Agência Sefa Karacan / Anadolu via Getty Image
In 2020, the average American driver spent 26 hours stuck in traffic. Although it is still more than a day, it has been a steep decline since pre-pandemic times; in 2019, the average American sacrificed 99 hours in traffic jams. Around the world, it is a similar story. German drivers had an average of 26 identical hours of traffic in 2020, compared to 46 the previous year. In the UK, 2019 looked positively lousy, with 115 hours of congestion. At least one thing improved for that island country in 2020: its drivers spent only 37 hours sitting in their cars.
All of this data was collected by the traffic analysis company Inrix for its 2020 Global Traffic Scorecard, which tracks mobility in more than 1,000 different cities around the world based on travel times, miles traveled, travel characteristics and the effect of congestion accidents in each city.
And unless you’ve spent the last 12 months in a cave – in that case, damn it, I have some bad news for you – you’ll instinctively know that there were big drops in traffic in 2020 and, in particular, a drop in people traveling for urban centers and central business districts.
Still, traffic has not disappeared completely, and averages are hidden a lot in a country as big as the United States. The worst traffic of 2020 occurred in New York City, passing the fourth worst in 2019, where drivers lost 100 hours in traffic jams. But New Yorkers still spent 28% less time stuck in traffic, traveled 28% less miles and suffered 38% fewer accidents than in 2019.
The biggest drop in traffic was seen in Washington, DC. In the country’s capital, drivers spent 29 hours in traffic, an impressive drop of 77% compared to the pre-pandemic period. However, the city saw only a 26 percent reduction in accidents and a 25 percent decrease in vehicle mileage.
At least three of the 25 most congested cities in the United States actually saw an increase in hours lost to traffic in 2020: Santa Rosa, California, where traffic increased by 4% to 26 hours; Sarasota, Florida, where it increased 11% to 29 hours; and Kaneohe, Hawaii, which in 2020 saw an 8% increase to an average of 29 hours spent in traffic.
Inrix’s traffic scorecard is also among the top 25 for European cities, showing that Bucharest, Romania, has the most traffic. Despite the pandemic, Bucharest’s inhabitants spent 129 hours stuck in their cars getting nowhere, although the city didn’t have a rating in 2019, so we don’t know how much that has changed with COVID-19. The worst city in the world in terms of traffic last year was Bogotá, Colombia, which also ranked first in 2019. But even here we can see the influence of the coronavirus – although drivers lost 133 hours in traffic, it was still 31 percent fall, year after year.