Boston has the fourth worst traffic in the country, and is ranked eighth among the world’s most congested cities, according to a new report.
New York City has the worst gridlock in the world, followed by Mexico City, London, Paris and Chicago, with Boston placing only behind the Big Apple, Chicago and Los Angeles in the United States, according to new report released Tuesday by INRIX, a global transportation data and analytics company.
The typical Boston driver lost 88 hours to traffic in 2023, up 14% from 2022, representing a higher increase in year-over-year congestion delay than the seven cities it ranks behind. The report lists Massachusetts’ capital city among the “major urban areas” that “all moved up significantly from last year, with double-digit increases,” along with Bogota, Miami and Toronto.
The new rankings actually represent an improvement for Boston compared to recent years. An INRIX report released in January 2023 had the Hub ranked second for worst gridlock in the country, ahead of New York City, and fourth in the world, and it held the top spot in prior years tracked by the same company.
“Pre-pandemic Boston already had the distinction in similar surveys of being the worst traffic city in the entire country — and so maybe I can’t celebrate that we’re only No. 4 on the list now,” Mayor Michelle Wu quipped on Monday, when asked about the pending report. “It’s been a known problem for some time.”
Traffic woes in cities like Boston are one of the top reasons why urban downtowns aren’t coming back as strongly from the pandemic, Wu said after an event that focused on a city program that aims to convert underutilized downtown office buildings into housing units.
“In Boston, where we’re a very suburban commuter-heavy downtown, we rely a lot on people taking the commuter rail in, to come to work,” Wu said. “When the T isn’t what people want it to be, that just exacerbates the challenge. Making transportation, traffic, and public transit as smooth as possible is one of the biggest factors to making downtown as active and revitalized as possible.”
Bob Pishue, transportation analyst at INRIX, remarked on gridlock’s relation to a city’s economy, saying, “Traffic congestion is both a bane and a barometer of economic health; it symbolizes bustling activity, yet simultaneously hampers it.
“Reflecting on 2023 and early 2024, the surge in traffic congestion in urban areas indicated a revival of economic hubbub post-COVID, but it also led to billions of dollars in lost time for drivers,” Pishue said in a statement.
Time spent in traffic cost the typical Boston driver $1,543 in 2023, and cost the city as a whole roughly $2.9 billion, the report states.
Drivers are typically traveling at 10 mph in downtown Boston. The state’s capital city is also home to the seventh-worst corridor in the U.S., I-93 southbound through downtown to the Pilgrim Highway Interchange, resulting in 20 minutes lost on average per day at the area’s peak traffic time of 3 p.m., the report states.
The highest-traffic hour in that intersection reflects a trend Pishue attributes to changing post-pandemic work patterns, “which are creating new travel peaks from what we’ve seen previously.” Traffic was worst at that particular intersection around the more traditional 4 p.m. rush hour in a January 2023 INRIX report.
“The uptick in congestion comes alongside the emergence of a new phenomenon: the midday rush hour,” the report states.
Wu said the city’s efforts to add more “jobs, opportunities and housing” go hand in hand with work to combat traffic congestion by trying to improve street redesign “so that things can move faster” and “flow more smoothly.”
She said her administration is working with different technology companies to analyze traffic and understand where the hotspots are, in order to make adjustments in signalization to help with traffic enforcement and compliance with traffic rules.
The mayor also pointed to efforts to make improvements around curbside management for food-delivery scooters and vehicles that are contributing to traffic, in part, by double- and triple-parking.
“It just ends up backing up the entire roadway,” Wu said, adding that traffic is a “really important factor that affects housing and the economy in addition to people’s general frustration about how to get around.”
