NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) — New York City has the slowest car travel among U.S. cities, according to a new analysis. In the last year, drivers lost an average of 94 hours from traffic.
The average time it took to drive 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), a distance roughly equivalent to the perimeter of Central Park, in the middle of New York City last year was 31 minutes and 6 seconds, according to a traffic index compiled by Amsterdam-based geolocation technology specialist TomTom. The Big Apple, which became the first city in the US to institute congestion pricing this week, is working to reduce gridlock, pollution and carbon emissions by charging a $9 toll for drivers entering parts of Manhattan during peak hours.
People from the top 10 US cities with the longest travel times lost an average of 60.6 hours commuting over peak hours by car last year.
Worldwide, cities in Latin America and India topped the list for traffic. Barranquilla, the city that holds Colombia’s largest port along the Caribbean Sea, had the slowest travel speeds both in the city center and metropolitan area. Its metro area also ranked seventh on global congestion.
Gunnar Berghäuser, TomTom traffic expert and data scientist, didn’t have an explanation for that city’s first-place spot. But he did notice that cities with bottlenecks like bridges or mountain roads have higher rates of congestion.
India’s Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune came within the top five for city center traffic; London landed in fifth place. Both Kolkata and Pune have long rivers running through them with some bridges that experience minor to major delays, according to TomTom’s live traffic maps for the cities. On average, London drivers lost 113 hours driving during rush hour last year.
TomTom, which focuses on maps and navigation technology, used GPS data from navigation devices and applications to evaluate the average travel speed and congestion level in 500 cities across 62 countries. The study used a representative sample spanning 737 billion km (458 billion miles) to better understand traffic patterns within cities and their metropolitan areas through 2024.
The researchers gave cities one ranking based on travel speed and another on “congestion” — a metric that discounts other factors that slow drivers down like infrastructure and speed limits. They also gave each place a separate score for their city center and the entire metropolitan area.
On congestion alone, Mexico City’s center ranked worst. The megacity also had some of the world’s slowest traffic, at 31 minutes and 53 seconds per 10 kilometers.
Globally, New York City’s center ranked 25th for slowest travel speed. But the city does not score nearly as low on pure “congestion:” There, it’s 222nd out of 500 cities. London has a similar disparity between its two scores. Although it has some of the world’s slowest traffic, its car congestion is far from the worst at 150th. These disparities happen because infrastructure in cities like New York and London make it difficult to get around quickly in a car regardless of traffic, said Ralf-Peter Schäfer, TomTom’s vice president of product management traffic, travel and routing. Even without traffic, drivers in these cities would take longer to cover 10 kilometers than a driver in a traffic-free Mexico City, where car congestion is mostly responsible for slow travel.
To encourage faster alternative means of travel, New York City plans to invest the revenue from its new congestion pricing policy in infrastructure for improved public transit and biking. London has had a congestion pricing policy since 2003.
The TomTom Traffic Index looks at other metrics, too, including the average hours spent driving between 6 and 10 kilometers twice a day during rush hour. The analysis even provides details about hourly speed and congestion levels in each city throughout the day and includes a map so users can see where traffic is concentrated and when.
“This was the outstanding part of this release: building a tool that allows us really to look into details in cities locally, but also in time,” said Berghäuser.