Every two years, a research institute at Texas A&M comes out with a flawed report on traffic. Each time, other transportation analysts debunk it. But most reporters breathlessly regurgitate quotes from author Tim Lomax every time without doing any actual reporting of their own. How did our local reporters fare this year?

Interview photo from Shutterstock.

The Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Study” takes a “searching under the streetlight” approach of looking at some data they get from INRIX and extrapolating that into shoddy conclusions. Victoria Transportation Policy Institute researcher Todd Litman, Joe Cortright of City Observatory, and locally, the Coalition for Smarter Growth have all rebutted the study’s many flaws.

But Lomax knows that the press just eats up this “we’re #1 in traffic” or “commuters waste 3 days per year in traffic” or whatever. When his report is about to come out, he goes on a press blitz, and hundreds of news outlets write up his non-peer-reviewed study (543, at last count via Google News).

Some of our local reporters just packaged Lomax’s quotes and numbers into an unquestioning bundle of clickbait. Others took a moment to ask a few more questions or even wrote critical articles. Here’s how they stacked up.

The “not fooled for a minute” crowd

  • WAMU. Martin di Caro, one of the region’s best transportation reporters, focused his story around criticisms of the study, especially the Coalition for Smarter Growth’s. Di Caro also actually asked study author Tim Lomax about the critiques.

    One criticism has been that the study’s summary talks about delay to residents, when really it’s just about car commuters. Lomax acknowledged that he doesn’t have good data on transit, bicycling, or walking, but argues it’s unfair to criticize the study for leaving pieces out even though Lomax spins his own data into sensational statements and suggests policy conclusions.

  • WTOP. Ari Ashe, who was around the last time this came up and apparently remembers the controversy, skipped the bandwagon (though WTOP ran the Associated Press’s press-release-rewrite version) and instead wrote a good story with CSG’s rebuttal and comments by Falls Church Vice Mayor Dave Snyder.

The “used some actual shoe leather” crowd

  • NBC4. While the lead-in by the anchor sensationalizes the “we’re #1 in traffic!!!!!” angle, Tom Sherwood mostly uses this story as an opportunity to talk to people around the region, including Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, about solutions that include transit, bicycling, and more as well as roads. He also interviewed me. The CSG press release came out a little later, and the NBC4 web version of the story now includes quotes from that as well.

The “second draft is the best” crowd

  • Washingtonian 2.0. Posted just after this article initially went live, Ben Freed’s take criticizes the report and also points out weak spots in what Tim Lomax told Martin di Caro. Freed’s article also possibly has the best headline of the bunch: “Driving in Washington Is Bad. So Is That Study That Says How Bad It Is.”

The “phoned it in” crowd

  • WUSA9: USA Today’s national article was pretty terrible. And USA Today appears first on the byline for WUSA9’s article. Lomax speaks, these outlets transcribe.

  • Washingtonian 1.0. The writing is clever — 82 hours is enough time to watch Orange Is the New Black twice. Cute, if only it were based on valid data. Update: Washingtonian has followed up with another article, above.

  • Washington City Paper. We miss you, Aaron Wiener. The lack of a regular Housing Complex reporter covering planning and transportation is evident in the City Paper’s unremarkable summary of the report.

    It’s most disappointing because this is our alt-weekly that often finds an irreverent take on issues, questions conventional wisdom, and looks at the world through the city dweller’s lens. I don’t expect better from WUSA9, but do from these great folks who do so much excellent reporting (like the fantastic exposé on Metro’s PR-spin-efforts after the January smoke death incident).

    Also, the City Paper’s headline for the TTI study, “D.C. Most Congested U.S. City for Drivers, Report Finds,” commits the cardinal sin of conflating DC with the whole region; as Tom Sherwood noted, the traffic analysis is about the whole region, not the District itself.

The “fool me twice” crowd

  • Washington Post. Ashley Halsey III has seen this story before. In fact, he’s written it three times before, in 2009, 2011, and 2013.

    Halsey has had ample time to see the criticisms that people have leveled at the study every time it comes out. He even quoted more other people for context in 2009 and 2011, but stopped in 2013, and this year’s article again simply recited Lomax’s claims with no critical eye at all.

The “are there even humans here?” crowd

  • Fauquier Times. This “news source” appears in Google News, but its article on the issue is just a straight-up reprint of the AAA Mid-Atlantic press release (which, not surprisingly, argues that the solution to the traffic reported in the study is spending more money on roads).

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Tagged: aaa, press, roads, traffic

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.