Louisville traffic among most congested in U.S.

A national traffic-congestion study ranked Louisville as the 36th worst city in the United States, which will probably come as no surprise to Louisville commuters. It's also the 128th worst on the international list.

The 2014 study by TomTom, a global company that is involved with mapping and navigation, specifically analyzed the increased traffic patterns within the evening rush hour, which TomTom data show is the most congested time of day.

Louisville public works spokesman Harold Adams said construction for the new downtown bridge, the new Spaghetti Junction interchange and utility work are contributing to the congestion.

"The Ohio River Bridges project, which will ultimately improve traffic flow in our community, has contributed to increased congestion during the ongoing construction," he said in a statement. "We expect congestion to fall below pre-construction levels once the bridges project is complete. We are also in a very active period of construction for utility upgrades and repairs that have coincided with the bridges project and (also) contributed to traffic congestion. Completion of the utility upgrades will also relieve traffic congestion."

Nearly every city with high levels of congestion can expect to double its congestion level during the evening rush hour. In fact, commuters around the world are spending an average of 12.5 working days per year stuck in traffic — compared to Louisville commuters who spend about 21 days — during the evening rush hour alone.

The 10 most congested U.S. cities in 2014 were, in order, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, New York, Seattle, San Jose, Miami, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Portland, Ore.

In the world, Istanbul is the worst followed by Mexico City; Rio de Janeiro; Moscow; Salvador, Brazil; Recife, Brazil; St. Petersburg, Russia; Bucharest, Romania; Warsaw, Poland; Los Angeles.

Key Louisville highlights from the 2014 TomTom Traffic Index include:

Louisville traffic congestion increased 4% .

Delay per 30-minute driven in peak period: 16 minutes.

Most congested day in 2014: December 4th .

Best weekly commute during peak period: Friday morning; Monday evening.

Worst weekly commute during peak period: Tuesday & Wednesday mornings; Thursday evening.

The TomTom study is one of several annual studies that look at congestion, with differing results, Larry Chaney, transportation division director for the Kentuckiana Regional Planning and Development Agency, said in a statement. Like Adams, he cited the bridges project as a factor in the TomTom results.

"A closer inspection of the rankings reveals that traffic congestion in Louisville is not much different than that in comparable cities, and construction of one of the largest highway construction projects in the United States (the Ohio River Bridges Project) is likely to have been a factor in the increase in delay over that of 2013," he said.

But delay-free travel at all times of the day isn't realistic either, Chaney said.

"Travel time delay is naturally to be expected in any situation where the peak hour traffic is at a higher volume than off-peak," he said. "It would be impractical and prohibitively expensive to build all transportation infrastructure to provide off-peak travel times for every hour of every day."