It is the worst bottled city, and despite what you might think, it’s not Paris!
All motorists hate being stuck in traffic jams. Seeing the minutes scroll without advancing a meter, stuck in a line of vehicles that hob or force the passage, it is the assurance of arriving late, to waste fuel and to come in exhausted, even upset. Worse still, this endless expectation puts the nerves alive and transforms each trip into a real test, especially during rush hours when you have to go to work, leave it, or collect your children at school. A reality that affects many cities in France. But which one has the sad record of the worst traffic jams?
Most people would be tempted to answer “Paris”. But even if the capital is far from exemplary on the subject, today it does not appear in first place. Indeed, the latest 2024 ranking of the most bottled cities in France, led by the Société de Systems GPS Tomtom, Paris class in second position. The first place is coveted by a completely different metropolis, which has no less than 750,000 inhabitants. It is precisely in the southwest: it is Bordeaux.
According to the data collected by TomTom, it is in this city that we lose the most time in traffic jams. Between January and December 2024, a motorist spent an average of 113 hours in the traffic jams in downtown Bordeaux, enough to bring the average duration necessary to travel 10 km in this area at 31 minutes. Another detail and not the smallest: the journey time increases approximately 33 % when there are traffic jams compared to fluid circulation.
Behind Bordeaux and Paris, we find in the ranking of Marseille, Nice, Nantes, Lyon, Le Havre, Nancy, Rouen and finally Orléans, which closes the top 10 cities where it is better to avoid taking your car to move. Only two cities stand out with a slight improvement: Le Mans and Metz. There, motorists earned ten seconds to travel 10 km in the city center last year. A small victory, but a victory anyway!
