A trip in metro Denver that takes 20 minutes outside rush hour consumes nearly half an hour during peak morning and evening travel periods, according to a national report released Monday.
Based on that measure, Denver was the ninth-most congested urban area in the country in 2003, the Texas Transportation Institute said in its 2005 Urban Mobility report. Still, that is an improvement from 2002, when the metro area was ranked seventh worst, and 2001, when it ranked fifth.
Even though Denver’s ranking improved, the institute’s “travel time index” showed drivers in metro Denver faced the same amount of extra time commuting at rush hour – an extra eight minutes for every 20-minute trip – in 2003 as they did in 2002.
Denver is one of only two cities considered large urban areas – as opposed to very large such as Los Angeles and Chicago – to rank among the nation’s 10 most congested. The large urban area category has cities with populations of 1 million to 3 million. San Diego is the other large urban area to be ranked in the top 10.
But Tom Norton, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation, said commuters should take comfort in the fact that commuting times in metro Denver are not getting worse.
He said the picture should brighten once the massive T-REX highway and light-rail project is completed next year.
“When we get done and out of there, it will be a remarkable improvement,” he said.
For now, T-REX, which began in 2001, is shaking up travel patterns for many commuters and may have skewed some congestion data over the past four years, said David Schrank, a researcher with the institute.
Some commuters who stopped traveling on Interstate 25 and Interstate 225 and switched to local streets during T-REX construction may not have shown up in data analyzed by the institute – even though they added congestion to those streets, Schrank said.
The Texas report looks at freeways and major arterial roads, but not local streets.
One other measure of rush- hour pain that Schrank’s group tracks – the extra number of hours a year that commuters waste stuck in traffic – has been declining in the Denver area, according to the report.
From 60 hours a year of wasted time for the average Denver-area rush-hour commuter in 2000 and 2001, it dropped to 52 hours in 2002 and 51 in 2003, the report noted.
The report said congestion levels can be reduced by encouraging some commuters to switch to mass transit or carpooling, as well as measures such as better traffic-signal timing, ramp metering, and removing crashed or disabled vehicles more quickly from highways.
For small urban areas of less than 500,000, Colorado Springs had the second-worst “travel time index” in the nation in 2003, according to the Texas report.
Staff writer Jeffrey Leib can be reached at 303-820-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com.
