While we might typically associate the hustle and bustle of Delhi, Mumbai, or Bengaluru with India's troublesome traffic, these aren't, in fact, the cities bearing the brunt of the country's slowest traffic. The spotlight for such dubious honors, according to a recent report, belongs to Kolkata, Bhiwandi, and Arrah. This surprising revelation was made in a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), USA, that analyzed global traffic speeds. 

Slowest Traffic Cities Unveiled 

The study, summarized in the report titled 'The Fast, the Slow and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich And Poor Countries', examined over 1,200 cities across 152 nations. Kolkata, Bhiwandi, and Arrah figured amongst the top 10 cities around the world with the slowest traffic. It's noteworthy that the research utilized data sourced from Google Maps between June 13 and November 5, 2019, exploring traffic in cities with a populace exceeding 3,00,000. 

Indian Cities Ranking in Slow Traffic in Bengaluru

An interesting point is that Bhiwandi comes up as the 5th slowest city globally, followed by Kolkata and Arrah at the 6th and 7th spots respectively. In some further surprises, Mumbai stood at the 13th position while Bengaluru wasn't far away at 19. Shillong completed the list at 20. 

"For our three most populous countries, India, the US, and Indonesia, we collected 66 million, 57 million and 13 million trip instances in 173, 121 and 29 cities respectively." - National Bureau of Economic Research

Country-Wise Uncongested Speeds 

The study also pointed out that nine of the ten cities encountering the slowest uncongested speeds are within Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria. 

Highway to Congestion 

When it comes to traffic congestion, Bengaluru occupies the 8th position among the world's top 20 congested cities, with Mumbai at 13 and Delhi taking the 20th spot. This aligns with a similar study by the TomTom Traffic Index, which identified Bengaluru as the world's second most congested city in 2022. The same research indicated Bengaluru as fourth in the number of hours lost due to rush-hour traffic, with Pune being the second-most congested city in India, at a global rank of 6. 

The TomTom study discovered that in 2022, it took an average of 27 minutes and 20 seconds to cover a distance of just 10 km in a car in Pune, and 29 minutes and 10 seconds in Bengaluru, revealing how seriously congestion impinges daily life.

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