It’s been a rough, rain-soaked day, so forgive us if we’re overly excited by news that nobody would consider good except for Jakartans.
You see, as hellacious as the traffic can be in Jakarta, it certainly doesn’t help that we’re constantly being told “JAKARTA HAS THE WORST TRAFFIC IN THE WORLD”. It’s one thing to suffer for hours in seemingly endless macet, but it’s a whole other to think that we’ve got it worse than everybody else Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hlloekx7e4
So yes, we are actually happy to report that a new study has calculated that Jakarta actually only has the 22nd worst traffic of any city in the world.
The study by American research company INRIX, titled the “Global Traffic Scorecard”, ranked countries and cities based on the total number of hours the average citizen spent sitting in traffic in 2016. It claims to be the “largest and most detailed study of congestion ever”, with data from 1,064 cities in 38 countries covering more than 100,000 square miles and focusing on congestion across all times of the day and week.
Based on that data, INRIX found that Jakartans spent about 17% of their total driving time in congestion or about 55 hours for the whole of last year. Which is really terrible, but apparently there are 21 cities that have it even worse.
Graph: INRIX
Now, don’t get us wrong. We’re certainly not proud of that 22nd place ranking. But we do take a certain shameful joy (what the Germans call schadenfreude) in the idea that people in 21 other cities have to suffer even worse traffic.
And which cities must face such a cruel fate?
Graph: INRIX
That’s right. Krasnodar, Chicago, Bangkok, Paris, London, New York, LA and all the rest of you can suck it. (Damn Los Angelinos, you have to spend nearly double the amount of time in traffic as we do? Ok, you have our sympathies.)
The study also found that Indonesia has the 3rd worst traffic on average of any country in the world, but not as bad as #1 Thailand.
If you’d like to dig into INRIX’s data and methodology to see how they could have calculated such shocking traffic statistics, you can check out their website and download a full PDF version of the study.
