Los Angeles Is Worst US City for Traffic

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Los Angeles Is Worst US City for Traffic

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Research firm INRIX has put out its 2015 Traffic Scorecard, which measures commute times for cities around the world, in particular in Europe and America. The worst city in the United States is Los Angeles, followed by a number of the other largest cities in the country.

INRIX claims that stronger economy and lower gas prices are among the contributors to more traffic on the roads around largest cities. It is an incident of how good news yields bad news. The 2015 Traffic Scorecard covers 100 cities across the world. Among those with the worst problems, several are in the United States:

At the global city level, London tops the list of gridlock-plagued cities, with 101 hours of delay, followed by Los Angeles (81 hours), Washington D.C. (75), San Francisco (75), Houston (74), New York (73), Stuttgart (73), Antwerp (71), Cologne (71) and Brussels (70). Drivers using the top 10 worst roads globally waste on average 110 hours a year, or more than 4.5 days, in gridlock. Of these, four are in Los Angeles, three in Moscow, followed by roads in London, Brussels and Munich.

[nativounit]
The 10 U.S. cities with the worst commute times are:

  1. Los Angeles, CA – 81 hours
  2. Washington, DC – 75 hours
  3. San Francisco, CA – 75 hours
  4. Houston, TX – 74 hours
  5. New York, NY – 73 hours
  6. Seattle, WA – 66 hours
  7. Boston, MA – 64 hours
  8. Chicago, IL – 60 hours
  9. Atlanta, GA – 59 hours
  10. Honolulu, HI – 49 hours

Methodology: Findings in the INRIX 2015 Traffic Scorecard are drawn from traffic speed data collected by INRIX on more than 1.3 million miles of urban streets and highways in the United States, along with highway performance data from the Federal Highway Administration.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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