You officially have justification to gripe about the time you spend stuck in traffic around Los Angeles: According to a new study, L.A. suffers the worst urban traffic in the entire world.
That finding comes from transportation research firm INRIX in its traffic review of 1,064 cities in 38 countries. Their Global Traffic Scorecard gave L.A. the dubious top spot, concluding that every Angeleno spent an average of 104 hours stuck in traffic in 2016. The second-worst ranking went to Moscow, where commuters idle for a mere 91 hours a year.
In addition to the annoyance factor, all that time spent waiting around in traffic adds up financially, too. INRIX calculated the economic impact of those 104 hours per person and found that the cost to each impacted individual was $2,408 in direct and indirect costs from gas and car expenses to lost productivity at work. On a citywide level, that adds up to $9.7 billion (which might seem staggering, but nonetheless pales in comparison to the $16.9 billion that traffic costs third-ranked New York City each year).
The Global Traffic Scorecard also includes a ranking of the most congested roads in the U.S. and L.A. appears only once. The I-10 Freeway, eastbound from Exit 3A to Exit 12, makes the list, particularly for its evening rush hour crowding.
One bit of relief for L.A. drivers comes on the weekends. While our traffic eases up on non work days, in New York City and San Francisco the congestion rates barely dip from their weekday levels. The U.S. city with the worst weekend traffic is Las Vegas, where average driving speeds on weekend days are just 5.6 miles per hour.
Want more? Sign up here to stay in the know.