The thing about traffic is that while you're in it, it's a very immediate annoyance. You have somewhere to be, you just want to get home after a long day at work, you have to pee really badly -- whatever. That immediacy makes it easy to lose track of just how much of an impact on you it actually has in the grand scheme of things.
For example, a company called Inrix put together a traffic survey that looked at not only how much time people spent in traffic in a given city, but how much that time cost them. So, if you live in Boston -- America's most congested city for the second year in a row -- you lost 149 hours of your life to traffic in the last year. If you live and drive in Chicago or Philadelphia, things aren't much better at 145 and 142 hours, respectively.
