Eight of the 10 most congested cities in 2022 were in Latin America and Asia, according to TomTom Traffic Index data on the time wasted in rush hour traffic in 390 major urban areas worldwide.

In 2022, the Colombian capital Bogotá was the world’s most congested metropolitan area, with drivers losing an average of 132 hours to peak-hour traffic over the year. Comparisons in this study were based on the time taken to drive a 10-kilometre journey to and from work during congested peak hours, relative to the same trip in “optimal conditions” with free-flowing traffic. 

The second-most congested city was Romania’s capital Bucharest, where drivers on average wasted 107 hours stuck in rush hour traffic, followed by the Philippine capital Manila (103 hours), Bangalore in India (102 hours) and the Peruvian capital city Lima (101 hours). The top 10 most congested cities all had average annual time lost to traffic of at least 79 hours.

The cities with the highest levels of congestion tend to be in developing countries with rapid urban population growth.

Ralf-Peter Schäfer, vice president of traffic at TomTom, explains that the fundamental problem is that “too many people want to drive at the same time in the road network”. Key drivers of congestion are limited road capacity in historic urban centres, cities with growing numbers of cars on the road and a lack of public transport infrastructure. “If you don’t make a massive investment in transit [systems], then the consequences are higher congestion,” he notes. 

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For the 12 consecutive years that TomTom has assessed traffic in cities across the globe, congestion has worsened every year with the notable exception of 2020. Due to lockdowns, the closure of factories and the rise of remote work, demand for the road network dropped sharply in many cities around the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a “phenomenal experiment” for traffic engineers to assess how sudden reductions of demand impact road networks, says Mr Schäfer. He continues that more flexible work arrangement has led to much less demand in some metropolitan areas where there is more of a service based economy, such as the San Francisco Bay Area on the US West Coast.

More than half (six) of the ten cities that are the least congested, based on the time lost due to rush hour traffic, were located in the US. These included the Greensboro-High Point metropolitan area in North Carolina and the cities of Cleveland and Akron in Ohio.

Mecca in Saudi Arabia ranked as the least congested city by this metric, with an average eight hours lost to traffic during peak hours commuting each year. It was closely followed by the UAE’s Abu Dhabi (also at eight hours) and the Islamic pilgrimage city of Medina (10 hours). The Italian city of Syracuse was the only European city to make it into the top-ten least congested list.

Mr Schäfer says that since “congestion is bad for business”, particularly in industries like logistics, cities should use data to effectively plan and invest into multimodal transport options.

“If a city has a wide [road] network with high capacity, then they have better ground to serve more cars,” he says. “But there is a trend towards stimulating more bikes, pedestrians and transit usage to balance out between car and non-car commutes.”