What could you do if you were given 78 hours of free time to devote to a single activity, without the need to sleep or eat? Lovers of Jack and Rose could watch James Cameron’s Titanic 24 times in a row. Round ball fans, meanwhile, could travel to Doha by car to prepare for their football holidays at the next World Cup. While regular readers could read 2,340 of the 4,200 pages of A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust, according to TomTom. Or spend 78 hours in traffic jams in Brussels.
The Dutch giant, specialized in the manufacture of software and GPS for the automotive industry, has just published its balance sheet for the year 2021. With a hardly surprising finding: Brussels remains the most congested city in the country. Despite a coronavirus pandemic that forced a large part of the population to telecommute, motorists lost, on average, almost 78 hours in Brussels traffic jams in 2021. This means that the average travel time for a trip to the capital is on average 34% more than the ideal route. Either the one that travels at the maximum allowed speed, without car congestion. “During rush hour, motorists who have to make a 30-minute journey take an average of 17 minutes longer”, precise TomTom.
A congestion rate that now places Brussels on the 52nd place of the most congested cities in the world. And first in Belgium. Antwerp (59 hours lost; 116th world city) and Leuven (50 hours; 192nd world city) complete this unenviable podium in Belgium. Then follow, in order, Liège (48h), Ghent (46h), Namur (41h), Bruges (41h), Kortrijk (32h), Charleroi (29h) and Mons (29h).
Figures up in 2021 compared to 2020 but which are mainly explained by the lockdown from March to May 2020 during which, according to the company Coyote, traffic had fallen some days to 1% of the usual traffic, in particular because non-essential travel had been banned.
Figures that are however down if we dwell on those of 2019, the last pre-covid reference year in terms of mobility. The average congestion rate – the extra time compared to a normal journey – recorded in Brussels that year was 38%, up from 34% in 2021.
Finally, it should be noted that Mons, which was ranked second among the most congested cities in Belgium in 2019, regained a more enviable tenth place in the TomTom ranking in 2021. It must be said that the Cité du Doudou had seen its figures skewed by the important works on the E42 that had required the passage on a single strip over the entire crossing of Mons, as well as by the accident of a tanker truck carrying chemicals, which had required the complete closure of the highway for more than 24 hours, sending all traffic back to the secondary network.
Brussels is not the most to complain about
If the Brussels capital is, quite logically, at the top of the Belgian ranking, it is still only on the 52nd place of the most congested cities in the world. In this little game, it is the city of Istanbul that takes the first place with an average congestion rate of 68%. In other words, a trip usually made in 30 minutes on a deserted road takes an average of 50 minutes. During rush hour, the same journey made by Les Stanbuliotes takes an average of 1h and 4 minutes. In the ranking of the most congested cities, Istanbul is ahead of the Russian capital of Moscow and its Ukrainian counterpart of Kiev.
Conversely, at the very bottom of the ranking, it is Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, which is designated the least congested city in the world – out of the 404 analyzed by Tom Tom – with an average congestion rate of barely 7%. Every year, only one day seems to be problematic: that of the Muslim pilgrimage. Mons and Charleroi, the best Belgian cities analyzed by TomTom, rank 25th among the least congested cities in the world.