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Stuttgart worst city for traffic jams

Jörg Luyken
Jörg Luyken - [email protected]
Stuttgart worst city for traffic jams
Photo: DPA

GPS company TomTom released data on Tuesday showing which cities have the worst traffic problems. The conclusion: Stuttgart is Germany's worst city for commuters.

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If you drive to work in Stuttgart, you are probably used to delays. Perhaps it would surprise you to know though that for a 30-minute daily commute, you spend 84 hours every year caught in a traffic jam or heavy congestion.

That is 22 minutes each day lost in traffic.

“Stuttgart has been the traffic-jam capital of Germany for years,” Carsten Bamberg of the German Automobile Association (ADAC) told The Local.

TomTom conducted the analysis on data from 2014 collected by satellite navigation systems to measure the impact of traffic congestion in 200 cities around the world.

Istanbul was ranked the worst worldwide with a congestion level of 58 percent and a delay of 29 minutes for each 30-minute commute.

In a scathing assessment of the situation in Stuttgart, Bamberg accused the city administration of “neglecting” its road, tram and bicycle infrastructure despite years of steady population growth.

“It is important to massively build up public transport,” said Bamberg, adding that the government has until this point failed to meet this challenge

“There is no improvement to the situation in sight.”

By contrast, commuters in Dortmund only have to deal with 15 minutes of daily delays for a similar commute - although even this adds up to 56 hours lost every year sitting in a traffic jam.

The Stuttgarter Zeitung reports that this is the third year in a row that the capital of Baden-Württemberg has been awarded the dubious title by TomTom, which compares data on Germany's ten main population centres.

And the situation only appears to be getting worse. Congestion rose 3 percent on the 2013 results to 32 percent traffic congestion.

Hamburg, second on the German list, does only marginally better than Stuttgart. Commuters in the harbour city face delays of 20 minutes per 30-minute commute every day.

Berlin and Munich came in 4th and 5th places in Germany with average times lost in traffic of 19 and 20 minutes, respectively, for a half-hour commute.

The bad news from Stuttgart is mirrored across the country. On average in all 10 urban areas, delays rose by between 1 and 4 percent in comparison with 2013.

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