According to the statistics published by TomTom, traffic in San Jose hasn’t got any worse since 2014. The bad news about it is that it was horrible in 2014 and still is. The traffic in San Jose adds 30% of the travel time making it the 5th most congested city in the country and 51st in the world.
This data has been gathered through GPS equipment installed in personal vehicles around the world. According to the findings, California has three of the most congested cities in the United States: in addition to San Jose, Los Angeles is on the top of the list (and also the 10th most congested city in the world), and San Francisco is the 2nd. But still, comparing to San Francisco, morning and afternoon traffic in San Jose is worse, and that is actually what really counts.
Specific times of day make San Jose’s traffic far worse.
Morning commute in San Jose is the 2nd worst in the United States after Los Angeles, and afternoon commute is the 3rd with Los Angeles being the 2nd. San Jose is also one of the cities where traffic remained constant over a period of one year.
In the six cities congestion got worse. These cities are Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Nashville. In five cities traffic situation got better. For instance, travel time decreased by 3% in Honolulu.
Still, congestion in San Jose is not the worst in the world. The first position in the international congestion list belongs to Mexico City where the added time is 59%. It goes up 4% every year. Morning and afternoon traffic there is truly awful with the added time of 97% and 94%. Other cities on the list are Bangkok, Istanbul and Lodz, Poland.
Yeah, I remember taking a trip to San Jose and the traffic was horrendous! Especially during rush hour! It took ages for us to get anywhere!
Traffic in San Jose is awful. I thought for sure they were number one. I thought it was worse than Los Angeles and San Francisco. I wonder what they are doing to combat the problem and what the true bottleneck is here? I am not a traffic engineer by any means but it is population increase? Queueing models need to be reevaluated? If the GPS in personal cars is evaluated which cities are the worst you’d think they’d start figuring out WHY and then solving some of these congestion issues. I think it’s awesome you provide these articles to us! Super helpful and interesting to read these statistics on San Jose and other cities around us. Keep it up!
While I live on the East Coast and have never been to California, it doesn’t surprise me that San Jose, among other Californian cities, ranks so high in traffic congestion. In Baltimore and Washington, DC, there are also severe problems with traffic congestion that have only worsened in recent years because more and more people opt to live outside of the city in wealthier suburbs with better education systems, but to work at white-collar jobs within the cities. Thus, the “daily rush” of white-collar workers from the wealthier suburbs into the cities creates the bulk of the traffic congestion. I wonder if this is also the case in San Jose and other Californian cities. Ride-sharing and better, cheaper public transportation options would be ways to reduce the traffic, but both are difficult to implement on a large scale. People are often wary about ride-sharing, thinking of it as potentially dangerous (when ride-shares are organized with strangers over the internet) and an inconvenience to organize. Ideally, better and cheaper public transportation networks would extend to the suburbs, but the cost of creating these networks would be astronomical.
In San Jose, I think it’s the opposite. People are coming from cheaper areas to work instead of wealthier.