A steady line of cars and trucks meandered through Bar Harbor on Wednesday morning as Gary Hutchinson and seven of his family members climbed out of their rented red minivan and onto Cottage Street.

The narrow thoroughfare was bustling with cars and people, but the West Coast tourists said they had yet to encounter any traffic problems as they rode along Route 3 toward their vacation destination.

A report released June 30 by AAA, the American Highway Users Alliance and The Road Information Program ranked Route 3 from Ellsworth to Acadia National Park as the 20th-worst traffic bottleneck in the country for summer vacationers.

According to the researchers, the road that connects the mainland to Mount Desert Island is among the top 25 most congested tourist destinations in the nation.

That classification left some local officials and summer visitors scratching their heads.

“What traffic?” Hutchinson asked. “We’re from Northern California. This is beautiful compared to what we’re used to.”

Marc Laflamme of Sherbrooke, Quebec, said he endured some traffic between Ellsworth and Bar Harbor when he arrived in town July 3.

“We saw that,” he said. “It’s normal. I think it’s a tourist place, and we think it’s normal.”

Micki Sumpter and Costas Christ, executive directors of the Ellsworth and Bar Harbor chambers of commerce, were surprised to hear the area has been ranked nationally as a bottleneck.

“I think they got it wrong,” Christ said. “Statistics and this type of thing are always something to take a second look at.”

The Bar Harbor Chamber has received no complaints from disgruntled motorists, he said.

“We have not had one person come into this office that I know of who came in and said the traffic is terrible,” said Christ, who commutes to Bar Harbor from Brooksville. “I drive it all through the summer, and I don’t see a crisis.”

Sumpter expressed concern that the route’s status on the list might scare some tourists away but also acknowledged that it validates some of the road work being done in and around Ellsworth.

“The [Ellsworth] Chamber and the city have been working on it,” she said. “It verifies to us that what we are doing out there is correct, but I do not agree totally that we are one of the top traffic bottlenecks.”

Others, such as Ellsworth City Manager Stephen Gunty, were less surprised. He said a steady stream of cars moving through the city is “a good problem” because it supports local businesses, but congestion is a regional issue that should be addressed by state and federal transportation officials.

Rich Margiotta, the traffic engineer who analyzed data for the bottlenecks survey, said researchers began their work last February by asking state transportation departments to list their biggest traffic concerns. They heard back from 38 states, including Maine.

Besides the road to Acadia, Margiotta said, U.S. Route 1 in Hancock County, Route 1 in Ogunquit and state Route 302 near Naples and Sebago Lake were on Maine officials’ “worst” list.

“We looked at the data for all these places, and the only one that bubbled to the top was Route 3,” Margiotta said Thursday during a telephone interview from his home in Knoxville, Tenn., where he telecommutes for Boston-based Cambridge Systematics.

His figures show 14,400 vehicles travel Route 3 from Ellsworth to Mount Desert Island on a summer weekend day. That translates to 1.3 million cars over 13 weeks of summer. The fact that Route 3 is a two-lane road also put Acadia on the list.

The purpose of the report, he said, was to draw attention to the issue of congestion as a whole, not to single out any individual locations.

“[It was] not to highlight that these areas are terrible but to highlight that this is a growing problem,” he said. “It is not just in urban areas. It is creeping into the rural. In the future, congestion is going to be a problem affecting not just metropolitan areas.”

Margiotta said Acadia’s traffic counts were enough to put the area on the list but are minor in comparison to those of places near the top of the roster, such as the Oregon coast or Cape Cod. “It’s an order of magnitude,” he said.

The bottleneck status came as no shock to Fred Michaud, planner at the state Department of Transportation.

“Frankly, I was surprised that there weren’t a couple more Maine towns” on the list, he said, mentioning Camden, Rockland and Freeport.

DOT figures show an average of 20,000 vehicles use Route 3 every day. Officials say changes are under way that will make it easier for the area to accommodate that much traffic.

Michaud noted the long-term project to widen High Street in Ellsworth and the Ellsworth City Council’s recent decision to reroute cars one way up Route 3 in the so-called Myrick Triangle at the top of Beckwith Hill. Also, DOT is considering how to fix the intersection of Routes 3 and 198, where drivers cross over onto the island.

Summer visitors come to the area for its natural beauty and quaint villages, Michaud said, and grandiose infrastructure improvements may not be appropriate for alleviating any gridlock.

“A four-lane road through Bar Harbor may not be what people are looking for,” he said.

As AAA released its report, some wondered why places such as Manhattan and Orlando, Fla., didn’t make the cut.

Margiotta said researchers excluded vacation destinations in urban areas because it was too difficult to differentiate between tourism traffic and daily commuter traffic.

Sumpter said that exclusion is unfair, partly because hundreds of employees of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor use Route 3 every day.

Janice Von Brook of Hampden is among them; she carpools to the lab. She said the slowest part of the trip is actually the construction zone on Route 1A north of Ellsworth.

“It slows you down greatly,” she said. “For me, personally, I can’t say it’s been a difficulty. On the other hand, if I were trying to get to a doctor’s appointment, I’d probably be frantic.”

Despite local road work and traffic levels, visitors this week said their experiences driving to Bar Harbor were positive compared with more urban stops on their vacation itineraries.

“We didn’t have any problems at all,” said Robin Barbour of Virginia Beach, Va. “Our drive in was great. There was some construction, but everybody’s been so kind and gracious here. We just came from New York City – talk about bottlenecks.”