By Stephen Fidler
New research published today shows peak-time drivers in Brussels waste an average 65 hours a year in traffic jams.
That’s more on average than Londoners who lose on average 54 hours a year and more than in Germany’s most congested city, Cologne, where on average drivers give up 57 hours a year of their lives to traffic jams. The worst rush-hour cities surveyed are Paris, where drivers lose 70 hours a year, and Manchester, where the figure is 72 hours. In Belgium, Antwerp pushes Brussels close with 64 hours annually . Ghent’s in third place with a mere 33 wasted hours a year.
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- ZUMApress.com
- A traffic jam in Munich, Germany.
The data comes from INRIX, a U.S. company which has used data from drivers’ GPS systems to build what it calls traffic scorecards for European countries. The Belgian data released today follows scorecards that it has already done for France, Germany and the U.K.
As far as national comparisons go, the worst countrywide rush-hour traffic is in the U.K., where drivers pay an average “travel-time tax” of 22%–that means it takes 22% longer to drive a given distance at peak times over other times. That compares with 21% for the Benelux countries, 19.7% for Germany and 14.3% for France. (France does well because although Paris is a rush-hour nightmare, most French cities apart from Lille (50 hours a year) are pretty low scored.) Meanwhile the U.K. has lots of cities with horrible rush hours, including Belfast (62 hours), Newcastle (62 hours), Liverpool (58) and Aberdeen (56). In Germany, Stuttgart follows Cologne with 56 hours, with the drivers in the Ruhr conglomeration wasting 51 hours a year.
Ranked according to the total time wasted combined with the number of drivers wasting it, Paris is the rush-hour misery capital followed by London in second place. Then, Germany does well, with the Ruhr in third place, followed by Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne and Munich. Manchester is in ninth spot.
But Inrix scorecard does more than measure the worst cities, it identifies the worst blackspots, the place you most want to avoid on a Thursday morning (Belgium’s worst morning commute) or a Friday afternoon (the worst afternoon). The worst jams in Belgium are to be found on an 0.48km stretch on Antwerp’s outer ring road, while seven of the worst 10 are in Brussels, all of them on the R0 ring road.
I can attest to Paris. Biggest complaint are the motorcycles and mopeds that weave in and out of traffic. They cut down on congestion, but they don’t follow traffic rules so you really have to be on your guard.
This report is hardly representative as it only includes France, Germany, the UK and the Benelux countries.
Anyone who’s been through Kyiv, Moscow, Bucharest, etc will know that Eastern Europe gets traffic jams far worse than those seen in the west.