A minute in New York isn’t as quick as you think.
The Big Apple is currently ranked the worst city for congestion in the United States – with drivers traveling an average of just 12 miles per hour during rush hour, according to recently released data.
In total, New Yorkers have to endure 236 hours — or 10 full days — stuck in rush-hour traffic a year, according to the TomTom Traffic Index, which tracks traffic jams in major cities around the world.
Annual data, released last month, shows it took nearly 25 minutes on average for motorists in New York City to travel just six miles last year – a 90-second increase from 2021, when workers were returning slowly in the office after the COVID-19 closures.
Still, some New Yorkers have scoffed at the data – insisting they are actually crawling much slower in the lockdown city.
“Average of 20 km/h during rush hour? It’s less than that,” Grzegorz Heichel, 43, told The Post in Midtown on Monday.
Heichel, who works in the hardwood flooring business and constantly drives between construction sites, said it took him 3.5 hours to drive the 57 miles from Manhattan to his home in Chester, NJ on Friday. .
“I’m in my car 10 hours a day, all over Manhattan, and I can tell you the traffic is really bad,” he said, adding that it’s worst around the Holland Tunnel and between 42nds. and 44th streets.
Repairman Shawn Duncan, 51, said he was stuck in his car for 2.5 hours on his overnight commute from Manhattan to Stamford, CT.
“Traffic in New York is hectic. It’s awful,” he told the Post.
“It’s the best city in the world, but for drivers it’s horrible.”
According to Duncan, the worst place to get caught in a bottleneck is the Queensboro Bridge.
“I’ve been driving here for 16 years. The traffic is getting worse. Every year there are more cars on the road,” he said.
According to the data, the Big Apple’s bad congestion was closely followed by Washington, DC, where it took drivers about 20 minutes to cover six miles at an average speed of 14 mph.
San Francisco was third with an average rush hour speed of 15 mph. There, it takes drivers about 20 minutes to cover six miles.
Boston and Chicago’s average rush hour speed was equal to 16 mph, according to the figures.
In Boston, it takes a driver 19 minutes to drive six miles. It takes an average of 18 minutes for a Chicago driver to travel the same distance, according to the data.
New York officials have weighed imposing a congestion toll on cars entering Manhattan below 60th Street in hopes of reducing overall traffic.
