Traffic Slowed Down in Almost Every Major U.S. City in 2022

Evening traffic crawls in both directions on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, February 13, 2023 in Brooklyn, New York.

You’d think with many employers offering work from home and flexible start times, traffic jams would be fewer and farther between, but data from the mapping technology company Tom Tom shows commutes are more frustrating than ever.

Tom Tom has been tracking traffic patterns across the globe for years. It sets an interesting metric for its rankings: How fast a car can travel six miles in a city during rush hour. Researchers measure the travel time in 389 cities across the globe, including 80 in our own U.S. of A., and they compared 2022's number to the travel times in 2021. They also calculated pollution generated and cost to the owner per kilometer or mile.

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Washington D.C. and Indianapolis had the worst slow downs; both cities added a minute-and-a-half to their six-mile trek from 2021 to 2022. New York City, the slowest city in the U.S., added a minute and 10 seconds to its average six-mile drive time of 24 minutes and 30 seconds. Folks too good to take the train into Manhattan now spend an astonishing 236 hours in traffic each year.