Twenty-seven minutes! That's how long it takes you on average to cover a distance of 10 kilometres by car in Brussels. The figure comes from Dutch navigation company TomTom and their annual traffic report. This makes Brussels the tenth most congested city worldwide.
For the thirteenth time, navigation company TomTom released its annual car traffic index. It’s a report that provides insights on traffic trends in 387 cities in 55 countries. TomTom bases this Traffic Index on data from more than 600 million navigation systems and smartphones.
Based on all this data, TomTom has compiled a ranking of cities that were most affected by traffic jams in 2023. Brussels stands on tenth place in this global ranking. In Europe Brussels even takes fifth place, after London, Dublin, Milan and Bucharest.
104 hours in traffic jams
The ranking only takes into account traffic in city centres, which in Brussels coincides with the regional borders. Within these, it takes motorists an average of 27 minutes to cover a distance of 10 kilometres, up 20 seconds from 2022. That year, 14 November proved to be the day with the greatest congestion: it took a car driver 33 minutes and 10 seconds to cover 10 kilometres.
Of the 257 hours the average motorist spent on Brussels roads in 2023, 104 were spent in traffic jams. That's four days and eight hours or the time it takes to read 51 books, according to TomTom. Car traffic was especially slow on Thursdays between 5pm and 6pm.
Average speed: 18km/h
The average speed on Brussels roads in 2023 was barely 18km/h i.e. as fast as a bicycle or electric scooter, in other words. "More than half the world's population lives in cities. Traffic jams have a huge economic, ecological and health impact. We urgently need to find solutions" says Ralf-Peter Schäfer, deputy director of TomTom’s traffic department.