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Curious City

Bumper-to-Bumper With Some Questions About Chicago Traffic

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8642 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There’s never a shortage of complaints about Chicago traffic, but experts swear it could be worse. We investigate the science behind lane closures and red lights, and then take a look at the chaos of creating a traffic report.

Transcript

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0:00.0

All right.

0:04.0

Up we go.

0:06.0

Hey, it's Andrew Meriwether.

0:08.0

And this morning I'm doing a ride along with my wife, Larkin, as she heads out on her daily commute to work.

0:14.0

Got a little snow in the car, with a brush out.

0:18.0

It doesn't like there's any ice, so we should need the scraper.

0:21.1

Like hundreds of thousands of her fellow Chicagoans, each morning she commutes to her job.

0:26.4

In her case, it's a reverse commute, out to the suburbs.

0:29.9

And also like the majority of Chicago, she does so by car and not public transportation.

0:35.3

So my car takes me about 45 minutes, maybe 50 minutes to get home, the traffic's a little bit worse.

0:41.3

On public transit, it would take me a little over an hour.

0:45.3

2020 census data shows that around 59% of folks living in the city commute by vehicle.

0:51.3

And that number is over 86% for suburbanites. All of which is to say, we spend

0:57.2

a lot of time in cars. See this guy? What are you doing? Oh my gosh. Now it's chaos. People are

1:04.8

driving in the right lane that's not a lane. And that means we have opinions about traffic.

1:11.4

A lot of opinions.

1:13.6

We just went through one of the most annoying lights on my drive.

1:16.9

I don't understand it at all.

1:18.6

There's two lights right next to each other, one after the other.

1:22.4

So sometimes you'll wait at the first one.

1:25.6

You can see the other one in front is green the whole time.

1:29.3

And then right when your light turns green, the other one will turn red.

...

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