Toronto's brutal traffic congestion is among the worst in new worldwide ranking

Toronto may be a city of people who love to complain, but when it comes to our congestion issues, motorists are not exaggerating.

Our traffic woes have been so bad as of late that we now have an entire task force dedicated to trying to find solutions — which could include charging non-locals for driving downtown — and we've also landed high up on multiple international rankings for gridlock.

The latest comes from Inrix, a transportation analytics company that inspected three years of road data to narrow down the busiest and most frustrating places to drive in the world.

Of course, cities like New York, London and Los Angeles were found to have the highest overall traffic delay times — but Toronto, unfortunately, wasn't very far down the list.

Drivers in T.O. spend more time navigating bottlenecks than any other city in Canada, and we're eighth on the list of places with the most traffic delays in the Americas. Graph from Inrix.

The 6ix was ranked the worst in Canada, the eighth-worst in the Americas, and the 17th-worst on the entire globe for traffic headaches. Thanks to the city's clogged arteries, the average person wasting an estimated 63 unnecessary hours behind the wheel over the course of 2023.

Our delays are worse than those in all but one city in Oceania (Brisbane, where residents spend about 74 extra hours driving in traffic) and Africa (Cape Town, where this figure is 83 hours).

Local motorists also fare slightly better here than in the Asian cities of Istanbul (91 hours) and Jakarta (65 hours), and than quite a few European locales, including Paris (97 hours), Dublin (72 hours) and Rome (69 hours), though our time in traffic outpaced the average for any continent.

Chart of the worst places for congestion in 2023 from Inrix.

But, time squandered on the road wasn't the only metric assessed — overall driving speed in each city's downtown core, and increases over time also factored in, giving Toronto its ranking of 17 (worse than our 2022 ranking of 21).

The firm noted that Toronto is among the metropolises that "moved up significantly" last year from the year prior, with a double-digit increase of 21 per cent.

A different study earlier this year gave the city an even worse assessment, putting us third-worst for traffic out of 387 cities analyzed.