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Tell Us Something New: Cross Bronx is U.S.A.'s Worst Road, Study Says

By Eddie Small | February 21, 2017 10:14am | Updated on February 21, 2017 12:10pm
 The traffic analytics firm INRIX has named the Cross Bronx Expressway as the worst corridor in the country.
The traffic analytics firm INRIX has named the Cross Bronx Expressway as the worst corridor in the country.
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David Greene

THE BRONX — It won't shock anybody who regularly uses it, but a new study has concluded The Cross Bronx Expressway is the nation's worst road for traffic.

The transportation analytics company INRIX recently published its 2016 traffic scorecard which had the notoriously snarled route in the top spot. The average driver apparently spends 86 hours a year stuck in congestion.

New York took four of the top 10 spots, far more than any other city. I-95 East from Exit 70A to Exit 7A was number three, Fifth Avenue southbound from 120th Street to 40th Street was number seven and NJ-495 Eastbound from the I-95 Junction to 12th Avenue through the Lincoln Tunnel was number eight.

Corridors in Chicago took the number two and number 10 spots on the list, while streets in Boston, Los Angeles, Austin and Philadelphia filled out the rest of the list.

Overall, drivers in New York spent an average of 89 hours last year sitting in traffic, the second highest amount of time in North America and the third across the globe, behind only Moscow and Los Angeles.

Streets in New York City had the highest daytime congestion rate in the country among the cities INRIX looked at, and traffic speed was 8.23 miles per hour — significantly slower than the average pace of the 2016 New York City marathon winner Ghirmay Ghebreslassie.

New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, chair of the council's transportation committee, called a news conference Tuesday after the list was released, and called for shifting more commercial traffic to rail.

Driving the Cross Bronx feels "more like a parking lot than an expressway," he said. "The solutions are to take trucks out of this equation."