:  Yeah, I think, I think, first thing is it got slightly worse than it was last year.  

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  But not by a huge amount, and to be honest, that’s the trend. In fact, in the U.S., there was only Indianapolis that reversed that trend. But Houston was pretty much the average that most people saw, which was a slight increase on the time it took last year. And I think a lot of this is—there’s a few things that we’ve noticed around the world. The first one is really for the last, what, three years because of COVID, etc., and the way people…

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  …adapted their working behaviors, I think this year is the first time that many companies and organizations have gone back to working from the office full time. Of course, many still…

Doug Delony:  Right.  

Andy Marchant:  …do home and work, but we’ve found by talking to people and looking at the impacts that this is the first one since full lockdown happened where people are pretty much back to their working patterns, behaviors that they were pre-pandemic. So, I think that’s one thing to note. And I think the other one is we’ve also seen a rise in the types of traffic that are driving. Again, through pandemic, we saw a massive increase in E-commerce. For example, a small company setting up, doing local delivery services, food, parcels, etc. So, that’s added another volume of vehicles on the road that perhaps weren’t there before. So, I don’t think there’s one thing that’s happened, but there’s a number of things that when they come together have increased the volumes of traffic on our roads.  

Doug Delony:  And I think it’s, like, I feel like it’s constantly evolving as managers and employers try and figure out that balance of how much they can make someone come back to the office or when they can make them come back. You know, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, very popular time for public transit here in Houston. That’s when our Park and Ride buses are jammin’. I know that you said during rush hour in the Index in the TomTom report that 6 miles at rush hour in Houston is 32 minutes. You also measured the total time lost in traffic at peak hours. What’s that? 

Andy Marchant:  Yeah, so that’s looking at how much time, yeah, people lose…

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  …or people waste purely because of traffic. So, it’s great to say, “Hey, this is how much time it takes you to complete this journey. This is how much time you spend driving. But what we found was people wanted to understand what was the impact on them personally. So, there’s three things that we measured. So, one was time lost based on traffic.  

Doug Delony:  Uh-huh.  

Andy Marchant:  One was emissions, so how much pollution is added because of traffic, and one was cost. And those are things that maybe there is an ability for people to have their own personal impact by making some small changes.  

Doug Delony:  Right.  

Andy Marchant:  What we found in a lot of localities, and in TomTom as well, is that teams now have these days where they go, “You know what? Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the days where we all come to the office together, so we can collaborate and work together.” Outside of that, people flexed, but everyone comes on those two days, which means the traffic on those two days is going to be way greater than people saying, “Well, I’ll come—you know, half the team will come Monday, some of the team will come Tuesday, some on a Wednesday, maybe less on a Thursday, and pretty much empty on a Friday.” That would balance out the traffic more but because people have gone for this model of saying, “Hey, if you want to work together, if you want to see each other, if you want to collaborate….” Tuesdays and Wednesdays or Mondays and Thursdays are our common days. So, everyone traveling on those days is going to impact the traffic.  

Doug Delony:  I saw “peak hours, Houstonians have lost time in traffic, 56 hours 28 minutes last year.” Is that right? 

Andy Marchant:  Yes. Yes, that’s correct.

Doug Delony:  And the big headline then is “Houstonians losing time. They’re losing money.” You know, here at METRO—I have to throw this out there—that’s one of the really big perks with Park and Ride buses and any public transit, really. The bus lanes, the HOV lanes, the express lanes. They can save you some time, and you can even be productive when you’re on these vehicles because you don’t actively have to drive. You can even catch a little nap. Let someone else worry about the driving, so you don’t lose as much time. But aside from saving money and saving fuel and the wear and tear on your car, there’s also a benefit to the environment. You touched on this briefly, Andy. If you could tell me, real quick, TomTom’s numbers here about the average fuel cost for driving and then a little bit about the CO2 that’s emitted, perhaps per 10,000 miles I think I saw on the report.  

Andy Marchant:  Yes. So, we looked to a few different things. We were trying to—we were trying to understand what is the impact to you as a driver that is going to make you want to change those habits. Obviously, cost…

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  …is a huge one. Believe me, the fuel costs in Houston are way better than they are in Europe.  

Doug Delony:  [laughs]  I think I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that.  

Andy Marchant:  We do see a much, a much bigger impact on our pockets over here for sure. But there is an amount that you spend, right? And the more time that you sit in traffic, therefore, the journey becomes longer, it’s going to impact the amount of fuel you use. And, you know, there is an amount that’s wasted each year that could be spent elsewhere. You know, it could be spent on a day out. It could be spent on a nice meal or whatever. And maybe it doesn’t sound that much to some people, but, hey, if your commute suddenly is, you know, instead of 6 miles is 26 miles then, you know, that’s gonna have, you know that’s gonna have a lot. And maybe that adds up to an extra, you know, eight to ten tanks of fuel over the year… 

Doug Delony:  Mm-hmm.  

Andy Marchant:  … that you’re just throwing away because of, because of traffic. Emissions is another one. You know, I think there’s a lot of talk around the world about greenhouse gases, about making things better, and what we did is we took, we took some studies on the typical emissions per vehicle across different locations, and then we’ve added that to the traffic. So, we can see the typical type of vehicle and the emissions that it releases by having traffic, what the impact is, and it’s, you know, it’s quite a bit. Again, we tried to measure it in the Traffic Index to something that people could relate to, and you know, trees is a good one. We, you know, trees we know absorb a lot of pollutants…

Doug Delony:  Uh-huh.  

Andy Marchant:  …etc. And you would have to plant just for the additional impact caused by traffic in Houston, that you would have to plant over, I think it’s over 75 trees every year.  

Doug Delony:  Wow.  

Andy Marchant:  Just to impact that additional CO2 that’s released because of traffic. That’s year on year on year. So that’s…

Doug Delony:  Right.  

Andy Marchant:  …you know, that’s huge forests over a period of time.  

Doug Delony:  And I know that TomTom, the Index there, you know, you calculated for 10,000 miles. In Texas, we drive an average of 16,000 miles…

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.  

Doug Delony:  …per year. I know some people who drive 20,000 miles per year because they don’t live in Houston. 

Andy Marchant:  Uh-huh.  

Doug Delony:  They can’t take advantage of public transit. And they’re just driving all over the state. 

Andy Marchant:  Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, while some of the numbers may seem low…

Doug Delony:  Uh-huh.  

Andy Marchant:  …but as you start to multiply them up for those kind of—that’s where they really kind of start to add up. So, yeah, it’s a lot. 

Doug Delony:  And it looks like things, you know, I mean, as far as predicting things—I know it’s kind of difficult this day and age. Are we looking to improve traffic overall? Do you think as far as a Houston trend or worldwide trend, do you think traffic is getting better? It’s getting worse? 

Andy Marchant:  I think, yeah, I think in the short term, it’s gonna get worse. I think because we are seeing a return to pre-pandemic levels. So, traffic is growing year on year as people start to get back into rhythms, etc., that they used to. I can’t comment too much on Houston because, as I say, I am not a local. But I can give you some examples across here in Europe. So, in Europe there’s, there’s lots of initiatives going on around Green Cities and that’s kind of trying to move the cars outside of the city and turning roads into pedestrian areas, green parks, etc. That’s also having an impact because as they close off roads, and they start to do construction that’s adding more impact to the traffic as it’s causing more delays. So, again, in the shorter term, it’s adding to the traffic situation. So, unfortunately, folks, I think at least for the coming years, I see traffic only getting worse.  

Doug Delony:  [laughs]  

Andy Marchant:  I think there’s gonna be some globally—not just Houston, not just London for me, not just at other locations—but globally, I think there’s gonna be some real, you know, some really close organizations come together to try and find out how to do we solve this problem. And electric vehicles are an amazing way of improving, you know, our air quality. But it isn’t going to solve traffic. You know, if I take, if I take 20 percent of all the cars off the road that petrol and switch with EV, I’m not reducing the volume of cars, and therefore, reducing traffic.  

Doug Delony:  Right.  

Andy Marchant:  I’m just making them greener. So, I think there’s got to be lots of new initiatives like public transport. Like your Park and Ride. Schemes that really incentivize drivers to look at alternative methods, and maybe that is be more productive by taking that lost time and actually being able to do a little bit of work or respond to your emails while somebody else is driving the vehicle. 

Doug Delony:  Yeah, I think we’ve seen the illustrations where people—they have the photo—there’s a few variations of this that go around where you have the people standing in the street, and it shows the equivalent of the people that would be in cars and the space that the number of cars takes up on a street versus just a single bus. 

Andy Marchant:  Yeah.

Doug Delony:  It’s like, you know, 55 people can fit on a single bus versus the 55 cars that are in the other one and…

Andy Marchant:  Exactly.  

Doug Delony:  …and the space that cars take up in general. And here in Texas, I mean, I’ll admit we love our cars but, you know, it takes multiple solutions to solve most problems. And part of that is maybe a Houstonian says, “Okay, you know what? On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’m not gonna drive my car.” We have a city council person here in Houston who is no-car Fridays. They only take public transit. They ride their bike. They walk. And hey, you know, it’s a little bit healthier for you.  [laughs]

Andy Marchant:  And these are the kind of initiatives that we need people to kind of really get on board with because that’s a great idea. I mean, you know, one day a week—does it really impact your life so much? Probably not. But, hey, does it have a big impact on society and my city? Absolutely. I think these are a great example of initiatives that are not hugely expensive. It doesn’t cost the city billions of dollars of investment to build a new commuter subway or METRO system but just encouraging people, “Hey, don’t drive on one day a week. You know, what’s the big deal?” I think that has a big impact over a period of time.  

Doug Delony:  Alright. And seeing the numbers certainly helps make that impact as well. So, we thank you, TomTom, for having the numbers. We thank you, Andy, for joining us here. Is there any question that I did not ask that you just wish I’d asked, or anything that I missed, or anything that you’d like to add to this conversation?  

Andy Marchant:  No, I think, I think, really, the message, the message from us is, you know, hey, you know, we can, we can measure this really, really well. You know, we want to work with the cities like Houston to really kind of help them understand, you know, the best ways forward, and yeah, please take a look at the Traffic Index yourself, as a listener, and yeah, just take some little bits of insights. You know, just those small things can make a huge difference if we all do it together. 

Doug Delony:  And it’s TomTom.com—that’s you guys, that’s your website? 

Andy Marchant:  TomTom.com, yeah, and “Traffic Index” is what you’re searching for. 

Doug Delony:  Thank you so much, Andy Marchant.  

Andy Marchant:  Thank you.  

Doug Delony:  That wraps it up for this edition of the Next Stop. Thank you to you, the listener, and all of our METRO riders out there. If you’re not yet a METRO rider, and you’ve listened this far into our podcast, why are you not giving METRO a try? You can check out our trip planner and other tools that will teach you how to use the METRO system at ridemetro.org. We’re not asking you to sell your car or get rid of it, but hey, maybe just park it for a day or two out of the week. I think you’ll really find that you like using METRO. I’m Doug Delony. If you’d like to check out more episodes of this podcast and subscribe, you can find all the links you need on our website. As always, drive less and do more with Houston METRO.  

[Music plays to end]