And the most congested city in the world is...
Istanbul is no longer the city with the world’s worst traffic congestion, according to the TomTom Traffic annual index.
|||Amsterdam, the Netherlands - The big news in TomTom’s annual Traffic Index report, detailing the cities around the world with the most traffic congestion, is that Istanbul has been knocked off the top spot by Mexico City.
Drivers in the Mexican capital can expect to spend on average 59 percent extra travel time stuck in traffic any time of the day, and up to 103 percent (more than double!) in the evening peak periods, compared to a theoretical “free flow” or uncongested situation.
That adds up to an average of 219 hours of extra travel time a year.
Next in the rankings are Bangkok (57 percent), Istanbul (50 percent), Rio de Janeiro (47 percent) and Moscow (44 percent), making up the top five most congested cities in the world. The only two African cities in the top 100 are Cape Town (47th on the list at 30 percent, one percent up from 2014) and Johannesburg (77th on the list at 27 percent, also one percent up from 2014).
However, given that TomTom has no data for cities on the African continent other than in South Africa, these figures may not be representative in an African context.
Using data from 2015, the TomTom Traffic Index, now in its fifth year - looks at the traffic congestion situation in 295 cities in 38 countries on six continents - from Rome to Rio, Singapore to San Francisco. TomTom works with 14 trillion data points that have been accumulated over eight years.
Looking at TomTom’s historical data, it’s clear that traffic congestion is up by 13 percent globally since 2008, but there are surprising differences between the continents. While North America’s traffic congestion has increased by 17percent, Europe has gone up by only two percentage points.
TomTom Traffic vice-president Ralf-Peter Schaefer suggested that this pointed to economic growth in North America, and a near-recession in Europe, heavily influenced by southern European countries such as Italy (-7 percent) and Spain (-13 percent) where there has been a marked drop in traffic congestion over the past eight years.
“The TomTom Traffic Index is released every year,” Schaefer said, “to help drivers, cities and transport planners to understand traffic congestion trends but, most importantly, how to improve congestion globally.
“We really want everybody to think about how they can lower the amount of time they waste in traffic every day - and to realise that we all need to play a part. If even just five percent of us changed our travel plans, we’d improve travel times on our major highways by up to thirty per cent.”
THE FIVE MOST CONGESTED CITIES GLOBALLY IN 2015:
Mexico City - 59 percent
Bangkok - 57 percent
Istanbul - 50 percent
Rio De Janeiro - 47 percent
Moscow - 44 percent
THE FIVE MOST CONGESTED CITIES IN NORTH AMERICA:
Mexico City - 59 percent
Los Angeles - 41 percent
San Francisco - 36 percent
Vancouver - 34 percent
New York - 33 percent
THE FIVE MOST CONGESTED CITIES IN EUROPE:
Moscow - 44 percent
Bucharest - 43 percent
Saint Petersburg - 40 percent
Warsaw - 38 percent
Rome - 38 percent
AFP