Many of us moan and groan over the thought of being delayed 10 minutes on the way to our destination (I know I do), but researchers at IBM are finding that citizens of large cities such as Moscow, Beijing, and Sao Paolo have it MUCH worse."Your daily slog through traffic is nothing compared to Moscow, where people might spend more than three hours sucking exhaust fumes while going nowhere fast," says Chuck Squatriglia of WIRED.

IBM Research surveyed 8,192 motorists in 20 cities, and most of them think traffic has become worse in just the past three years. More than half said gridlock has wreaked havoc on their physical or mental health, and one-third said it is undercutting their productivity at work or school.

 

Mounting congestion is a relatively new phenomenon in emerging markets where the economy is growing faster than the infrastructure. That stands in contrast to cities like New York and Los Angeles, where growth has occurred over time, allowing traffic engineers to do an OK job of keeping up.

"Traditional solutions - building more roads - will not be enough to overcome the growth of traffic in these rapidly developing cities, so multiple solutions need to be deployed simultaneously to avoid a failure of the transportation networks," says Naveen Lamba, who has the unusual title of IBM global industry lead for intelligent transportation. "New technologies are required that empower transportation officials to better understand and proactively manage the flow of traffic."

IBM used the results of the survey to compile a "Commuter Pain Index," which ranks the emotional and economic toll of commuting. The index is a measure of 10 criteria, from the amount of time spent sitting in traffic to the frequency with which people simply gave up and went home.

 

Thirty-one percent of respondents said they've encountered traffic so bad they simply turned around and went home. That number climbed to 69 percent for residents of Beijing.

 

Here in the United States, 85 percent of respondents say traffic is as bad or worse now than it was three years ago. But that doesn't mean they're about to change their behavior. More than 8 in 10 people drive solo to work - compared to 50 percent for the rest of the world - and only 3.1 percent carpool.

IBM's web-based survey, conducted by Survey Sampling International in 2008 and 2009 and released today, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 points overall and plus or minus 5 points when comparing cities. Respondents were drivers between 18 and 65 years old.

 

Source: WIRED