The weather outside may be frightful, and the gas prices less than delightful. (OK, they've only ticked up by a few cents.) But a record number of Americans will take to the road this holiday season, according to AAA---93.6 million.
Traveling to see the in-laws: Yay! More cars on the road: Boo! Unless your nearby destination is along a train route, traffic is near-unavoidable this time of year, especially if you're traveling through one of this country's more populated places. "In some areas, you simply have the demand for road travel exceed the supply for roads," says Bob Pishue, who helps oversee research at the internet services company Inrix.
But we want to toss you a holiday ham bone. Inrix searched through more than 150 million data points from roads all over the country to pinpoint the most nightmarish major highways to motor upon. We've broken these down by the region, to show you the worst bottlenecks in the East, West, South, and Midwest, with average traffic jam lengths (in miles and minutes). Unsurprisingly, a lot of these clogs occur at major highway interchanges. Avoid! Avoid! Avoid!
Before we get to the data, an important caveat: There are a bunch of reasons traffic slows down---congestion, sure, but also awful weather, construction, unfortunate road configurations (where, say, three lanes are whittled down to two), a big event (like a football game), or a major crash. The data here refers to December 23 to January 1 of the 2015 holiday season, so any incident that triggered a jam back then may not repeat this year---or new problems could pop up elsewhere.
For the East, Inrix pulled data from the area's three big population centers: Boston, New York City, and Washington, DC. Boston may have flashes of baseball brilliance and notably poor drivers, but it doesn't even crack the top five pokiest roads this season.
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For the South, we take a good, hard look at Dallas and Houston, Texas, and Miami, Florida.
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The Midwest bracket features the wider Chicago area and Detroit, Michigan. Chicago comes out on top (er, bottom), every time.
[google_table url="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1U7ogB8HrQMjHQeKuIn1KuSwZkSTwmQ1zxdbhUOz0TH4/pubhtml" title="America's Worst Holiday Roads, Midwest"/]
Finally, the West looks at Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles. Guess which car capital always wins out in holiday horribleness?
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Basically: Before you plan out your driving route, make sure you check your local traffic conditions. Consider, perhaps, some mass transit instead. And be safe out there, celebrants.
