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Congestion pricing officially went into this past Monday, eliciting many mixed feelings all around. That same day, the transportation data and analytics company INRIX, Inc. released a survey that ranked New York as the most congested city in the country, and the second-most traffic-heavy in the world.
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The study looked at a staggering 1,000 cities across 37 countries to find the places where commuters spent the most time stuck in their cars. Istanbul, where commuters lost an average of 105 hours to traffic a year, took the top spot.
In New York, commuters have apparently wasted an average of 102 hours in traffic, nearly tying with Chicago, which came in third. All in all, ten U.S. towns made the top 25 most congested cities list.
Fun fact: according to the survey, millions of Americans spend an average of one work week stuck in traffic jams per year. That might mostly be due to our car-centric culture: according to another study by Frontier Group, Americans drive more any other country's population per capita.
As annoying as the traffic is, though, you should keep in mind that it is a signifier of an economy that is bouncing back from COVID.
"Every year since 2020, we’ve seen traffic gradually rise towards what it was pre-pandemic," said Bob Pishue, transportation analyst at INRIX and author of the 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard, in an official statement. "While the U.S. is still behind pre-2020 levels of traffic, a pullback of remote and hybrid work models, specifically in tech-heavy areas like San Jose, San Francisco, and Seattle, brought a large jump in downtown trips, which is a good sign for metropolitan economies."
Ironically enough, the study also points out that being stuck in traffic is bad for the economy. That lost work week per year, in fact, is equivalent, on average, to $771 of lost revenue per person in lost time and productivity, or $74 billion nationally. Not to mention all the other life-related things you could be doing during those hours. Maybe implementing congestion pricing wasn't so bad, after all.
Here is the survey's full list of most congested cities:
10 most congested cities in the world
1. Istanbul
2. New York City
3. Chicago
4. Mexico City
5. London
6. Paris
7. Jakarta
8. Los Angeles
9. Cape Town
10. Brisbane