Traffic congestion in large cities has been a problem for decades. To some extent, this is because many highways were built for less traffic than they can handle now. A road that was two lanes needs to be three or four to accommodate current vehicle volume. Another problem, which is related, is that older roads are under repair more often than new ones, which temporarily worsens congestion. Cities and nations with aged infrastructure need to constantly rebuild, and in some cases expand, what was built a lifetime or more ago.
Moneybarn looked at the problem by nation and city. One of the reports it issued from the research was “Slowest Cities: The World’s Slowest Cities to Travel by Car.” Among the primary yardsticks used for ranking nations were congestion levels from GPS navigation system company TomTom, Wikipedia’s speed limits by country, road quality from the World Economic Forum and “CO2 consumption in traffic and overall inefficiencies in the traffic system” from Numbeo.
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Overall national scores were based on these metrics: average congestion level, average days with low traffic, highest speed limit, road quality and a traffic index. The worst country based on a score of 10 to 1 was Peru at 2.28. The researchers commented:
The most congested country in the world was Peru, with the capital of Lima being particularly well known for its traffic woes. The country scored poorly across the board, but particularly when it came to the average congestion level of 42%, which means that a journey here would take 42% longer then it would do with no traffic.
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A close second was another Latin American country, Columbia (see scores below). In fact, five of the worst 10 countries are in Latin America.
The nation in third place was the Philippines, followed by Indonesia, India and Brazil. The balance of the 57 nations considered had scores above 4.00. The nation with the best score was Germany at 8.34.
These are the 10 countries with the worst traffic:
- Peru (2.28)
- Colombia (2.40)
- Philippines (2.48)
- Indonesia (3.35)
- India (3.46)
- Brazil (3.99)
- Mexico (4.20)
- Argentina (4.43)
- Romania (4.76)
- Thailand (4.79)
Click here to read about America’s 50 worst cities to drive in.
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