No one has it worse than I-4 commuters, concludes a respected analytics firm, citing data showing delays there are longer than in New York, Los Angeles or — you name it.
The nearly 12-mile stretch of I-4 in Orange and Osceola Counties between State Road 528 and State Road 429 jumped to the top spot among the most congested roads in the country in 2023, up from 10th the year before, according to INRIX’s newly released Global Traffic Scorecard. As of 5:30 a.m. Thursday, it took 40 minutes to drive that grueling stretch of highway, according to Google Maps.
The congestion on I-4 even surpassed the infamous delays on I-5 in Los Angeles, surprising INRIX’s Bob Pishue. He attributed Central Florida’s woes to the varying impact of remote work. Traffic experts thought the return to the office after the pandemic would increase traffic in the nation’s largest cities and lower the I-4’s rankings, but the opposite happened.
“Before COVID-19, the corridors weren’t really changing much,” Pishue said of the rankings. Now “we’re seeing patterns where traffic builds up in the middle of the day… and now it’s just a gradual increase and it’s building at even higher volumes… so it’s just piling on top of each other.”
I-4 performs poorly in that scenario because tourist traffic lasts all day and because so much construction has occurred in recent years, impeding traffic flow, he said.
With billion-dollar projects in the works, such as I-4 Beyond The Ultimate and Moving Florida Forward, Pishue expects I-4 to remain in the top ten for some time to come.
Drivers across Central Florida are trying to relieve pressure on I-4 with alternate routes, such as extending SunRail to the airport and the Orange County Convention Center and building a Brightline to Tampa.
“We must continue to expand mobility options in our region and across our state so that our residents and visitors are not solely dependent on roads,” Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said in a statement. “Not everyone will use every public transportation option, but our transportation network must ensure equal access for all by expanding multimodal choices for residents and visitors.”
INRIX develops its rankings by estimating the time the average driver loses due to delays on individual routes. I-4 drivers will spend an additional 124 hours and 31 minutes per day in traffic in 2023, on top of their average commute time, the company’s data shows.
Those drivers are often service workers who live in Osceola County and rely on I-4 to work at the theme parks that also line the now-infamous road.
Tawny Olore, Osceola’s deputy district manager, said it’s a brutal situation.
“Things are a little cheaper in Osceola, so there’s a tremendous amount of staff coming here and they all have to get on I-4,” Olore said.
But relief is coming, and sooner than initially expected.
Last year, the Legislature spent $4 billion on the state’s Moving Florida Forward project — which would see construction begin in late 2024 on a section from Champions Gate to Osceola Parkway on I-4.
On Thursday, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that a project to add additional lanes to I-4 between State Road 417 and US 27 would end in 2025, sooner than the 2030 date ever expected.
“This is going to save enormous amounts of hours of waiting in traffic over the next 10 to 15 years, compared to what would have happened if we hadn’t put our foot on the gas,” DeSantis said. “It’s one thing to have rush hour traffic … but I mean, you can go at any time of day and you can have a backup … and part of that is there’s a lot of visitors and attractions.”
Meanwhile, Osceola is focused on widening state roads that connect to I-4. One major project: widening Old Lake Wilson Road, with construction set to begin in 2027.
“So when I-4 opens up and we remove that bottleneck, they won’t run into another bottleneck,” Olore said.
