Despite all the congestion I am exposed to in İstanbul, I still remember LA’s congestion, which prevented me from visiting the city as many times as I desired (while staying in Irvine, CA).
The Zag Daily piece reports that Istanbul ranks as the world’s most congested city in the latest Global Traffic Scorecard published by the mobility analytics firm INRIX, with drivers losing around 118 hours in traffic and congestion worsening compared with the previous year. This continues a pattern in which INRIX data have repeatedly placed Istanbul at or near the top globally for time lost in congestion.zagdaily+4
Other congestion rankings
Different organizations use different metrics and sometimes produce different “most congested city” lists. For example, TomTom’s Traffic Index also tracks congestion worldwide and has in some years ranked Istanbul as the city with the worst congestion, but in other years it has placed Istanbul lower in the global table while still identifying it as one of the worst-affected cities. So the truth of the headline is tied specifically to INRIX’s methodology and year, rather than an absolute, universal ranking across all data sources.cittimagazine+3
INRIX defines “hours lost” in 2024 as the extra time a typical driver spends in congestion during peak commuting periods compared with driving in free‑flow, off‑peak conditions.inrix+2
Core elements of the 2024 methodology
INRIX uses anonymized GPS probe data to measure actual speeds on the busiest commuting corridors in each urban area during morning and evening peaks, and compares these with speeds during uncongested, free‑flow periods (typically overnight).ftnnews+1
For each city, it computes travel times on typical commute routes at peak vs free‑flow, takes the difference as “delay,” and aggregates this delay over the year on a per‑driver basis to produce the annual “hours lost” figure.inrix+1
The analysis spans more than one year of data (around 22–36 months) to capture trends, and “impact rank” then weights these hours lost by city size to create the overall congestion ranking.inrix+1
Which Istanbul corridors contributed most to the 105 hours loss?
INRIX does not publicly list specific named corridors for Istanbul in the summary material that reports the 105 hours lost, so the exact ranking of individual routes is not available without access to the full paid scorecard.inrix+2
What is known from related studies
The Istanbul city scorecard shows aggregate peak, off‑peak, and “last mile” speeds, but the public dashboard only labels a generic “busiest corridor” without naming or mapping it in detail.inrix
Independent academic and media analyses of 2024 congestion and accident delays consistently highlight Istanbul’s main trunk routes—D‑100 (E‑5), the TEM (O‑2) motorway, and key coastal roads—as the primary locations where peak‑hour accidents and recurring congestion generate much of the time loss.dailysabah+1
Plausible main contributors (not INRIX‑official)
Given INRIX’s methodology (measuring delay on the most frequented commute routes) and the spatial pattern of traffic and crashes, the D‑100/E‑5, TEM/O‑2, Bosphorus crossing approaches, and inner‑city coastal corridors are almost certainly among the main contributors to the 105 hours, but this is an inference from other datasets, not an explicit list in the INRIX publication.hispanatolia+2
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