WCBS/880 AM's demise creates another pothole in future of traffic reporting

It was 5:18 p.m. and the Long Island Expressway was “just getting worse and worse,” Jim Feldman, the WCBS/880 AM afternoon traffic reporter, told his radio audience for not quite the last time one night this week.

He laid out the options, which were not great — “You do have the Grand Central as an alternate, but that’s kind of slowed, too” — before turning to some ugliness on the Bruckner. He closed his spot in a brisk 46 seconds. Then it was on to weather and back to news.

When WCBS signs off at the end of August after a nearly 60-year run, to be replaced at the 880 frequency by ESPN, its traffic reporting will end too, and a venerable if unsung news beat in a city with what is empirically some of the worst traffic in the world will take a hit.

Yes, there are smartphone navigation apps that drivers have been using for years, and reporting will continue on WCBS' sister station, 1010 WINS. It will continue, too, on other local news broadcasts. But most of them do not match the ceaselessly updating 10-minute tempo by which WCBS and WINS mark their days.

Some would argue that metro region drivers need help now more than ever. In 2023, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, there were more than 335 million crossings on the seven bridges and two tunnels operated by the agency, the most in history. In April this year, the last month for which statistics were available, there were 927,912 crossings every weekday, on average, and 904,357 on weekend days. According to Inrix, a data collector, drivers in New York City lost 101 hours of their lives last year to delays, the worst rate of congestion of any city surveyed in the world.

“Traffic has always been bad, but it’s worse now than it’s ever been,” said Samuel Schwartz, a transportation engineer also known as Gridlock Sam. “It’s moving in Midtown at less than 5 miles per hour," he said. That is slower than a bicyclist, or a determined walker, or somebody riding a horse. The streets are clogged in part because of a pandemic-era increase in truck traffic that has yet to recede, said Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner.

Information about big traffic delays

Schwartz is also a former cabbie, and said WCBS had been a mainstay for professional drivers since he drove in the late 60s and early 70s. Drivers listened, he said, because “you want to get the fastest information on a paralyzing incident, not your average daily traffic.” Drivers, both professional and commuter, who grew up with radio traffic reporting “still like to hear the traffic reports and get the warnings, but I suspect less so for many of the younger drivers” using apps, he said.

Traffic reporters have responded to the app threat by playing to their strengths, said Fred Bennett, senior vice president for analytics and networks at Audacy, the broadcasting giant that owns WCBS and WINS. Unlike outlets that buy their traffic content, Audacy does all of its own traffic reporting in New York City, the biggest market in the country, with 16.6 million listeners. In July in the city, WCBS reached 1.7% of listeners, WINS 4.3%; on Long Island, WCBS reached 2.3%, WINS 5%, according to Nielsen ratings published at Radio Online, an industry website.

Audacy’s traffic reporters use an array of reporting tools, including traffic cameras, police scanners, sources in government and law enforcement and tips from listeners, Bennett said.

“We lean in on the why,” he said. An app may show a crash on the LIE, he said, but a good radio report will add nuance: “a two-car accident may quickly get cleared up with all lanes open, but if a tractor trailer overturns, they’ll be out there for several hours and they’re going to tie up that road.”

The reports air more frequently now than in the past and the format has evolved from a “laundry list” of roads and conditions to “cover the stories in traffic that are impacting the most people right now,” he said. When the stories succeed, they do something the apps can’t: “We do provide empathy for that person stuck out there,” Bennett said, slipping into the voice of a reporter describing a hypothetical backup. “ ‘You’re not going to believe this, it’s been out there all morning, why is this taking so long?’ We try and be the mouthpiece of the commuter.”

Being a 'friend' to listeners

Tairy Ynoa, traffic reporter and meteorologist for Telemundo 47, likened her role to that of a trusted friend for her early-morning audience of “people who wake up at the same time every day” and need to know changes in commuting patterns before leaving home. Her reporting tools include a helicopter camera. “When we’re reporting on an accident such as a jackknifed tractor trailer, we can show the magnitude of the incident” in a way few traffic cameras can, she said.

Some veterans said the end of WCBS pointed to broader trouble for the economic viability of traffic reporting, at least on the radio.

Bernie Wagenblast, editor of the Transportation Communications Newsletter — she also provides the voice for some of the city subway system's recorded announcements and formerly reported for Shadow Traffic, a company that provided traffic information to broadcasters — said that not only had radio lost its monopoly on drivers over the last 15 years, but “the radio audience has grayed. … Younger people are not listening to radio, whether it’s music or news or anything else in the same way my generation listened to radio. How do you stop the loss and increase listeners? People smarter than I am have not come up with an answer.”

Rob Langer, news director for The Joy FM, a Sarasota, Florida-based Christian Contemporary station who covered Nassau County traffic for WALK/97.5 FM from 1990 to 2000, said there were once as many as 40 traffic reporters who were part of news teams at broadcast outlets in the New York metro area. That number is now “down to a handful,” he said, and listeners may not realize that some of the reporters delivering their traffic news are doing so for multiple markets and may not be based locally.

“That’s the way the radio business has gone,” he said. “Heaven forbid there’s an emergency locally. Who are you going to turn to?”

Losing experts 'who know the city better than anybody'

Some on the beat said the demise of WCBS, which will disrupt the careers of reporters with decades of experience, was dispiriting. NY1’s Jamie Stelter, a traffic reporter since 2003, said she knew some of them and that their audience was about to lose experts “who know the city better than anybody.” After years of corporate retrenchment across the news industry, it was unsettling to see another newsroom close, she said. “Anyone who looks around is a little nervous.”

But Stelter, like Bennett, said she saw a grander mission, and maybe some job security, in traffic reporting done well.

“Traffic is people, people moving around the city. Waze or Maps might tell you there’s a 17-minute wait to the [George Washington Bridge] ... They don’t tell you how frustrated people might be. That ramp over there has been under construction going on over seven years, or there’s a big train delay and people got stuck on the train, the panic in that moment and all the things happening in and around the city that may have led to that moment," she said. "There is community in traffic reporting that you don’t get from Google and Waze.”