Bangkok ranked among world's most congested roads

Another traffic jam, just a part of daily life in Bangkok. (Bangkok Post file photo)

Bangkok drivers spent an average 64.1 hours stuck in congested traffic last year, wasting a lot of fuel in the process, but Los Angeles was the city with the world's biggest rush hour traffic delays, according to a study by INRIX Inc released on Monday.

The INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard rated Bangkok the 12th most congested of all cities rated, considerably worse than 30th in 2015, with a traffic scorecard rating of 11, down from 20 in 2015.

Bangkok drivers spent an average 64.1 hours a year in traffic jams, according to the scorecard  -- 23%  of overall time and an average 33% of their time during peak hours.

This was  immediately above Caracas and Mexico City, both  long known for horrendous traffic, which improved from near the top of the list in the 2015 rankings.

INRIX, based in Kirkland, Washington, aggregates and analyzes traffic data collected from vehicles and highway infrastructure. The company said the latest edition of its Global Traffic Scorecard report was based on 500 terabytes of data from 300 million sources.

According to the study, the United States had the worst traffic among rich, developed economies in 2016. Five of the world's 10 most congested cities are in the United States, INRIX found.

The INRIX study sliced data in different ways. Los Angeles drivers spent an average of 104 peak drive-time hours fighting slow traffic during 2016. That put Los Angeles at the top of the list of cities where drivers spent the most hours stuck in slow rush hour traffic.

But on a different measure, time stuck in congestion as a share of all driving, Moscow drivers had it worse. They spent 25.2% of their total driving hours on congested roads, while Los Angeles motorists spent 12.7% of their total driving time in slow traffic, the study found. In Bogota, Colombia, motorists spend 31.8% of their total driving time in traffic jams.

The worst stretch of road in the United States is New York City's Cross Bronx Expressway, where drivers on the 4.7 mile (7.5 km) road spent an average of 86 hours a year staring at the bumper of the car ahead.

After Los Angeles, INRIX listed New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Miami as the most traffic-choked US cities.