WASHINGTON (AP) – If getting stuck in traffic makes you want to roll down your car window and scream, look no further than another of those studies to find the bad news: Gridlock is getting worse. Congestion delayed travelers 79 million more hours and wasted 69 million more gallons of fuel in 2003 than in 2002, the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2005 Urban Mobility Report found.
Overall in 2003, there were 3.7 billion hours of travel delay and 2.3 billion gallons of wasted fuel for a total cost of more than $63 billion.
“Urban areas are not adding enough capacity, improving operations or managing demand well enough to keep congestion from growing,” the report concluded.
Honolulu became the 51st city in which rush-hour traffic delayed the average motorist at least 20 hours a year. The Hawaiian capital joins such congested areas as Washington, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago – and Virginia Beach, Va., Omaha, Neb., and Colorado Springs, Colo.
BBC NEWS | Americas | Loophole may allow US crime spree
A loophole in US law may allow people to get away with any major crime within a 50-square mile “zone of death” in western Idaho, according to a Michigan law professor.
Backpacker in Idaho
A small swathe of Idaho could be the venue for the perfect crime
This lawless oasis is said to exist on the edge of Yellowstone National Park because of a poorly drafted statute in the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Criminals are entitled to be tried by a jury drawn from the state and legal district they committed their crime in, the constitution says.
But, argues Prof Brian C Kalt, while Yellowstone comes entirely under the district of Wyoming, small parts of it spill into the states of Montana and Idaho.
“Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree,” Kalt writes in a forthcoming paper for the Georgetown Law Journal.
“You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets.