A lot has changed since research scientist Sue Fish began commuting from Salisbury to the Boston area in 1977. Her hairstyles, for sure. But so has the traffic.“The volume of traffic is unbelievable. It's probably doubled since then,” she said. Fish makes the punishing ride in and out of Cambridge five days a week. The 45-mile ride eats up 1 1/2 to 2 hours each way.“Oftentimes I'll call home and my husband will say where are you? And I say it's taken me an hour and I haven't even got to (Interstate) 93 yet,” she said. “It's not like just some days, it's like every day there's traffic.” Traffic congestion is certainly no revelation to anyone spending time on our roads, but a look data and research gives some clues to how we got to the current state of congestion.Price of successOver the last 50 years, the state’s population has soared 23 percent to 6.9 million people. Much of that growth is concentrated in the eastern part of the state, according to the UMass Donahue Institute.More people means more vehicles: Massachusetts has 1 million more of them registered than in 2010, according to Registry of Motor Vehicle records.And there are more jobs for people to get to. The state added 350,000 people and 435,000 jobs in that same time period, mostly in the Boston area, according to the Donahue Institute.“We've added these jobs and people but we have not added commensurate roadway capacity,” said Branner Stewart, senior research manager at the Donahue Institute, who has studied the economic impact of traffic congestion. “Growth will moderate, and we'll also miss perhaps some economic opportunities that would have come our way had we had the transportation capacity to bring in the workers,” he said.Spending 80+ hours per year stuck in trafficAt the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s highway operations center, engineers monitor more than 1,000 cameras across the state to try and keep the traffic moving.“(Interstates) 93, 95, the Turnpike, Route 1, 1A. Those are roadways where we see as the major hot spots approaching the city,” said MassDOT highway administrator Jonathan Gulliver. “There are some roadways where they do not hit a stage that anybody would call uncongested except for in the middle of the night.”But there’s only so much engineers can do to keep the traffic moving. When the roads are filled to capacity, one seemingly small "insult,” in the lingo of the state, like a crash or a construction zone, can make an already bad commute unbearable.“One small incident that closes a lane or even slows it down is going to really gum up the whole system,” Gulliver said.Traffic congestion was the focus of a major study released this August by MassDOT. A key finding was that not only have commutes become longer, but the variability of commutes has become a significantly aggravating factor. On top of that, the morning and evening rush hours are starting earlier and lasting longer.Just how much worse our congestion has become is made clear by statistics calculated by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute since the 1980s using a variety of measurements.In 1982, the average Boston-area driver spent 31 hours a year stuck in traffic. By 2017, that number grew to 80 hours a year – the equivalent of two full work weeks sitting in traffic.Unpredictable traffic, unpredictable impacts Time in traffic goes even higher if driving is part of your job. It’s changed the way George Washington Toma TV and Appliance in Weymouth has done business, according to owner George A. Toma.“It's definitely getting worse. And I think the biggest issue is the unpredictability. There's no rhyme or reason to traffic anymore. I used to be able to go into Boston between 10 and 2 and be able to get in and out kind of sort of,” he said.The variability is means his technicians and delivery drivers are missing appointments more and more often.“(Are) Your customers understanding about it?” 5 Investigates’ Mike Beaudet asked him.“Ninety-nine percent of them (are)," he said. "You take a day off of work. You don't want to spend eight hours waiting for the appliance guy. We tell you we're coming in the morning. You make plans in the afternoon or go back to work or whatever it is. And now you're two hours into that and you've lost a whole day.”And if his own workers are late because of traffic, it has a ripple effect on the whole day’s work.“If you're a delivery guy or a service guy, there's nobody to fill your hole. So if you're not here then that customer has to wait. So you're late for that first stop and then the rest of the day is really screwed up,” he said.It's also tough for customers when your business is located in the epicenter of a traffic jam, including patients at Mass General Hospital.Dr. Tim Wilens, chief of pediatric psychiatry and addiction medicine, has seen the impact on congestion throughout his clinic.“On certain given days I would estimate that a quarter of my patients are running late,” he said. “Many patients will call from the road saying, ‘You know, we got stuck because of an accident or because of a jam-up,’ and they have no understanding of why there's a jam-up, and they may have no understanding of why there's a jam-up.”Wilens has been seeing patients for almost 30 years in Boston, and he, too, has seen traffic’s impact grow.“We have a lot more late patients because of traffic congestion,” he said. “And that seems to be increasing. And I would say in particular over the past year or so it really seems to be more problematic than I've noticed previously.” Fish, the commuter from Salisbury, took us along for one of her drives home. She left Kendall Square at 4:30 p.m. on a Monday. An hour-and-a-half later, she pulled into her driveway.“This a typical Monday commute," she said. "It was traffic, but it moved. And that's all you can ask for."And soon enough she, along with hundreds of thousands of other commuters, will be back at it, like it or not, facing whatever comes their way on our roads.“I learned to be patient,” she said. “You have to be.”