Cities With the Worst Traffic in the World; 10 Are in the U.S.

Drivers wasted a lot of time and money being stuck in traffic last year. Here are the 30 worst cities for traffic.

Jan 23, 2023 - 18:30

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Cities With the Worst Traffic in the World; 10 Are in the U.S.

Drivers wasted a lot of time and money being stuck in traffic last year. Here are the 30 worst cities for traffic.

Try not to think about where you need to be in five minutes, or the $4-a-gallon gas you’re wasting as you sit idle in a traffic jam. Do you even have enough gas? Can you even get off the freeway to get gas?

If you live in a city, chances are you’re familiar with these thoughts while helplessly stuck in traffic. Traffic congestion cost the U.S. more than $81 billion in 2022, according to the latest traffic report by Inrix, a U.S. company that analyzes transportation data.

The typical American driver lost 51 hours stuck in congestion, costing the average driver $869 in lost time, according to Inrix, and that doesn’t even include fuel costs.

The average American driver spent $134 more on gas in 2022 than in 2021. A Los Angeles commuter shelled out nearly $315 more in 2022 than in 2021, and the typical New York driver an additional $213 in 2022.

If that sounds like a lot of pain, imagine living and driving in London, which tops Inrix’s list of cities with the worst traffic in the world, for the second year in a row. The average London driver lost 156 hours due to congestion in 2022 and spent an extra $223 on fuel.

After some traffic relief during the covid pandemic, delays exceeded pre-covid levels in 39% of urban areas in the U.S., and 42% in Europe, the report says.

To compile their Global Traffic Scorecard, Inrix collects billions of anonymous data points daily from a variety of sources, including connected vehicles, mobile devices, navigation units, fleet vehicles, road and garage infrastructure, and publicly available information on incidents.

These are the cities that had the worst traffic in the world in 2022.