The US city with the worst traffic revealed where drivers lose 112 hours a year stuck in jams
Drivers lose more than 100 hours a year stuck in traffic jams in this major city.
If you've ever taken a road trip across the US, you'll probably know there are some cities you're better off not traveling through via car, like New York City and Los Angeles.
Last year, drivers lost an estimated 4.7 billion hours due to traffic in the US.
According to Tom Tom Traffic Index, 10 kilometres through the Big Apple could take as long as 31 minutes - and the same distance takes a little more than 26 minutes in San Francisco.
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Yet new analysis from Global Traffic Scorecard, based on metrics from INRIX, has placed Chicago as the city with the worst traffic in America, tipping NYC off the top spot from last year.
The research has found drivers in the Windy City lose a staggering 112 hours per year sitting in traffic on average, a hike of 10 per cent from the previous year and coming in at more than double the average (49 hours) of time lost in congestion across the entire country.
However, Chicago isn't the worst of the bunch, with the city ranking third globally for bad traffic, behind Mexico City and Istanbul, the worst offender.
New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Washington and Seattle were also considered amongst the worst US cities for traffic.
Interestingly, Baltimore and Philadelphia shot to the top of this year's list for having the largest congestion increase in the top 25 cities, with delays hiking by 31 per cent in each, costing drivers more than $85 billion in lost productivity.
As for the worst-affected routes, both directions of I-95 near Stamford in Connecticut came out the busiest, followed by the I-278 in NYC and I-4 close to Orlando, Florida.
Tom Tom adds that traveling 10km through Chicago takes around 19.51 minutes, only narrowly beating Honolulu, Hawaii (20.39).
The insight comes as traffic backing up around Chicago's O'Hare International Airport has become a point of contention in recent months, as data pins it as home to some of the worst traffic growth of any US airport.
The situation has become so bad that renovation planners are even reportedly thinking about changing the timescales of the ongoing works, scheduled to be completed by 2033.
Worldwide, Barranquilla (Colombia), Kolkata, Bengaluru, Pune (India) and London (UK) are consistently some of the worst places to drive, according to the Tom Tom Traffic Index.
Kyoto in Japan, Lima in Peru, Davao City in the Philippines, Trujillo, also in Peru, and Dublin in Ireland, also made the top 10 for poor travel times per 10km.
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