America’s Most Traffic-Congested Cities Are Ranked in This New Study
Los Angeles, California
Worldwide, only Los Angeles cracked the top 10 when it comes to cities with the worst roadway delays.
Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York were the most traffic-jammed cities in the U.S. last year, according to a new study.
The annually published traffic index was released Tuesday by TomTom, a Dutch company with a business line that includes in-car navigation products and services. The index assigns cities around the world a congestion ranking. Each ranking is based on the estimated percent increase in travel time in a place due to traffic delays.
So, for instance, the congestion level in L.A., the nation’s most congested city, was 41 percent, according to the study. This means travel times were 41 percent longer there than they would have been if roads were clear of traffic. For San Francisco, which checked in at No. 2 among U.S. cities, the congestion level was 36 percent. For New York, in third place, it was 33 percent. Seattle and San Jose rounded out the index’s top five cities in the U.S.
TomTom noted in a statement that, for drivers in Southern California, “traffic jams added up to 164 hours of extra travel time per year—almost a full week stuck in their cars.”
In addition to ranking fourth overall for congestion in the nation, Seattle also had the second worst delays during the evening rush hour peak, beat out only by L.A. The City of Angels also topped the list of U.S. cities with the worst morning delays, followed by San Jose.
Among the least congested cities in the nation: Knoxville, Tennessee, Dayton, Ohio, and the Omaha-Council Bluffs metropolitan region on the Nebraska-Iowa state border.
The index was based on data from 2015 for 295 major cities in 38 countries.
Among large cities with populations over 800,000 worldwide, L.A. ranked 10th in terms of traffic congestion. No other U.S. cities cracked the index’s global top ten rankings for large cities. Mexico City, Bangkok, Thailand and Istanbul, Turkey, were the three most congested large cities globally, according to the study.
The full results of the index can be found here.
Bill Lucia is a Reporter at Government Executive's Route Fifty.
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