Think Your Holiday Commute Is Bad? These Places Have it Worse

Nov. 23, 2015, 4:24 PM UTC / Updated Nov. 25, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

By Halimah Abdullah

Californians dreaming of escaping traffic-clogged climes have good reason.

Los Angelenos face some of the nation’s worst gridlock according to a report by the American Highway Users Alliance of the top 50 bottlenecks. Nine of the nation’s top 20 bottlenecks are in Los Angeles

Road warriors in Chicago — which ranked number one with a 12 mile long clog on Interstate 90 — New York City, Boston, Seattle, Newark and Miami also have good reason to grouse, their cities ranked among the top 20 for bottlenecked traffic.

The report comes just as roughly 47 million Americans prepare to take to the roads to travel more than 50 miles over the Thanksgiving holiday, according the AAA Travel. And whether travelers wend their way through such highways as I-395 near the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Washington D.C. or I-75/I-85 near Freedom Parkway in Atlanta, their highway commutes are likely to be clogged.

Such trends aren’t some “idiosyncratic” blip, Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said during a press conference on the nation’s bottlenecks on Monday.

America’s population is expected to grow as much as 70 million over the next 30 years and all of those people will put a strain on the country’s roadways if infrastructure isn’t improved, Foxx said.

But those improvements take money.

The issue of funding federal highway projects has long been a thorny matter in Congress. The Senate agreed last week to extend funding to the chronically financially strapped Highway Trust Fund until Dec. 4th as lawmakers in both chambers of Congress hammer out an agreement over separate multiyear highway bills.

Foxx said he is hopeful that Congress will reach a resolution that would ultimately lead to investment in infrastructure that could help relieve bottlenecks.

“We need to take a break from 20th century policy and apply new policy to a 21st century context,” Foxx said.

Halimah Abdullah

Halimah Abdullah is a digital editor and writer for NBC News and is responsible for reporting, writing, editing and web producing federal policy news for NBCNews.com. Prior to joining the site in April 2015, Abdullah worked at CNN.com, where she reported, edited and web produced stories on federal politics and policy. In that role, Abdullah was responsible for helping cover Congress, the White House, federal agencies, and national political races.

A veteran politics and policy reporter and editor, Abdullah has worked for Bloomberg Government, McClatchy Newspapers' Washington Bureau, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Newsday, and the Dallas Morning News. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times and TODAY.com, among other publications. Her journalism and creative writing have won awards, been published in several anthologies, and earned her invitations to attend several writing colonies. Abdullah is also a writing professor who has taught at the University of Maryland and the University of the District of Columbia and John Jay College and Brooklyn College in New York.

Abdullah lives in the Washington D.C. metro area.