Yes, you really are spending a week of your life stuck in Tacoma traffic every year

Tacoma drivers spent an average of 41 hours stuck in traffic in 2017 making the city the 18th worst in North America for congestion.

That’s according to a new study by Kirkland-based Inrix. The company specializes in transportation analytics.

The cost for each driver: $1,485. Tacoma as a whole lost $2.5 billion to congestion. Those figures are based on the driver’s wasted time, additional fuel costs and the increased cost of transporting goods and providing services that businesses face.

Number one on the list worldwide for lousy traffic was Los Angeles (Tacoma came in at 83) where drivers are bumper to bumper for 102 hours per year.

Seattle came in at nine on the North America chart with drivers wasting 55 hours in stalled traffic.

Inrix used 500 terabytes of data from 300 million different sources to compile the scorecard, it said. It looked at 1,360 cities in 38 countries.

“It confirms, as previous INRIX Traffic Scorecards have found, that congestion is a significant and growing burden on our cities,” the authors said.

This story was originally published February 6, 2018 at 3:37 PM with the headline "Yes, you really are spending a week of your life stuck in Tacoma traffic every year."