America’s 75 Worst Commutes: Highways to Hell.

They are the highways to hell in the country’s most gridlocked cities. The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine your ultimate morning nightmares. How did your commute rank?

Our first step was ranking the metropolitan areas with the worst rush-hour congestion. The order is based on the peak hour Travel Time Index (TTI) for the metropolitan area each highway is in. TTI is a measure of how much longer it takes to complete a road journey during peak congestion hours compared to free-flow hours. (Peak hours are defined as 6 a.m. to 10a.m., and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.) Speeds during non-peak hours are used by INRIX to establish this free-flow baseline.

After determining the 75 worst metro areas, we then found the worst highway in each, defined as the most hours of bottleneck congestion, as reported by INRIX. The rankings then provide a still deeper look—at the most congested bottleneck segment for the worst highway in each area.

Three "winners" are from New York State.

Roundabouts

Here's a list of ALL the roundabouts in the U.S. and Canada. It lists the location, the type of roundabout, and the year it was constructed. It was compiled in 2006, but at least three of the records for Albany County, NY were updated in 2007.

State Highway Safety Laws

Description from ResourceShelf:

While you may be familiar with what’s legal in your own state, it’s a different story when you’re planning a road trip that will take you through several states. Will you need a Bluetooth headset? What’s the story if your 18-year old kid and his friends are taking to the open road — with their cell phones? Well, you can always rummage around the Net in search of different state driving laws — or you could call AAA.

Or you could take the recommended ResourceShelf route and seek out a reliable one-stop shopping site — in this case, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which maintains a collection of various highway safety laws in every state, updated monthly. Topics covered:

» Aggressive Driving Laws
» Cell Phone Driving
» Child Passenger Safety
» Drug Impaired Driving
» Drunk Driving
» Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL)
» Helmets
» Mature Drivers
» Seat Belts
» Segways
» Sobriety Checkpoints
» Speed Limits
» Speed and Red Light Cameras
» Work Zone Speed Limits
You can see a neat matrix of laws on a state-by-state basis, with comments, notations and additional information, including links to related issue briefs. If it’s more useful for you to browse all the laws at once for a particular state, you can access the information that way.

There are other treasures on the GHSA website, notably this outstanding collection of links and resources, from which you can get to all state highway safety office websites, related federal websites, and a nicely annotated page of links on various highway safety topics.

For a look at traffic safety beyond the U.S., check out this page of Global Road Safety Websites.

Freight Facts and Figures 2008

From the Federal Highway Administration.

Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems

The Reason Foundation's 17th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems measures the performance of all state-owned roads and highways from 1984 to 2006. The study calculates the effectiveness and performance of each state in 12 different categories, including traffic fatalities, congestion, pavement condition, bridge condition, highway maintenance costs, and administrative costs.