More Traffic Congestion in Larger Cities? - Scaling Analysis of the Large 101 U.S Urban Centers

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Over the past three decades, urban congestion has become more costly in terms of time, money and fuel. Congestion has generated, for the 101 large U.S urban centers, 4.8 billion hours of travel delay in 2011, up from 1.1 billion hours in 1982. We examine the scaling relationship between the population sizes of urban centers and traffic congestion for the five subgroups of urban centers. We find that the scaling relationships are superlinear in a majority of the subgroups. However, for the subgroup of mega cities with over 3 million populations, the relationship is linear. Several implications from our findings will follow.