Brisbane traffic congestion ranked 10th worst in world but experts question ‘black box’ analysis
Share:
Academics say traffic scorecard uses ‘rogue metric’ which may make Brisbane’s congestion appear as bad as Los Angeles and Jakarta. Brisbane ranks among the world’s most congested cities – ahead of sprawling megacities like Bangkok and well in front of Sydney and Melbourne – according to a transport analytics report.
But experts have cast doubt on the methodology of INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard, which compares travel times when roads are empty in the middle of the night with speeds at peak hour to calculate what it calls “delay”. “This is a rogue metric,” said Matt Burke of the Griffith University Cities Research Institute.
“INRIX scores are a bit of a black box. You don’t quite know exactly how they’re calculating this.”. According to the report, an average Brisbane driver lost about 84 hours to congestion in 2024, an increase of 14% on 2023. That ranks the city as the world’s tenth most congested, behind Istanbul (105 hours), New York (102 hours) and London (101 hours).
Melbourne had the country’s second-worst congestion, at 65 hours, followed by Sydney, 51 hours. Perth (42 hours), the Gold Coast (40 hours), Newcastle (39 hours) and Adelaide (30 hours) were also measured. Auckland was the region’s third-most congested, losing 63 hours per driver to congestion.
