Familiar spots lead ATRI’s top highway bottlenecks

From Transport Topics.

Some very familiar trouble spots lead the 2022 Top Truck Bottlenecks List from the American Transportation Research Institute.

For the fourth consecutive year, the intersection of Interstate 95 and New Jersey State Route 4 in Fort Lee, N.J., ranked as the worst freight bottleneck in the country, with average speeds of 30.1 mph. Average rush hour speeds of 22.4 mph were down 28.2% from 2020.

This spot has ranked at or near the top of the ATRI report for more than 10 years.

Another perennial chokepoint claimed the No. 2 spot: downtown Cincinnati’s I-71/I-75 intersection, just north of the Brent Spence Bridge along the Ohio River.

A damaging fire on the bridge in November 2020 left transportation officials and engineers scrambling to repair the busy span, but the ensuing shutdown illuminated the vulnerability of the 59-year-old structure and demonstrated why officials from both Ohio and Kentucky are in discussions about the possibility of building a companion bridge nearby. This could be especially helpful for the region amid expansion of Amazon’s air and ground hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.

ATRI’s analysis, which utilized data from 2021, found traffic levels rebounded broadly across the country as more Americans returned to work, and consumer demand for goods and services continued to grow amid persistent supply chain woes. Across the country, average rush hour truck speeds declined more than 11% from 2020 to 38.6 mph.

See the complete article online at Transport Topics.