When is Chicago-area Traffic the Worst?

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

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

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2015

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Let our info about the Let our info about the worst hours, days and seasons for road congestion steer you clear from a traffic-induced personal hell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	When were the...
0:03.7	What schools?
0:06.0	Who decides what the next...
0:07.8	Where's that story?
0:09.2	Why they give the look?
0:11.2	What is this?
0:13.6	It's a curious city.
0:15.0	Where WBEZ answers your questions about Chicago, the region, and its people.
0:20.5	Hi, I'm reporter Chris Bentley. We get lots of questions about the Chicago area's built environment.
0:26.0	Our bridges, our buildings, our trains, and we've gotten dozens that might owe to the fact that
0:30.9	many of you tune in while driving. No wonder then that today's question is about traffic.
0:36.8	Even if traffic is not a personal hell for you,
0:39.7	you might want to perk up because traffic affects everyone. There's pollution and public safety
0:44.6	problems for pedestrians or bicyclists, and it can be expensive. Just think about how much time and fuel
0:50.4	was wasted in the Chicago area alone. Funny enough, in 2011, the Texas Transportation Institute put a number on that.
0:56.7	And that's $6.2 billion with a B dollars, and that ranked third of all of the urban areas that we looked at.
1:07.1	This is Bill Isley, senior research engineer with the Institute.
1:10.4	That works out to about $1,200 per auto commuter per year in terms of wasted time and fuel.
1:18.9	Okay, onto a specific traffic question that has an interesting twist.
1:23.6	It comes from Esther Bowen, who commutes from Chicago's Bucetown neighborhood to her job at Argonne National Laboratory southwest of the city.
1:31.0	The drive usually takes her about 45 minutes.
1:33.6	A long time, but she says she's not complaining.
	...

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