file photo by Boyd Loving
By Larry Higgs | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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on August 26, 2015 at 8:00 AM, updated August 26, 2015 at 12:10 PM
Why are you almost always late for dinner or constantly missing your kids soccer games last year? Well, New Jersey residents wasted almost two work weeks in 2014 just sitting in traffic.
It’s not just your family and social life that suffered. Traffic in the New Jersey-New York region caused commuters to burn 35 more gallons of gas they wouldn’t have if traffic was flowing freely. And drivers paid $1,739 in fuel costs and wasted time for the privilege of staring at someone else’s brake lights in 2014.
The bad news was delivered in the 2015 Urban Mobility Scorecard, released Wednesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and INRIX, a supplier of travel time data.
Commuters driving in the New Jersey-New York-Connecticut region have the fourth-worst commute out of the 15 largest urban areas for delays. But we spend more money than any other region in the amount of gas we burn to schlep to and from work, the report said.
Don’t feel too smug if you commute elsewhere in the state, because two other New Jersey regions also made the list for crummy commutes in the report.