TomTom, a company specialising in location technology and satellite navigation devices, has released its annual traffic index, ranking the world’s most congested cities based on their travel time, fuel costs and CO2 emissions.
The Traffic Index is based on data from over 600 million in-car navigation systems and smartphones. For each city (both the city centre and the wider metropolitan area), TomTom calculates the average travel time per kilometre from the time it took to cover the millions of kilometres driven across the entire network in the year 2023.
Travel times and speeds are based on trip data spanning 543 billion km anonymously collected during the year from drivers within the larger metropolitan area (“metro”) or a 5 km radius from the centre (“city centre”) throughout the complete road network, including fast roads and highways crossing this area.
Planning the future of urban areas is essential to ongoing traffic management.
Ralf-Peter Schäfer, Vice President of Traffic at TomTom
“With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, traffic congestion and its economic, ecological and health consequences have become a problem that needs to be urgently addressed”, said Ralf-Peter Schäfer, Vice President of Traffic at TomTom. “Analysis of historical traffic data can help growing cities map more efficient road systems and plan better zoning using location intelligence. Effective implementation of planning measures such as the implementation of LEZs to reduce air pollution will benefit from data from connected cars.”
The trend over 2023 confirms the general decline in average speeds in most cities: of the 387 cities analysed in the traffic index, 82 saw their average speed remain unchanged and 77 had a higher average speed (and therefore shorter journey times) than the previous year, while in the remaining 228 cities, average speeds decreased.
In London and Dublin, the two cities with the lowest average speed, travel times for a 10-kilometre journey increased by 1 minute compared to 2022. Dublin climbed to second place in 2023, replacing Bengaluru as the runner up, which, with a one-minute shorter travel time, went down to 6th place. In only 4 other cities in the world has travel time decreased by one minute or more: Indianapolis, USA (-2 min 10 seconds), Sapporo, Japan (-1 min 10 seconds), Munster, Germany (-1 min 10 seconds) and Cairo, Egypt (- 1 min).
With the decrease, Sapporo managed to drop 10 places in the ranking, from 4th in 2022 to 14th in 2023. Bogota’s travel time also decreased by 50 seconds, taking it from the 10th most congested city in 2022 to the 19th in 2023. Replacing them among the top 10, Toronto climbed all the way to 3rd spot, while Brussels closed the top 10.
TomTom also points out that the increase in both the cost of petrol and fuel consumption, due to longer journey times, has had a clear impact on the budget of motorists who have to use their car every day to get to work. In more than 60% of the 351 cities where the company aggregates fuel prices, the average budget in fuel increased by 15% or more between 2021 and 2023. Moreover, the increase in fuel consumption has a direct impact on average CO2 emissions per vehicle.
