Horrible traffic is intrinsically tied to Los Angeles.
The city was one of the first to introduce freeways and today its residents spend an
average of 90 hours a year stuck in delays.
But LA is far from the most congested city in the world.
So which cities have the worst traffic?
Well, one perpetually gridlocked city is Istanbul.
According to data from the navigation company TomTom, traffic keeps Istanbul drivers on
the road an extra 178 hours a year.
That’s more than a full week just sitting in your car.
The city’s excessive traffic is primarily a result of its rapidly growing population
which, in the later half of the 20th century, increased more than 10-fold.
Today, the majority of Istanbul’s 14 million residents use a car as their primary mode
of transportation, since public transit is notoriously inefficient.
The problem is only exacerbated by the city’s aging infrastructure and roads that date back
to before cars even existed.
To combat the issue, Turkish officials have gone to bold, arguably extreme measures.
Not only do they plan to build new bridges and hundreds of miles of metro lines, but
also an underwater highway and a vehicle shipping service, in which large trucks roll onto a
ship, bypassing the city altogether.
Another particularly congested city is Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta.
Roughly 3 million commuters enter the city every workday, growing its population by nearly
a third.
An overwhelming majority of these commuters must travel by private vehicle, as Jakarta
is one of the only major cities in the world with no rapid transit system.
In the 1990’s, Indonesian officials attempted to mitigate Jakarta’s traffic problems with
a so-called “three-in-one” system, prohibiting cars with fewer than three passengers from
taking major roads during peak commuting hours.
Not only did the policy fail to ease traffic, but it spawned an illicit ‘carpool economy’,
in which lone drivers pay roadside jockeys to ride with them in order to reach the 3-passenger
minimum.
The jockeys were often young boys and girls or women with children, and fearing exploitation,
the government scrapped the policy in May 2016.
But perhaps the most congested urban area in the world is Mexico City, where, according
to Tomtom data, drivers are on the road an additional 219 hours a year.
The main problem, besides the city’s enormous population, is that very few people live near
their work.
For instance in the city’s commercial hub, just 7 thousand housing units are occupied,
while more than 850 thousand people commute to the district every day.
City officials have proposed a number of prospective solutions, one of which is an elevated monorail
with gondolas, allowing people to float over the congested freeways.
The project is still in its early stages, but if it does go through, planners say it
could transport up to 200 million passengers a year.
In these cities, as well as Bangkok, Moscow, Dhaka and Rio De Janeiro, the problems around
traffic go way beyond longer commute times.
Excessive congestion leads to more traffic-related deaths, increased air pollution and a slew
of economic problems.
With each city's population continuing to rise, its citizens will likely continue to
spend hours of their day in gridlock.
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No US cities were mentioned in the video, but many experience crippling gridlock on
a regular basis - particularly those that don’t have an efficient bus or subway system.
So why is the United States so behind when it comes to public transit?
Find out more
in this video.
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