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.

“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.

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Several academics told the Guardian that Brisbane’s road system looked artificially worse because they were unusually clear overnight, due to council traffic light timing.

“Compared to a city that was congested all the time, where the peak and the off peak were very similar, you would say that the other city was less congested, when, in fact, it was just congested all the time,” he said.

Narelle Haworth, a professor at the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety at the Queensland University of Technology, said Brisbane looked worse than Sydney due to higher speed limits.

“Where it’s 50[km/h] in New South Wales, it’s 60 or 70 in Brisbane and in Queensland. In a sense, the high congestion value is a representation that … the speed limits are too high,” she said.

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Brisbane’s transport system is largely designed around the car.

The climate council found last year that it has the country’s least accessible public transport system, with the smallest proportion of people living near a station. According to the 2022 census, residents of Brisbane spend the second-longest amount of time commuting: the average of 58 minutes is beaten only by Sydney.

That’s because residents have longer distances to travel. Brisbane is among the world’s largest and least dense cities due to longstanding bans on all .

Burke said the INRIX metric counts only vehicles – not people. That means it doesn’t account for public or active transport use or car-pooling.

He said the average number of people travelling in each vehicle had steadily declined over the decades, making traffic worse, but that was not captured in the INRIX statistic.

Burke said Brisbane could turn to options like increased public transport investment or congestion charges – similar to those adopted by New York on Sunday – to create a disincentive for people to drive.

“The basic principle behind congestion charging is the right one, and that is we can’t build infrastructure to get ourselves out of congestion unless we’re willing to spend a trillion dollars paving the Brisbane River,” he said.

“There is no road space that we can miraculously create that is not going to be horrendously expensive.”

Queensland transport institutions have long turned to road widening to remedy congestion. But the phenomenon of induced demand often results in more traffic, because improved road conditions encourage more people to drive.

The Queensland Department for Transport and Main Roads recently abandoned the “predict and provide” approach which led to road widening. It now uses an approach called “vision and validate”, based on a final desired outcome for an area.

“You can’t build your way out of congestion, not in the long term,” Haworth said.

“The standard description is that putting extra lanes on a road is a cure for congestion, in the same way that buying larger pants is a cure for obesity.

“The more capacity you provide, the more people will drive, and it doesn’t get anywhere in the end. Congestion is one of those things that really suggests that we need to invest more in public transport, and we need to take careful thought about how we actually develop new areas, because the more we design and build car dependent areas, the more congestion we’ll have.”

Source: www.theguardian.com