Here’s Roadguy’s column from the Sunday paper. Please add your impressions about which rush hours are busiest, or any other thoughts, in the comments below.

MORNING RUSH HOURS, BY THE NUMBERS

Alert reader Jim, a Dakota County denizen, wonders why some rush hours seem worse than others:

Tuesday and Thursday morning commutes (between 7:30 & 8-ish) seem noticeably more congested than other mornings. I commute from south of the river and over the past seven years have driven both 35E to St. Paul and 77/62/35W to Minneapolis, and both routes seem to follow this pattern.

Roadguy is more likely to be in his pajamas than in his car at 7:30 a.m., so he was unable to bring a personal perspective to Jim’s question. But the engineering types over at the Minnesota Department of Transportation keep track of traffic volumes the way your Uncle Phil used to keep track of baseball statistics, so Roadguy asked them whether there was any evidence of more cars on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

In general, the MnDOT folks said, volumes are higher on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Then they looked up traffic totals from Hwy. 77 northbound, one of the roads that Jim has taken to work, and the figures bore that out.

Between 7 and 8 a.m., the average number of vehicles was 6,600 for all three days in the middle of the week. The number for Monday was 6,400, while Friday’s average was 6,000.

(Apparently we like our long weekends around here.)

While the numbers, which are gathered by pavement detectors, don’t vary a whole lot, Todd Kramascz, a traffic operations supervisor for MnDOT, says, “A change in volume of only a few hundred vehicles during the peak hour can make a difference in the amount of congestion on a corridor.”

Indeed. But what about Jim’s perceived dip on Wednesdays?

Kramascz and Brian Kary, MnDOT’s director of freeway operations, tried looking at a different set of numbers, this time for northbound 35E at the Mississippi River in October.

“The numbers were actually highest on Wednesday and Thursday,” Kary said. With 5,500 vehicles during the 7-8 a.m. hour, those two days were about 1,500 higher than Monday, Tuesday and Friday. (Apparently we liked really long weekends in October.)

So while MnDOT wasn’t able to statistically confirm Jim’s rush-hour impressions about Wednesdays, Roadguy did learn something. If he ever has to drive on the freeways between 7 and 8 a.m., better to do so on a Monday or a Friday.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.