ARLINGTON, Va. — According to a report released Tuesday, the worst-in-the-nation congestion of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area causes the trucking industry to lose $3 billion a year in the Garden State alone, accounting for nearly 5 percent of congestion costs nationwide.

Even given the notorious Jersey bottlenecks like the Routes 95/4 approach to the George Washington Bridge, New Jersey ranked only fifth in the study done by the American Transportation Research Institute, a division of the American Trucking Association, as reported by NJ.com. New York was fourth, at $3.9 billion lost by truckers in the year 2015; Florida led all states at $5.3 billion.

Across the country, truck drivers lost $63.4 billion in 2015 while stuck in a combined 996 million hours of traffic on major U.S. roads. That would be the equivalent of 362,000 drivers sitting in their individual cars and not moving for an entire year, the report said.

Even though several factors in New Jersey are helping to improve the situation — such as the recent 23-cent-per-gallon hike in the gas tax and the widening of the New Jersey Turnpike past Exit 6 — the lost costs represent not just wasted time, according to the report, but wasted fuel, shipping complications, and wear-and-tear on the trucks themselves.

More From WPG Talk Radio 95.5 FM