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Yet another annual traffic survey has found London firmly in first place—or worst place, perhaps—for 2022. This time it’s TomTom’s data that shows the Big Smoke is hell on wheels, with an average travel time of more than 35 minutes to go six miles (10 km) last year. Instead of just releasing a static report, TomTom has used its data to create a tool that lets you calculate the costs of commuting in 389 cities and their metropolitan areas, from A Coruña in Spain to Zwolle in the Netherlands, with 80 US cities in between.
Of course, the 2022 data is worth a look. Here in the US, TomTom’s trends show my own city of Washington, DC, did pretty badly over the past 12 months—the time to travel six miles went up by a minute and a half to 21 minutes. Indianapolis saw travel times also grow by 90 seconds year-on-year, but you could complete those six miles in 14 minutes, according to TomTom’s data.
As you might expect, transit-friendly New York City had the longest travel times to go six miles—25 minutes, which was an increase of 70 seconds over 2021. And New Yorkers spent the most time in rush hour during 2022, a total of 236 hours. (DC, in second place, lost 196 hours.)
But some American metropolises appear to have made life easier for their drivers. Orlando is the big winner here, where driving six miles got a whole 30 seconds shorter, at 10 minutes overall. It’s clear even from a glance at this data that the US remains wedded to a very car-centric infrastructure. Despite long travel times in the larger cities, 46 of the 80 US cities featured in the report have travel times of 12 minutes or less to go six miles.
It’s also possible to see how varying commute lengths stack up the costs in both time and money. TomTom’s data includes more than 337 billion miles (543 billion km) of journeys, and for consumption estimates, it uses that traffic data together with map data and a simulation tool developed by the Graz University of Technology. A more US-biased tool would probably let you set commute distances of more than 31 miles (50 km), however.
Helpfully, you can select different powertrains to compare the cost differences between gasoline vehicles versus EVs or calculate how much carbon might get dumped into the atmosphere. Fuel and energy costs are based on aggregated country-wide averages, but the theoretical EV the tool uses only has a 40 kWh battery, so the amount of charges over a year is probably a bit optimistic.
