Trucking bottlenecks cost U.S. billions — and a Nashville freeway is one of the worst

Americans are paying dearly for traffic congestion along U.S. highways — to the tune of a record-high $108.8 billion nationally — and one Nashville interchange landed in the top five on a list of the worst trucking bottlenecks in the country.
That's according to the American Transportation Research Institute, a nonprofit focused on the trucking industry's role in a safe and efficient transportation system. Last week, the institute released its annual report of the nation's top 100 truck bottlenecks for 2025, compiled using a database of freight truck GPS data.
'Delays inflicted on truckers by congestion are the equivalent of 436,000 drivers sitting idle for an entire year,' the institute's president and chief operating officer, Rebecca Brewster, said in a news release announcing the report. 'These metrics are getting worse, but the good news is that states do not need to accept the status quo.'
In the same release, the president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations, Chris Spear, said these bottlenecks 'choke our supply chains' and add almost $109 billion annually to the cost of transporting goods — on top of impacting the quality of life for other motorists who rely on the national highway system for their daily commute.
In Tennessee, former President Joe Biden's Infrastructure and Jobs Act provided a few billion dollars of investment in highway infrastructure after its passage in 2021, but the state's unmet need for the five-year period between June 2023 and June 2028 has ballooned to nearly $38.5 billion according to the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations.
The combined Interstate 24/40 heading east in Nashville where it meets I-440 lands at fifth on that list, up five spots from 2024. According to the institute, trucks travel along that roadway at an average speed of just 38.1 miles per hour and 27.2 miles per hour on average during peak traffic.
That's not the only Nashville roadway to make the list.
The next highest at 16th is where I-40 and I-65, heading east, converge on the west side of downtown. The split of I-65 and I-24 several miles north of downtown clocks in at 53rd.
Those Nashville roadways are part of a list of seven truck bottlenecks throughout Tennessee that cracked the top 100. Four other highway interchanges, two each in Chattanooga and Knoxville, made the list between the 28th and 68th spots.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville has one of worst truck bottlenecks in the U.S. See where

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