It’s Geekalicious

Posted by Carol Coletta on November 16, 2010

That's what Sightline called our latest report, Driven Apart. 

Sightline recognized the report as a breakthrough that challenges conventional wisdom on congestion and its measurement.

"For decades, we've been hearing that congestion is getting worse and worse, and that traffic backups are taking a bigger and bigger bite out of our days (and paychecks) each year. 

"But what if we're measuring congestion wrong -- and the conventional wisdom is largely hogwash?

"A geekalicious new report from CEO's for Cities shows that the nation's most influential measure of congestion -- the Urban Mobility Report by the Texas Transportation Institute, which is where reporters and policymakers get most of their information about the nationwide impact of congestion -- is riddled with conceptual problems, data limitations, and methodological errors that render its city-to-city congestion rankings almost meaningless. 

"Even worse, CEOs for Cities says, the congestion rankings are systematically biased against compact cities with short commute distances.  And on top of that, they likely overstate the impacts of congestion, both on people's time and on the economy as a whole."

Sightline produced one of the most best summaries of the report to date.  So if you haven't yet read it, it's still news.