Does Budapest have one of the worst traffic jams in the world?

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When waiting in traffic in your car or on the bus, have you ever wondered whether traffic jams could be worse? That depends on where you live. It might not actually be as bad in your city as you would think at first.

FleetLogging was curious which modern city has the worst traffic jams in the world, more precisely, how big the difference in traffic is during peak hours and off-peak periods. To do this, they first selected the 141 busiest cities in the world and then used the TravelTime API to calculate how far from the city centre you could go in an hour during peak and off-peak periods.

Travelo found the list of FleetLogging, and according to their calculations, the first place, which is actually the worst placement in this statistic, goes to Marseille.

Marseille is the second-largest city in France, and it had the largest difference in the world in terms of the number of kilometres travelled from the city centre during peak and off-peak periods. Within the United States, the biggest discrepancy was in Boise, Idaho.

Tram Villamos Traffic Dugó Forgalom Budapest — Photo (taken before the pandemic): Budapest traffic – Alpár Kató – Daily News Hungary ©

At peak times, however, it is the most difficult to get out of London: you can only cover about 20 kilometres in an hour during peak traffic. Singapore, on the other hand, is the worst in terms of off-peak traffic: you could only travel about 27 kilometres in an hour in normal traffic.

Hungary has been on much worse lists. Recently, Hungary was calculated to have the second-lowest minimum wage in the European Union, and it is estimated that every fifth to sixth death in Hungary can be attributed to environmental pollution.

Although Budapest is on the list, the situation is not quite that bad. Budapest is the 10th worst city in the world in the overall peak hour to off-peak period travel distance ratio, but the reality seems more reasonable.

You can still travel about 80 kilometres from the city centre in a single hour during the most crowded periods, which can only be improved by another 20 kilometres during normal traffic.

When compared to other European countries, however, Budapest, Hungary’s capital, moves up to 8th place in the worst peak hours.

Paris is the 3rd, Hamburg is the 5th, and Prague, which just placed ahead of Budapest, is the 7th. You can find more interesting statistics about traffic if you visit FleetLogging’s website.