Overview
If you've inched along Parramatta Road at 8am midweek quietly wishing doom on reams of red blinking car butts, hoping the breakfast studio shenanigans of triple j's Matt and Alex will distract you from pummelling your own steering wheel in the face; we've got a spot of bad news for you. It ain't getting better anytime soon.
Making the biggest argument for riding your bike to work in recent times, new data published in the Sydney Morning Herald shows Sydney traffic is the worst in the country, particularly on Wednesdays. We've also got some of the worst congestion in the world.
GPS company TomTom used their own technology to find out what the blazes was up with our global tendency for jammin'. Tracking 92 million vehicle kilometres worth of GPS information from mobile devices (alongside live traffic streams) over 2012-2013, TomTom deduced that your average Sydney driver sat in their four-wheeler for 34 per cent longer than the trip would take without any other cars on the road. That's 38 minutes longer an hour than you should be — almost 90 hours a year. That's a whole bunch of podcasts.
Wednesday mornings took out the horribly-earned title of worst time to be driving in Sydney during the week, with Friday night coming in a close second. Weirdly enough, if you're running late on a Friday morning the roads will be the clearest.
Melbourne and Perth aren't rolling in glory either, recording average congestion levels of 27 per cent. Brisbane breathes a little easier with drivers spending 23 per cent longer than they'd need to on the road to work.
So who are the biggest offenders in Sydney? SMH reported that Newtown's snail trail Princes Highway to King Street made the cut, with its CBD sisters City Road and Broadway confirming their Tetris-like squalor. Military Road between Neutral Bay and Manly (including the hideously congested Spit Bridge), Old South Head Road in the Eastern Suburbs, the Eastern distributor south of Moore Park Road, just the tip of the M4, the south part of Lady Game Drive and the monarch of jams, Parramatta Road.
With recent developments in new Sydney bike lanes, hubs and technology, there's never been a better time to start cycling.
Via SMH. Image by by Alborz Fallah.