Ryan throws down the chart gauntlet in his post, Where the Congestion Grows Like Kudzu:

Real Time Economics helpfully reprints a chart from TTI’s urban mobility report which looks at hours wasted per traveler by metropolitan area. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. For a Washingtonian, the thing that’s likely to stick out is the fact that Washington is second in the country in hours wasted per traveler, and sustained the largest increase in wasted hours between 1982 and 2007.
One representation I’d love to see, should someone have the time to put a chart together, is hours wasted per traveler versus metropolitan population. The average traveler in the New York metro area faces 44 hours wasted per year, for instance, while the average traveler in Los Angeles loses 70 hours per year to congestion, even though New York’s metropolitan population is much, much larger than LA’s.

Please look no further: Driving Congestion v Population:

I took data from the Texas Transportation Institute report and matched it with some Metropolitan Statistical Area population data I had laying around when I Compared NYC & Washington DC – Area, Population, Density & Average Income. I was lazy and didn’t find the Texas Transportation Institute report to verify that they were using MSA’s as their population boundaries, but I assume that’s what they did.
Maybe my next chart will be a moving average of a city’s population-to-congestion analysis to see if there is anyway to find a consistent drift. My guess there will be a correlation between population and hours wasted (but that is a pretty safe assumption).
And don’t miss, Washington DC Congestion v Population Over Time:

Ball is in your court, Mr. Avent.