If you are planning to have a nice weekend city break in Europe, you probably don’t want to spend any precious time doing nothing in a traffic jam. Although an underground, bicycle, scooter, or walking short distances are often the fastest methods to move around in busy cities, travelers often need to hop on a taxi or a bus as well. As a recent study points out, the U.S. and Asian cities tend to be more congested than European cities, but the differences are not wide. Let’s take a look at cities in Europe where traffic tends to crawl more often than it should.
Inrix Inc, a transportation data and analytics company, has published its annual Traffic Scorecard that ranks congestion in nearly 950 cities in 37 countries across the world. A conclusion from the results is it takes about double the time to drive along the streets of London (the most congested city in Europe) than the streets of Munich, which is ranked the 21st most congested European city.
Here are the most congested cities in Europe in 2024 – top 25 from the worst to little less congested according to the Inrix Traffic Scorecard 2024:
- London, UK
- Paris, France
- Dublin, Ireland
- Rome, Italy
- Brussels, Belgium
- Warsaw, Poland
- Milan, Italy
- Rotterdam, Netherlands
- Prague, Czech Republic
- Berlin, Germany
- Bristol, UK
- Utrecht, Netherlands
- Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Leeds, UK
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Manchester, UK
- Hague, Netherlands
- Dusseldorf, Germany
- Budapest, Hungary
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Munich, Germany
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Cologne, Germany
- Bath, UK
- Stuttgart, Germany
So, we have a long list of cities where cars are not moving on the streets as they should, but where are the European cities where traffic doesn’t crawl at a snail’s pace? In the list of top 25 most congested cities there are no Nordic countries. Well, perhaps the cities in Nordic countries are not as large as many settlements in central Europe, but still, something has been done differently in the north for allowing traffic to flow more smoothly. Additionally, only a couple of cities in East Europe and another few in South Europe were ranked in the top 25.
One might expect that busy traffic and frequent traffic jams mean lousy air quality in a city, and to a certain extent it looks to be so, but not always. Air quality studies indicate that London has relatively clean air despite its traffic problems.
The data for the traffic study was collected by Inrix from multiple sources, such as phones, cars, trucks, and cities. The data in the 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard reflects the status of road segments for every minute of the day.