The Cities With the Fastest and Slowest Traffic in the World

A nine-mile trip from the airport in Dhaka, the bustling capital of Bangladesh, to Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed Park, near downtown, can take as long as 55 minutes, according to Google Maps. A trip of the same distance in Flint, Michigan, from the airport to the Sloan Museum of Discovery, takes about nine minutes. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] While we might expect a slower drive in a metropolitan area of 20 million vs. a regional city of just 400,000, the difference in travel time isn’t due just to traffic or congestion, according to a new study that measures traffic speed around the world. Even at midnight, with few cars on the road, the trip in Dhaka—the slowest city in the world—is still 30 minutes, or three times as long as the trip in Flint, the world’s fastest. According to the study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the speed of travel in a city is only partially related to the amount of traffic on its roads. Other factors, such as the layout and quality of a city’s roads and natural obstacles like hills and rivers, play a significant role in how fast cars can drive. As a result, the study’s authors make a distinction between travel speed, a measure unaffected by traffic, and congestion, which is the interaction of speed and traffic. “The slowest cities aren’t necessarily the most congested, and most congested aren’t the slowest,” says Prottoy ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen healthscienceclimate Source Type: news