Now I’m not entirely sure that real-time traffic information from GPS devices would help a driver get around Manhattan, New York’s business district any faster than a driver doing without. But even a bit of an advantage could mean big cash savings over an entire year judging by the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, a 3.5 MB Excel spreadsheet full of New York traffic data compiled over many years by Charles Kornanoff. Check out the following two paragraphs from Felix Salmon, a Reuters blogger:
“After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.
Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.”
The good thing is that after reading this you’ll never complain about high gas prices again. If you want to check out Kornanoff’s data, you can download the entire spreadsheet here and if you know how, do some data crunching of your own.
