I have read that the streets of Stockholm are the most clogged of nordic cities in rush hour about 33 % of Stockholm streets are jammed.

Oslo second place 28% Helsinki 19% and Copenhagen only 14 %

Howcome copenhagen streets are not that clogged at rush hour, it's the most dense bulilt and populated city in scandinavia. Maybe partly because of the bicycling habit ?

Any statistics from Amsterdam or other cities where bicycling is common.

How is the percentage of streets with filled queues at rush hour for Manhattan or Los Angeles ?

^^ It depends on how hierarchized are the streets in a city, which is ties to city morfology.

Some cities have, for practical matters, a clear traffic hierarchy in which some streets carry the "core" traffic. That might be due to geography, how one-way streets are organized, if there are many bridges or other big interferences etc. When that is the case, back streets will be less congested.

% of congested streets is not really an useful information.

Amsterdam, for instance, is not particularly congested, because small streets are not good substitutes for regular congested thoroughfares.

Los Angeles also experience a similar trend: internal streets in the neighborhoods are rarely, if ever, congested. Manhattan, OTOH, have many streets congested or slow moving because there is less of an hierarchy of traffic on the streets of Manhattan.

Geography is the largest reason why Stockholm is so congested, the city is built on islands and to get between the islands you need to drive in the major roads that have bridges. Those roads do get congested.

This is a fact in Stockholm, you dont drive to or through the city during rushour. You take the train or the metro.

This is a fact in Stockholm, you dont drive to or through the city during rushour. You take the train or the metro.

If that were the case, there wouldn't be congestion after all :|

Copenhagen has the widest avenues of Scandinavia. The city feels big and the HC Andersen blvd in particular is the main artery for the traffic flow.

The Stockholm counterpart "Sveavägen" is narrower and can not handle the amount of through north-south traffic at rush hour, so congestion occurs.'

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4184/kpenhamn.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/kpenhamn.jpg/)
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/1995/36117282.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/705/36117282.jpg/)

The HC Andersen Blvd; (photo from 2003) a very wide blvd by scandinavian messaures. Not like the avenida 6 junio of Buenos Aires but still wide !
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/2484/stockholmp.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/713/stockholmp.jpg/)
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/9302/36109791.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/820/36109791.jpg/)


Sveavägen (photo 2009) ^^

http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/5685/51038030.jpg (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/854/51038030.jpg/)

Congested street at rush hour, Stockholm in 2001^^

Copenhagen has the widest avenues of Scandinavia. The city feels big and the HC Andersen blvd in particular is the main artery for the traffic flow.

The Stockholm counterpart "Sveavägen" is narrower and can not handle the amount of through north-south traffic at rush hour, so congestion occurs.'


The HC Andersen Blvd; (photo from 2003) a very wide blvd by scandinavian messaures. Not like the avenida 6 junio of Buenos Aires but still wide !


Plus Sveavägen isnt really usable unless you are going north. In Copenhagen it seems like all streets are usable while in Stockholm there are to many one way streets and forbidden left/right turns. Its like the traffic planners have already decided where you should go and left you with a minimum of decisions to make yourself.

If that were the case, there wouldn't be congestion after all :|

Sadly a lot of people make stupid decisions of where to live and then they complain about traffic.

Brussels was the most congested city in the whole of Europe last year.

Brussels named most congested city in Europe

http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/TomTom-map_thumb.jpg

Congested road conditions are a bane in the lives of any of us concerned about saving fuel and money. With that in mind then Brussels will be the city to avoid, according to a new study from the sat nav peps at TomTom.
The Belgian capital topped the traffic study as the most congested city in Europe, with Warsaw in Poland in second place. Sadly for Brussels, the congestion seems to be getting worse too, with a 1.2 per cent increase in traffic since 2010.

The study also brings gloomy traffic news for the UK. Bustling capital city London – in spite of a 0.2 per cent decrease in traffic – climbs up the rankings to take third place in the most congested city list, while Edinburgh and Manchester both feature in the top ten. In fact, a total of 16 UK cities feature in the top 50 – making the UK undoubtedly 2011′s most gridlocked European country.
But it’s not all bad news. Six of the continent’s most congested cities have significantly reduced traffic since 2010. Polish city Warsaw has seen a 2.6 per cent drop, moving it down to fourth place out of 50. Meanwhile, Toulouse in France has reduced congestion by an impressive 1.9 per cent, making it fifth in the rankings with 33 per cent of roads congested in the city.
Where to escape the traffic
In comparison, the German city of Cologne sits at the bottom of the top 50; only 18.9% of its roads are congested. But Germany still features six times in the overall list.
The data shows that you’ll have the most stress-free trip in Spain, Switzerland, Norway, Hungary, Ireland or the Czech Republic, each of which has only one city in the top 50.
The most positive change of all has been made by Ireland. While Belfast still sits at number 12, there has been a reduction of 2 per cent in traffic congestion over the last year. And Capital city Dublin has reduced its traffic by a staggering 9.7 per cent since 2010 – although at 24.2 per cent, it’s still got some way to go to beat traffic-efficient Cologne.
The research was based on TomTom’s real travel times database, compiled over years of researching and tracking road speeds with the help of millions of TomTom users worldwide. The cities were ranked according to how fast cars can travel on the street network. A city’s traffic is defined as congested if drivers can travel at only 70 per cent or less of the posted speed limit, meaning that an hour-long commute would include 20 minutes or more of significant delays.

source:
http://www.thegreencarwebsite.co.uk/blog/index.php/2011/06/14/brussels-named-most-congested-city-in-europe/

other articles on this issua:

http://www.inautonews.com/brussels-the-most-congested-city-uk-most-congested-country
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/06/brussels-remains-europes-most-congested-city.html
http://www.leftlanenews.com/tomtom-names-brussels-europes-most-congested-city-uk-takes-home-title-of-most-congested-country.html
http://www.autoviva.com/news/brussels_most_congested_city_in_europe/1348

This street is by far the most congested inside the city center of Brussels. It has four to five lanes in one direction and it's congest from the morning untill the evening when people go home...


Wetstraat/ Rue de la Loi:

http://www.dilbeekrand.be/2010/images/stories/2010/wetstraat.jpg
http://www.dilbeekrand.be/2010/images/stories/2010/wetstraat.jpg

http://www.bralvzw.be/files/wetstraat_copyright_wie.jpg?1284041956
http://www.bralvzw.be/files/wetstraat_copyright_wie.jpg?1284041956

This tunnel feeds the Wetstraat with traffic coming from R0, Brussels outer ringroad, traffic coming towards you on this pic is coming from Rue de Beillard/ Beillardstraat, a similar street like the Wetstraat running next to the Wetstraat in opposit direction.
Brussels has many urban highways running underneath the city. If this was not the case, traffic would be even worse.

http://penguinfive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Cinquantenaire-tunnel-rue-de-la-loi-heavy-traffic.jpg
http://penguinfive.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Cinquantenaire-tunnel-rue-de-la-loi-heavy-traffic.jpg

Sadly a lot of people make stupid decisions of where to live and then they complain about traffic.

AFAIK, transportation infrastructure (trains, highways, bike lanes, whatever) exist to take people from where they live to where they want to go. It is not like it were 1880 when you had to move to a slum next to the factory where you worked at.

AFAIK, transportation infrastructure (trains, highways, bike lanes, whatever) exist to take people from where they live to where they want to go. It is not like it were 1880 when you had to move to a slum next to the factory where you worked at.

Of course, but if you buy a house in an outer suburb 100 km from the city you should know that you might have to spend a couple of hours commuting to work every day.

Why is traffic so bad in Brussels?

Warsaw due to lack of motorways?

Why is traffic so bad in Brussels?

It may only have 1 million habitants but hundreds of thousand people travel everyday to Brussels for work. That, in combination with those people living in one of the most suburban regions in the world due to very bad planning (meaning out of reach from good public transport) results in Brussels city center and motorways around it getting clogged up USA style every working day again...

This guy films police cars in Brussels and I guess it's at a random hour of the day at random places, just look at the traffic...

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Tourist video, make me thinking about Paris :)

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Bruxelles has some caveats of itself, like language issues, to top problems like schools perceived as bad (usually because of high concentration of immigrant - e.g., non-Dutch/non-French speaking, no parental involvement, male teens from conservative families lashing out at girls as if revealing clothing made them ok to be bullied etc), an urban environment less cared for, and pockets of poverty/unintegrated immigrant communities.

Then, you have around Bruxelles all these small municipalities typical of Belgium: very small in area, thus easier to become more middle-class friendly. These municipalities often will not allow social housing to be built, and have more lax planning laws, allowing people to build their own homes to their taste, something more difficult in Bruxelles itself.

Thus, Bruxelles becomes a dominated by either the richest and the poorest ones in the metro area. That shouldn't be a problem (Amsterdam, for instance, suffers the same fate), but Bruxelles lacks more freeways to easy the traffic, and it hadn't invested much in creating important secondary employment centers as other European cities of similar sizes have.

From time to time, you hear or read Bruxelles' officials complaining of the increasing share of people working there but not living there.

I found Paris to be very jammed. I also got a traffic jam in the Barcelona's Ronda de Circunvalacion out from the rush hour, but its avenues look to flow. Rome got very congested streets and alleys like Buenos Aires.

Chicago gets extremely jammed on the motorway and tollway networks, but within the city the surface streets normally don't get extremely jammed except for some main ones.

In the suburbs you get more jammed surface streets because everyone tends to drive. There are many different levels of streets though. Residential, feeder streets, main roads and then motorways. The first two levels will almost never ever be jammed or very busy.

Sheffield, UK isn't a very big city but at rush hour, the congestion is just awful! I think its mainly due to the fact that there has been too much traffic calming done to the roads. Several of the main roads within the city have been down graded to make it more pedestrian friendly, but at the cost of making car traffic a lot worse! Also there has been a lot of truncating of roads which then means that traffic from side streets all feeds into the same road which then gets very busy...

Arundle Gate is a good example of this...It was (opened in 1960s) a large grade separated dual carriageway, it was pretty much an urban motorway. Pedestrians would use underpasses...

But now with bus lanes, turning lanes and flats junctions the road is a lot smaller and traffic builds up a lot faster...

This is how it looks now...I personally think they have over complicated it with all the lines and restrictions...

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3286/3145174593_17b034bc62_z.jpg

Here is Arundle Gate before openings...

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x48/poshbakerloo/ArundelGate4.jpg

One of the large junctions...and underpasses...

http://i181.photobucket.com/albums/x48/poshbakerloo/ArundelGate5.jpg