TomTom says that America's most congested cities are...
TomTom says that America's most congested cities are...
If you live in a major metropolitan area, you know that traffic snarls are a way of life. You can either rail at the heavens as you from Point A to Point B, or you can close your eyes (only at a standstill, please) and think of England. Well, maybe not London, where traffic is terrible, but someplace in the country would be fine.
Of course
, some spots are worse than others for traffic congestion, and to prove it, TomTom has released detailed rankings for cities around the globe. To create those rankings, TomTom employed the same gadgets that provide travel information to TomTom's well-known in-dash and dashtop devices, collecting anonymous statistics on where and when traffic flow is heaviest, and how long drivers sit on congested roads.
Though 's rankings are slightly different from others we've seen (like those from Google Maps ), there aren't any major surprises. As in similar studies , coastal cities dominate TomTom's most-congested list, with the West Coast faring much worse than the East.
And so, without further ado, this year's most congested cities are:
1. Los Angeles, CA
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Honolulu, HI
4. Seattle, WA
5. San Jose, CA
6. Washington, DC
7. New York, NY
8. Portland, OR
9. Boston, MA
10. Chicago, IL
On average,TomTom says that motorists around the globe spend 64 hours stuck in trafficeach year, or about eight eight-hour work days. In Los Angeles, that figure jumps to a whopping 92 hours, or 11.5 work days.
However, Los Angeles isn't the worst city for traffic. In the western hemisphere alone, LA doesn't even a bronze medal, coming in fourth behind Sao Paolo, Mexico City, and the #1, Rio de Janeiro.
In fact, during peak travel times in Rio, 59 minutes of every hour are lost to traffic. In other words, motorists spend one hour traveling the same distance that would take them one minute if the roads were clear. Residents lose 114 hours ever year to traffic congestion.
LA looks pretty good by comparison: there, just waste 39 minutes per hour on traffic.
Want to see how your city of over 800,000 stacks up? You can check TomTom's full western hemisphere here ().
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These findings don't surprise me.
As a resident of the Seattle area, I think the traffic problems here are mostly engineering flaws with the highway systems coupled with people not being as good a drivers as they think they are. Plus, the weather definitely makes people drive funny (slow when it's cloudy/rainy and crazy when it's sunny).
I know that just about every exit here is supposedly from 60 MPH in about 100ft (a third of a football field) you do at least a 60deg turn and in some cases 90deg. This makes merging hard, maintaining speed impossible, and results in backups on the main artery instead of effective slowing in an appropriate turn lane.
Then the arterial merge system is also difficult because most people dont understand the concept of merging in the first place. They meter the ramps during peak hours which helps with the stupidity, but you still get the people who full stop on the merge resulting in people riding the shoulder and cutting over.
The last thing that really affects it is that there are very few main arterials. Most cities have very few main's as well, but Seattle's area of arterials is very small in square mileage (so small they've stacked the express lanes and main lanes on top of each other going through downtown, and stacked the highway arterial over surface streets on the water front. The primary and secondary arterial meet end to end in only ~20 miles and the highway arterial is lighted because it's a main street and not really a highway.
The secondary arterial that runs outside the city is threaded through several other main metropolises and it meets at the top and bottom of the lake back with the main arterial in a very badly designed merging of the highways at both ends. This literally makes the oval around the lake constricted to the point that traffic is contained within a very small square mileage. I would never want to truck through here if I drove truck... there are so few options.
Southbound (toward the city) when I drive home northbound (out of the city) EVERY DAY is practically full stop because they go from four lanes, to three and bottleneck... then about 0.5 mile later back to four lanes.
Whoever designed the roads out here should be shot.