How bad is traffic right now? Bad enough that the typical American driver lost roughly two full workweeks to congestion this year.
A new Global Traffic Scorecard from transportation analytics firm INRIX paints a picture of growing gridlock: the average U.S. commuter spent 49 hours stuck in traffic in 2025 — six hours more than in 2024 — and congestion cost the country about $85 billion in lost time and productivity. That’s roughly $894 per driver on average; in the worst-hit city, Chicago, drivers lost 112 hours and about $2,063 each.
The numbers that sting
INRIX tracked traffic in nearly 1,000 cities across 36 countries. Highlights that matter for anyone who drives:
- 62% of urban areas worldwide saw congestion increase in 2025, while just 26% improved.
- U.S. drivers together lost an estimated 4.7 billion hours to traffic — the equivalent of about 2.2 million full-time jobs, using a 2,080-hour work year.
- Beyond time, INRIX applies an economic value to lost hours (based on federal guidance) to arrive at those dollar totals.
Those statistics aren’t abstract. They show up as later commutes, higher fuel and repair bills, and fewer hours for family, side gigs or sleep.
Chicago: the new national bottleneck
Chicago overtook New York as the city with the worst congestion in the country. Drivers there averaged 112 lost hours — more than double the national average. Much of the pressure stems from airport- and highway-related snarls: O'Hare’s surrounding corridors have ballooned in volume, forcing planners to reconsider timelines for airport renovations, and annual increases have become a political headache.
Other cities rounding out the top five were New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Boston. Baltimore and Philadelphia stand out for seeing the sharpest year-over-year increases: both cities reported congestion surging by 31%.
Notable corridors and local stories
Certain stretches of highway promise misery most mornings and evenings. INRIX named both directions of I-95 near Stamford, Connecticut, as the busiest corridor in the country, followed by I-278 in New York and I-4 near Orlando. Locally, Portland-area commuters lost about 41 hours to traffic this year, placing the city 25th nationally and 113th globally; for Portlanders that’s nearly two days spent behind the wheel and an estimated per-driver cost around $755.
What’s helping — and what isn’t
New York’s congestion pricing program, rolled out recently, is widely credited with dampening what might otherwise have been a worse showing. The scorecard suggests policy choices can move the needle — though not overnight. Investments in transit, smarter freight scheduling, and demand-management tools make a measurable difference over time.
Technology nudges are arriving, too. Navigation and mapping services are getting smarter about routing and multimodal options; some commuters are already combining live routing with voice-driven assistants to avoid bottlenecks. If you want to experiment with better navigation, new features in mapping apps are worth a look — for example, developments like a conversational navigation copilot aim to make reroutes and real-time choices easier for drivers and transit users alike (Google Maps gets Gemini AI copilot).
How people cope on the ground
Not everyone expects traffic to vanish. Many drivers are pragmatic: leave earlier, follow live traffic alerts, and treat the jam as time to catch up on podcasts or an audiobook. If you’re a commuter who relies on audio to make gridlock less painful, the improvements to podcast players and auto-generated chapters can make shows easier to navigate while driving (Apple Podcasts improvements). And yes, a good pair of wireless earbuds makes long delays less maddening — think AirPods for clear call quality and noise control (AirPods).
Transit advocates note that fixing congestion is not only an engineering problem. Some suggestions readers and planners keep returning to: better coordination between freight and peak-hour passenger flows, faster and more reliable public transit, targeted congestion pricing, and tactical fixes like ramp metering and dedicated bus lanes.
Traffic also affects safety. Local reporting from Chicago has tied worsening congestion to a rise in serious incidents on expressways — an unwanted reminder that gridlock isn’t merely inconvenient; it raises real risks for drivers and first responders.
A slow-moving crisis
This year’s scorecard is a reminder that the era of steadily falling commute times is over in many places. For drivers, the options are familiar and imperfect: change travel times, shift to transit, accept higher costs, or push for policy and infrastructure changes.
City planners, employers and tech companies all have roles to play. Employers can stagger shifts or support remote work; cities can pilot pricing and transit upgrades; tech makers can keep refining routing and multimodal planning. Until then, drivers will keep searching for the quietest lane, the best podcast episode and — sometimes — a bit of patience.