A New York minute is not as fast as you think.
The Big Apple is currently ranked the worst city for congestion across the US – with drivers traveling at an average of just 12 miles per hour during peak times, newly published data shows.
All up, New Yorkers are having to endure a whopping 236 hours – or 10 full days — stuck in rush-hour traffic per year, according to the TomTom Traffic Index, which tracks congestion in major cities across the world.
The annual data, published last month, shows it took nearly 25 minutes on average for motorists in New York to travel just six miles last year – a 90 second increase from 2021 when workers were slowly returning to the office from COVID-19 shutdowns.
Still, some New Yorkers scoffed at the data – insisting they’re actually crawling along much more slowly in the gridlocked city.
“Average of 12 mph in peak hour? It’s less than that,” Grzegorz Heichel, 43, told The Post in Midtown on Monday.
Heichel, who works in the hardwood floor business and is constantly driving between construction sites, said it took him 3.5 hours to get the 57 miles from Manhattan to his home in Chester, NJ on Friday.
“I’m in my car 10 hours a day, all over Manhattan, and I can tell you the traffic is very bad,” he said, adding it’s the worst around the Holland Tunnel and between 42nd and 44th streets.
Repairman Shawn Duncan, 51, said he is stuck in his car for 2.5 hours during his nightly commute from Manhattan to Stamford, CT.
“The traffic in New York City is hectic. It’s horrible,” he told The Post.
“It’s the best city on Earth, but for drivers it’s horrible.”
The worst place to get caught in a bottleneck, Duncan says, is the Queensboro Bridge.
“I’ve been driving here 16 years. Traffic is getting worse. Each year, there’s more cars on the road,” he said.
According to the data, the Big Apple’s bad congestion was followed closely by Washington, DC where it took drivers roughly 20 minutes to travel six miles at an average speed of 14 mph.
San Francisco was third with an average rush hour speed of 15 mph. There, it takes drivers about 20 minutes to get six miles.
Boston and Chicago’s average peak hour speed was tied at 16 mph, the figures show.
In Boston, it takes 19 minutes for a driver to get six miles. It takes a Chicago driver, on average, 18 minutes to get the same distance, the data shows.
Officials in New York have been weighing imposing a congestion toll on cars entering Manhattan below 60th Street in hopes of reducing overall traffic.
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