The report, "Driven Apart: How Sprawl is Lengthening our Commutes and Why Misleading Mobility Measures Are Making Things Worse," was released Tuesday by the organization CEOs for Cities. The analysis conducted by Joseph Cortright, senior policy advisor, concludes the solution to traffic problems has much more to do with how America builds its cities than how the country builds its roads.

Driven Apart, a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ranks the amount of time residents of the 51  largest metropolitan areas spend in peak traffic. In some cases, the rankings are almost the opposite of those listed in the 2009 Urban Mobility Report from the Texas Transportation Institute -- a commonly cited annual measurement of traffic congestion in the United States.

For instance, the TTI report depicts Chicago as having some of the worst travel delays. However, in this study, Chicago drivers actually spend the shortest amount of time in peak-hour traffic of any major U.S. metro area. Nashville, on the other hand, jumped from 31st to first on the list of those with the longest peak travel times.

The other nine worst cities for traffic, according to this report: Oklahoma City; Birmingham, Alabama; Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Memphis, Tennessee; Detroit; Orlando, Florida; Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas; and Louisville, Kentucky. 

Some metropolitan areas such as Chicago; Portland, Oregon; and Sacramento, California, have land-use patterns and transportation systems that enable their residents to take shorter trips and minimize the burden of peak-hour travel, Driven Apart asserts. If every one of the top 50 metropolitan areas followed the development patterns of Chicago and other high-performing cities, their residents would drive about 40 billion fewer miles per year and use 2 billion fewer gallons of fuel, for a cost savings of $31 billion annually.

Driven Apart uses new metrics that focus on trip distances and total travel times -- two statistics not reported in the Urban Mobility Report -- because they point to a broader and more powerful set of public policy options for dealing with urban transportation problems. CEOs for Cities recommends a new system for measuring urban transportation performance that includes emphasizing accessibility and focusing on measures of land uses, trip lengths, and mode choices as well as travel speeds.

The 71-page report is available at bit.ly/CEOS092810.