[Post written by me, in partnership with TomTom]
How busy are your roads?
…Find out with the TomTom Traffic Index! I actually really love driving, especially when it’s country roads and to new places. Driving around Brighton isn’t as much fun as there is so much traffic and a lot of hazards in the form of crazy pedestrians that leap out at you and a lot of moped drivers that just care about getting to their next delivery on time!
Much as I say I don’t really enjoy driving in the city I do actually have to do it quite a lot, driving from Worthing to Brighton to see clients, co-work with other freelancers and to take the kids to events in the city. Sam also spent the last few months working as a delivery driver in and around Brighton which he said was made so much easier with the TomTom Go as it often took him some abstract routes completely avoiding snarl ups and break downs.
TomTom have been creating their Traffic Index for the past eight years, and it acts as a hub of information for drivers, car manufacturers, road planners and policy makers as it gives them a whole host of unbiased stats and info about the congestion levels of cities in 57 countries! Due to the increase in people using GPS to navigate around the stats are even more accurate and detailed.
The techy stuff that goes into how TomTom create their database of results is actually pretty clever, but in basic terms a congestion level of 34% means that the extra travel time is 34% more than an average trip would take during uncongested conditions.
So Brighton and Hove for the last year ranked 62nd in the world charts, and was 47 the year before, although the congestion level remained the same. Basically around twenty other cities got more congested than Brighton, which retained the same levels of traffic-jams and slow traffic! It makes perfect sense to me, as I sometimes sit in those jams when it gets really busy!
If you want to find out how your city is doing you can find out in the TomTom Traffic Report for yourself, or perhaps if you are planning a road trip any time soon you can find out the lowdown on what the local traffic will be like, and which are the busiest days and times on the roads there! They get yourself a TomTom Go to help beat the jams – I wouldn’t be without mine now. I even use it on local journeys in my own town, I tell it where to go with the voice controls and it takes me there!
Is your city better or worse than you expected? How does your city compare to Brighton?