Dhaka is the slowest city in the world while Mymensingh and Chattogram have ranked 9th and 12th on the list of 20 slowest cities respectively, according to a new study that analyzed traffic in over 1,200 cities of 152 countries.
The study was published as a working paper titled "The fast, the slow, and the congested: urban transportation in rich and poor countries" by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
It placed Nigerian cities Lagos and Ikordu on the second and third on the list and Manila, the capital of Philippines, in fourth place. Neighbouring India has eight cities on the top 20 list.
Time magazine reports that a nine-mile trip from the airport in Dhaka, the bustling capital of Bangladesh, to Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed Park, near downtown, can take as long as 55 minutes while a trip of the same distance in Flint, Michigan, from the airport to the Sloan Museum of Discovery, takes about nine minutes, according to Google Maps.
Even at midnight, with few cars on the road, the trip in Dhaka—the slowest city in the world—is still 30 minutes, or three times as long as the trip in Flint in the USA, the world’s fastest.
The Flint has a speed index of 0.48 while the slowest Dhaka has an index of -0.60. All cities in Bangladesh are among the slowest 15% of world cities.
According to the study, the speed of travel in a city is only partially related to the amount of traffic on its roads. Other factors, such as the layout and quality of a city’s roads and natural obstacles like hills and rivers, play a significant role in how fast cars can drive. As a result, the study’s authors make a distinction between travel speed, a measure unaffected by traffic, and congestion, which is the interaction of speed and traffic.
“The slowest cities aren’t necessarily the most congested, and most congested aren’t the slowest,” says Prottoy Akbar, an economist at Aalto University in Finland and the lead author of the paper. The researchers used data from Google Maps to analyse traffic in more than 1,200 global cities with populations over 300,000.
Their data set excluded China and South Korea, because the app can’t collect data in those countries, while a few other cities, like Pyongyang, North Korea, were dropped because of unreliable data. They devised representative trips travelers would take in those cities—a commute from downtown to residential neighborhoods, for example, and or trips along the periphery from a home to a restaurant—and in 2019 ran millions of trips on the app, at different times of day and week. In India, for example, they collected data for 66 million trips; in the U.S. it was 57 million.
The fastest cities, according to the paper, are almost all mid-sized municipalities in the U.S.—like Flint, Memphis, and Wichita, Kans.—where highways are wide and plentiful. Of the 100 fastest cities in the world, 86 are in the U.S., including 19 of the top 20 (the exception is Windsor, Ontario, across the Canadian border from Detroit). Even relatively poor cities in wealthy countries are fast.
The slowest cities, like Dhaka, Lagos, and Manila, are almost all in the developing world where infrastructure hasn’t kept up with population. “All cities with the fastest speed or uncongested speed are in rich countries, and all the slowest cities are in poor countries,” the authors write.
A major takeaway from the study, Akbar says, is that different cities need different prescriptions to improve travel times. In Dhaka, where Akbar grew up, the municipal government spent a lot of energy trying to reduce the numbers of cars on the road, regulating things like the hours restaurants could be open and banning slower vehicles like bicycle rickshaws from highways. But “that just means that you could, at best, make the speeds in the middle of the day look like speeds in the middle of the night,” he said. “Those sorts of adjustments can only help so far.”
