Where rush hour is a way of life
10 Cities With the Worst Traffic in the World
Drivers in these cities lose entire weeks each year to gridlock. Here are ten of the most notoriously congested metropolises on the planet.
Traffic rankings from TomTom, INRIX and Numbeo each measure congestion a little differently, but the worst offenders rarely change. In these cities the average rush-hour speed can fall below 10 km/h, and a short cross-town errand can swallow an entire afternoon. The economic toll is real: the World Bank has estimated that traffic congestion in major emerging-market cities costs between 2% and 5% of national GDP every year, and INRIX puts the average congestion cost per driver in the most affected cities at more than $1,500 annually in lost time and fuel.
How we chose these ↓ — jump to the full scoring system at the bottom of the article.
California, United States · pop. 3,878,718
Los Angeles is the United States' enduring icon of gridlock, and the only North American city in this list's top ten. The metro is enormous, low-density and almost entirely freeway-dependent. INRIX consistently ranks LA in the worst three US cities for hours lost per driver, with around 100 hours a year disappearing into the freeway system. The 405, the 101 and the 110 are practically synonymous with congestion in American popular culture.
LA's response has been a multi-decade transit pivot that almost no one in the rest of the country has noticed. Measure M, passed by LA County voters in 2016, raised the sales tax to fund $120 billion of transit investment through 2057. The Metro Rail network has grown from one line in 1990 to seven today, including the recently opened K Line through South LA. The 2028 Olympics are being used as a forcing function to complete the Purple Line subway extension to Westwood, the LAX people-mover and the Sepulveda Pass Transit Corridor. The freeway congestion will still be there in 2028. There will just be more alternatives to it.
Rush hour on the 405 Freeway through West LA. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
The downtown Los Angeles freeway interchange, the densest in the US. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Île-de-France, France · pop. 2,133,111
The Boulevard Périphérique, Paris's 35 km ring road, carries roughly 1.1 million vehicles a day and is famous for spending more time stationary than moving. INRIX has consistently ranked the Paris metro area in the top ten of European cities for time lost per driver, and the city centre's average peak-hour speed is below 14 km/h. Most of central Paris is so dense, with such narrow streets, that the car is essentially the wrong shape for the city.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo's administration has spent the last decade actively designing the car out of central Paris. The right bank of the Seine was pedestrianised in 2016, the speed limit on most inner streets is now 30 km/h, the city has built more than 1,000 km of cycle lanes since 2015, and a 2024 referendum overwhelmingly approved tripling parking fees on SUVs. The Périphérique itself is due to drop its speed limit to 50 km/h after the 2024 Olympics. The Grand Paris Express, a 200 km automated metro under construction since 2016, will add four new ring lines by 2030.
Traffic on the Champs-Élysées at the Arc de Triomphe. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
The Boulevard Périphérique, Paris's permanently congested ring road. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
England, United Kingdom · pop. 8,908,083
Central London is the most congested big city in Western Europe. The city's pre-industrial street pattern (cow paths, river crossings, royal-park-avoidance routes) was never designed for any kind of motor traffic, and TomTom's 2024 index put the average central-London peak-hour transit at 36 minutes per 10 km, on par with Bogotá. INRIX has previously ranked London the most congested city in Europe by total hours lost per driver per year.
The city's response has been the most aggressive demand-management programme of any major Western capital. The Congestion Charge, introduced in 2003, was the first cordon charge of its kind anywhere. The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) was extended to the entire Greater London area in August 2023, charging £12.50 per day for non-compliant vehicles. The Elizabeth line, opened in 2022, has added the equivalent of a brand-new subway across the centre. The traffic has eased a bit. It has not gone away.
Traffic on London's Oxford Street before the recent pedestrianisation works. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
The Marble Arch interchange, one of central London's chronic congestion points. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Moscow, Russia · pop. 13,274,285
Moscow's traffic is a peculiar combination of an extraordinary metro and an extraordinarily bad road network. The Moscow Metro carries over 8 million passengers a day, has the world's most beautifully decorated stations and runs trains every 90 seconds at peak. And yet the city's wide, radial avenues and ring roads are some of the slowest in Europe at rush hour, especially in winter when snow narrows lanes and gridlock can stretch entire evenings.
INRIX has previously ranked Moscow in the top five of European cities for congestion, with the average driver losing more than 100 hours a year. The Moscow Central Diameters, an S-Bahn-style commuter rail network integrated with the metro from 2019 onward, is the single biggest recent improvement. The city has also added an extensive Central Circle and Big Circle metro line, both of which opened in stages between 2016 and 2023 and have shifted some of the radial pressure to circumferential trips.
Evening traffic on the Garden Ring in central Moscow. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Kutuzovsky Avenue heading west out of central Moscow. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Istanbul, Türkiye · pop. 15,701,602
Istanbul's traffic problem is partly geological. The city straddles two continents, divided by the Bosphorus, and the entire intercontinental commuter flow funnels through just three bridges (the 15 July Martyrs, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet, and the Yavuz Sultan Selim) plus the Marmaray and Eurasia road tunnels. TomTom's 2024 index ranked Istanbul second only to Bogotá among large cities for time lost per 10 km, and the city's 16 million residents collectively spend an estimated 142 hours per driver per year in congestion.
The metro is finally catching up. Istanbul has opened more new metro lines in the last decade than any other European city, and the Marmaray under-sea rail tunnel (opened 2013, full intercity service from 2019) gives commuters an alternative to the bridges. The new Istanbul Airport, opened in 2018 on the European outskirts, has shifted some of the city's growth axis west, but the lower Bosphorus crossings remain a permanent rush-hour pinch.
Evening traffic on Istanbul's 15 July Martyrs Bridge across the Bosphorus. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Congestion on the E5 highway through the European side of Istanbul. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Bangkok, Thailand · pop. 5,527,948
Bangkok is the city where modern traffic-jam folklore was effectively born. In the early 1990s, before the Skytrain opened in 1999, the city was so congested that office workers carried portable potties in their cars and ate dinner on the road home. TomTom's 2024 index still ranks Bangkok in the global top 20 for congestion, with an average peak-hour transit of 32 minutes per 10 km in the central business district. INRIX has estimated that the average Bangkok driver loses around 70 hours a year to congestion.
The Skytrain (BTS) and the MRT subway have transformed the situation for residents of the corridors they cover, and the city's expanding BRT, motorbike taxi and Grab moto networks fill in the gaps. The motorbike taxi, in particular, is what keeps Bangkok functional: more than 200,000 orange-vested moto-drivers slip through stationary cars at speeds the cars cannot achieve. The fundamental issue is the city's car-heavy land-use pattern in Sukhumvit, Ratchada and the airport corridor, which the metro can mitigate but not solve.
Rush hour on Bangkok's Sukhumvit Road. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
An orange-vested motorbike taxi, the workaround that keeps Bangkok moving. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Maharashtra, India · pop. 12,442,373
Mumbai's geography is the city's congestion story. The island city is essentially a narrow north-south peninsula, and every commute from the booming suburbs of Thane, Andheri or Borivali to the southern business district funnels through a handful of arterial roads (the Western Express Highway, the Eastern Express Highway, the SV Road and the LBS Marg). TomTom's 2024 index put Mumbai's average peak-hour speed at around 18 km/h, and the Maharashtra government estimates that the average Mumbaikar spends 8% of waking hours stuck in traffic.
The partial relief is finally arriving. The Mumbai Coastal Road, opened in stages from 2024, gives the southern half of the city a six-lane bypass along the Arabian Sea. The first underwater section of the new Metro Line 3 began service in 2024 too, connecting Cuffe Parade to the international airport for the first time. The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link, the country's longest sea bridge at 21.8 km, opened in early 2024 and is already cutting an hour off the commute from Navi Mumbai. None of it has yet kept up with the growth in vehicle ownership.
Traffic on Mumbai's Western Express Highway. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Mumbai traffic during the monsoon, when flooded streets compound the congestion. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Bogotá, Colombia · pop. 8,181,047
Bogotá has held the top spot in the TomTom Traffic Index for several years running, including in 2024, when the city posted an average peak-hour travel time of 36 minutes per 10 km, slower than any other major capital. The Pico y Placa license-plate restriction, introduced in 1998, was once a global model for traffic-demand management; today it barely moves the needle in a city of 8 million people with strong car ownership growth and an unfinished metro project.
What does work, paradoxically, is Bogotá's TransMilenio Bus Rapid Transit network, which carries roughly 2.4 million passengers a day on segregated lanes and is the largest BRT system in the Americas. The city's first metro line is under construction and due for completion in 2028, which most analysts expect to finally shift the congestion needle. Bogotá is also one of the few major Latin American cities to have made cycling a serious commuting option, with more than 550 km of dedicated bike lanes.
Rush hour on Bogotá's Avenida Calle 26. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Bogotá's TransMilenio BRT, the largest bus rapid transit system in the Americas. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Mexico City, Mexico · pop. 9,209,944
Mexico City sits inside a closed valley at 2,240 m elevation, so the 5+ million cars that move around the metro every day are also trapped together with the smog. TomTom's 2024 index ranked Mexico City among the top five most congested cities in the Americas, with an average peak-hour transit of 28 minutes per 10 km in the central area. INRIX has previously estimated that the average commute consumes more than 150 hours of lost time per driver per year, the highest in North America.
The city's Hoy No Circula program has restricted vehicles by license plate since 1989, which initially worked and then triggered an unintended outcome where families simply bought a second cheaper car to drive on the restricted days, leaving the policy with diminishing effect. A new generation of MetroBús BRT corridors, the expanding metro and the Cablebús aerial gondolas in the steep eastern barrios have helped, but the underlying problem remains that the Valley of Mexico simply does not have the topographic room for everyone to drive at once.
Rush-hour traffic on Mexico City's Eje Central. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Congestion on Mexico City's Periférico ring road. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
Jakarta, Indonesia · pop. 10,467,629
Jakarta routinely tops the global congestion charts. Greater Jakarta has roughly 30 million people, 16 million registered motor vehicles and a road network whose total length per capita is among the lowest of any megacity. TomTom's 2024 index put the average peak-hour speed in central Jakarta below 16 km/h, and INRIX has previously estimated that the average Jakarta driver loses more than 80 hours a year just to congestion. The famous toll road north toward the airport, the Jagorawi, and the inner-city arterials of Sudirman and Thamrin are essentially permanent traffic jams.
The Indonesian government's response has been radical. Jakarta has been steadily expanding its MRT and LRT systems since 2019, the city introduced a license-plate odd-even policy on its busiest corridors in 2016, and most strikingly, the central government is in the process of relocating the national capital entirely to a new purpose-built city on Borneo (Nusantara), partly to relieve pressure on Jakarta itself. Even so, the traffic problem is not going away in any reasonable timeframe.
Gridlock on Jalan Sudirman in central Jakarta. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. 
An evening rush hour on a Jakarta toll road. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
How we chose these
We started with the three most widely cited congestion datasets: the TomTom Traffic Index 2024 (which measures average travel time per 10 km in city centres), the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard (which calculates hours lost per driver per year) and Numbeo's crowdsourced traffic time index. We also weighed in qualitative reporting from the IBM Commuter Pain Index, where it still exists, and local transport-authority data where available. A city had to appear in the top 30 of at least two of those three indices to be considered, and we then sorted the resulting longlist by a blended rank rather than by a single source. Cities where congestion is essentially a permanent emergency (Lagos, Cairo, Tehran) didn't make the cut here because comparable data is patchy, not because the traffic is better.
Sources & further reading
More lists
10 Cities With the Most Skyscrapers in the World
Where the skyline never stops climbing
10 Cities With the Best Public Transportation
Where you really don't need a car
8 Highest-Altitude Cities in the World
Where the air gets thin and the views get long
8 Oldest Continuously Inhabited Cities in the World
Places where someone has been home for thousands of years
10 Coldest Inhabited Cities in the World
Where winter is genuinely dangerous
10 Hottest Cities in the World
Where summer routinely crosses 50°C
10 Largest Megacities in the World
Where tens of millions share a single metro
8 Cities Built on Water
Where canals are the streets
10 of the World's Best-Preserved Old Towns
Where history is still the street plan
10 Most Expensive Cities in the World
Where a coffee costs ten dollars
10 Most Visited Cities by International Tourists
Where the world goes on holiday
7 of the Rainiest Inhabited Places on Earth
Where the rain is the climate, not the weather
8 of the Northernmost Cities in the World
Where the sun stops setting in summer
7 of the Southernmost Cities in the World
Where the next stop is Antarctica
8 of the Sunniest Cities in the World
Where clouds are a special event
8 of the World's Greenest Cities
Where sustainability is a city policy, not a slogan
8 of the World's Most Famous Mountain & Ski Towns
Where altitude is the address
7 of the World's Most Multilingual Cities
Where the official languages run into the dozens
8 Cities With the Most Billionaires
Where extreme wealth concentrates
10 of the Best Cities for Digital Nomads
Where Wi-Fi, weather and visas all line up
10 Cities Most at Risk From Rising Sea Levels
Where climate change is a near-term planning problem
10 of the World's Most Walkable Cities
Where the car is a guest, not the host
10 of the World's Best Cities for Nightlife
Where 'last call' is a foreign concept
10 of the World's Best Food Cities
A transparent ranking of where eating is the point of visiting
For entertainment only. Rankings on this page are editorial picks compiled from public sources for fun and discovery — they aren't a scientific measurement. Population figures and place details come from open data; see the linked place pages for sources.