Been a pretty good couple of weeks for trains in London, hasn’t it? The Bank branch of the Northern Line is back, Crossrail is finally here, and now a study that shows that travelling by trains is probably the way to go in the big smoke has just been published.
Yes, it’s no surprise to find out that London is terrible for traffic problems, especially in central zones, but it’s now officially been ranked rock bottom in this new study.
INRIX have crunched the numbers to create a Global Traffic Scorecard for 2021 and, yeah, it really isn’t pretty reading for Londoners. Those opting for a smooth cruise to work will have been in for a big surprise, as those driving around the city lost 148 hours compared to the time their journeys should have taken in 2021. That’s nearly a whole week, or 1/52 of the year, lost to sitting in traffic…
Paris came in close behind, clocking in at 140 hours, with Brussels hot on its heels at 134. Essentially, if you’re heading into that specific UK-Belgium-France radius of the Eurostar, you can probably expect to hit some delays along the way if you’re travelling by automobile.
If you asked anyone to guess the worst offender for traffic in the UK, London would correctly be the name on pretty much everyone’s lips. But who comes in second – or second last, depending on how you look at it – place? You’d expect it to follow the big, highly-populated city trend, right? Wrong. Cambridge, somewhat surprisingly given it’s estimated to have the 47th largest population in the UK, came in after London, with Exeter, Cheltenham and Bristol following (or leading) on. Folkstone has taken the real crown in the study, coming in at rock bottom (so top) of the list, with only 12 hours lost to traffic in 2021.
The Global Traffic Scorecard collects the data for 1,000 cities across 50 countries, taking commuting patterns, collision trends, and travel delays into account. You can read the full INRIX study here.