Top Ten Cities With
the World's Worst Traffic Jam
Many of us
start the day by commuting, or traveling, to work. We drop off our children at
school. We may visit the doctor or go to the market to buy food. We rush home
to see our families.
Life is more
pleasant when these trips are easy and direct. The easier commuting, the higher
your quality of life is.
Being stuck
in traffic is not easy or direct. Traffic delays can be stressful. They bring
out the worst in some people. Traffic delays also reduce your quality of life.
And some areas are worse than others. Three of the ten worst cities for traffic
are in Southeast Asia.
People who
live in big cities spend a lot of time talking about traffic. Too many people on
the roads can be a big problem.
Not all
traffic is the same. There are some terms you need to know when talking about
traffic.
One such term is gridlock. Gridlock is when
nobody can go anywhere. The roads become one big parking lot.
There is also stop-and-start traffic. This is when you move
forward a little, but then stop. Move a little. Then stop. Both are equally
stressful.
Traffic can be bumper-to-bumper. This means
there are so many cars on the road that their bumpers seem to be touching. To idle means
the engine of your car is running, but you are not moving … anywhere.
Another term to know is rush hour traffic.
Rush hour traffic happens at about the same time every day – when people are
commuting to and from work.
But who in the world has the worst traffic?
In 2014, the Castrol Magnatec Stop-Start Index examined
traffic conditions in 78 cities around the world. Drivers in these areas used
TomTom GPS devices. Each device measured the time spent in traffic and the
traffic conditions they experienced.
Castrol is an oil company based in the United Kingdom. The
company says all this stop-start driving and idling hurts your car engine. And
to help, it wants to sell you Castrol products.
The study found an increase in both heavy traffic and
stop-and-start driving.
Here are the results.
The top 10 cities with the worst traffic are:
10. Buenos Aires, Argentina
9.
Guadalajara, Mexico
8.
Bangkok, Thailand
7.
Rome, Italy
6.
Moscow, Russia
5.
St. Petersburg, Russia
4.
Surabaya, Indonesia
3.
Mexico City, Mexico
2.
Istanbul, Turkey
- Jakarta,
Indonesia
In
China, Shanghai’s traffic problems were found to be worse than Beijing’s.
Drivers in Shanghai spend 33 percent of their time on the road idling. People
in Beijing spend 27 percent of their travel time idling, doing nothing but
running their engines and wasting fuel.
So, what can cities do to reduce traffic
problems?
One thing cities can
do is to supply more public transportation.
Let us now take a closer look at the city
with the worst traffic in the world – Jakarta. Jakarta’s metropolitan area is
home to about 24 million people. But only 13 percent of all trips are on public
transportation.
Investment in public
transport in the Indonesian capital began in 2004. Workers are building the
first part of a public transport system, known as the Mass Rapid Transit
railway.
Another thing cities
can do to limit traffic is to charge money to drive in certain parts of a city.
Next year, Jakarta plans to start charging drivers more to travel on two
heavily congested roads.
Jakarta officials
have also banned motorcycles from the main roads in the city.
Until cities with
traffic problems find ways to get people from Point A to Point B more
efficiently, they can only envy people in Tampere, Finland and
Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. The survey found that these two cities have the
fastest moving traffic.
I’m Anna Matteo.
Are you living with
terrible traffic? How much time does it take you to commute to work? How is
your city helping to lessen traffic congestion? And if you are lucky enough to
live in a part of world without any traffic, you can brag about it … in the
comments sections.
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