Drivers in the D.C. area spent more time stuck in traffic in 2025 than the year before, according to datafrom the analytics firm INRIX.
The average driver in D.C. lost 70 hours to traffic in 2025, which the company calculates by looking at the difference between peak and off-peak congestion. That’s a 13 percent increase from last year’s 62 hours, according to the report.
D.C. ranks as the 19th worst city for congestion in the world, higher than last year but below larger U.S. cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Boston. Across the world, traffic was also worse, with a few exceptions — London, New York, and Paris, all of which recently started limiting vehicle traffic in central urban districts. Five New York roads made the list of busiest corridors in 2024 — only one was still there in 2025. While those three large, dense cities remain among the most traffic-clogged, delays have fallen.
The phenomenon of induced demand is that in a busy, populous area, congestion on roads will always stay at about the same barely tolerable level. If roads are expanded, people will drive on them more often, until those roads get congested enough to scare some drivers away.
Bob Pishue, head of research at INRIX, said the same logic applies to transit — which helps explain why, even though the U.S. Census found that commuting by transit in the D.C. area has more than doubled in the past three years, car congestion also rose.
“There’s a push and pull” that causes congestion to stay at roughly the same level, he said: “As the trip gets easier, people start driving again.”
Even the government shutdown last month had no significant impact on congestion, according to INRIX’s data. The D.C. area has not yet seen car commuting reach its pre-pandemic numbers, Pishue said, which suggests that traffic is likely to keep increasing for several more years.
But, Pishue said, the cities where traffic is declining appear to show an emerging trend of cutting congestion by discouraging driving in certain areas.
Congestion is “the inevitable result of what happens in economically healthy places, with generally free roads,” said Robert Puentes, who leads research on local policies for the nonprofit Brookings Institution. “If there’s space, people will use the space.”
But charging people to drive in the most crowded areas, as New York and London have, or banning some vehicles altogether, as Paris has, can cut congestion.
But making that sustainable, Puentes said, requires giving people a transit alternative that is competitive with driving.
Virginia has imposed a form of congestion pricing on the Beltway via dynamically priced tolls, and 2½ new miles of toll road were added in late November. But Maryland has not agreed to continue the express lanes to their side of the ring road. Three of the five most congested corridors in the area are on the Beltway, Pishue said.
INRIX’s survey uses data from vehicles and devices on the road over the past two years, looking at the time it takes to complete the most common commute routes in an urban area. It relies on more recent data than a Consumer Affairs report earlier this year, which claimed Washington has the worst traffic in the country. That analysis looked at self-reported Census responses on commuting and fatal crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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