London named world’s slowest city with average speed well below 20mph

It probably won’t come as much surprise to the people who make travelling through London a tubeless experience on a regular basis, but the English capital has been named the slowest city of 2023.

This has come from a study by the satellite navigation company TomTom, which analysed traffic patterns in 387 cities across 55 countries in 2023.

TomTom’s data shows that, in London last year, a three-mile journey using the city’s roads would take 24 minutes on average when travelling at what the company calls an “optimal travel time”. Double the distance to six miles, and an optimal time would be 49 minutes. In rush hour traffic, that six-mile journey would take 88 minutes. These times are probably slightly shorter if you’re on a motorcycle and can filter, but TomTom says that an average speed of 15mph can be expected in London’s city centre.

On the positive side for London, it was not top of the list of the most expensive cities to drive or ride in. That honour went to Paris. TomTom gives its data in Euros, rather than Pounds, but it says that the average Parisian would have spent €934, or around £800, on driving through the city last year.

In comparison, the average Londoner would have spent €886, or around £760, in 2023 on travelling through London. Additionally, the average Londoner spent £5 more than the average Parisian on fuel in 2023, while those in the French capital lost more “to congestion,” according to TomTom’s Traffic Index.

Paris and London were also the two largest emitters of CO2 in 2023. London won this one, too. If an average petrol car in London did six-mile journeys for a full year, it would produce 1,155kg of CO2, with 295kg of this being down to traffic. In Paris, the same journeys with the same car over the same period would produce 1,115kg. These were the only two cities where this figure was over 1,000kg.

London and Paris were not the only cities to perform badly in TomTom’s assessment. The Dutch company also found that Dublin was the “most congested at peak times” city in 2023, with daily commuters thought to have lost 153 hours to traffic in the Irish capital.

In general, cities slowed down in 2023 over the previous year, with 228 of the 387 cities analysed by TomTom showing a reduction in average speed, but London and Dublin were two of only seven cities in which average travel times for a six-mile journey increased by more than one minute over 2022.

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