Los Angeles Paces Field in Congestion

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The L.A. metro area has topped a list of the world’s most gridlocked urban areas, according to a recent report.

Area motorists spent an average of 104 hours in congestion during peak traffic periods last year, according to the 2016 Global Traffic Scorecard from Inrix, a Kirkland, Wash.-based provider of connected car services and transportation analytics.

That put Los Angeles ahead of No. 2 Moscow (91 hours a year in congestion); New York (89); San Francisco (83); and Bogota, Colombia (80). The United States had 11 of the 25 worst cities around the globe.

“Los Angeles drivers spend more time in congestion compared to anywhere else in the world due to a mixture of factors, including significant population growth, a high employment rate, high productivity and lack of alternative public transportation options,” Bob Pishue, senior economist with Inrix, said in a statement.

The firm has compiled the traffic congestion scorecard for nine years and 2016 was the first in which the average number of hours L.A. drivers spent trapped in peak congestion broke the century mark, hitting 104. (Exact figures from previous years were not released because Inrix changed the metrics and parameters for this year’s survey.) Those hours cost each driver $2,400 in fuel, wasted time, and other costs, resulting in a cumulative cost of $9.6 billion a year, the report said.

If it’s any consolation, Angelenos only spent about 13 percent of their total drive time in congestion, way behind Moscow (25 percent) and Bogota (31 percent), though on a par with New York and San Francisco.

Only one L.A.-area highway made the list of the 10 most-congested roads in the United States: the stretch of the 10 freeway between the 110 and 405. The most congested was Interstate 95 in the Bronx, New York.

– Howard Fine

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