Road Congestion: A £500 Billion Problem
27th March 2026
Traffic jams are, unfortunately, an all-too-common occurrence on today’s heavily congested roads; often, progress is so slow that it can feel as though you will never actually reach your destination. This wasted time is not only a frustrating experience for motorists, but it also has a real and calculable economic cost. In this blog post, we have attempted to calculate the global cost of road congestion – we estimate this to be a whopping £529 billion per year!
What is the average delay per vehicle per mile?
The Department for Transport publishes travel time measures for the Strategic Road Network and local ‘A’ roads, and, based on data for April 2024 to March 2025, the average delays (in seconds per vehicle per mile) were 11.8 and 47.9, respectively.
During 2024 in England, 96.9 billion vehicle miles were driven on the Strategic Road Network, so, given that the average delay on this network was 11.8 seconds per vehicle per mile, we estimate that 1.14 trillion seconds’ worth of delays were incurred on these roads.
Also, 90.4 billion vehicle miles were driven on the local authority motorways and ‘A’ roads in England, so an average delay of 47.9 seconds per vehicle per mile works out as a total delay of 4.33 trillion seconds on these roads.
The remainder of England’s road traffic in 2024 was on local authority minor roads, but, unfortunately, the Department for Transport does not publish the average delay for this road type. Therefore, we have been generous and assumed that traffic on these roads faced no delay at all.
By combining the above, we estimate that the total delay incurred across the entirety of England’s road network in 2024 was 5.47 trillion seconds. Given that England’s road network carried a total of 287 billion vehicle miles in 2024, we estimate the average delay per vehicle per mile to be 19.1 seconds.
How much time is wasted in traffic globally?
A reasonable estimate for the total vehicle miles driven worldwide is 10.7 trillion per year. Then, if we assume that an average delay of 19.1 seconds per vehicle mile applies to all road networks, this would suggest that 204 trillion seconds are wasted annually; or 56.7 billion hours.
To put this into perspective, the time lost in traffic is equivalent to 27.3 million people working 40 hours per week. That is approximately the population of Australia!
What is the economic cost of this lost time?
INRIX values travel time at £9.33/hr in the UK, although they do caveat this by saying “individual urban areas may have higher, or lower, values of time depending on local economic conditions”. However, if, for the sake of simplicity, we assume that £9.33/hr applies globally, the economic cost of 56.7 billion lost hours would be £529 billion.
How can Congestless help?
By generating more efficient routes for motorists to follow, Congestless offers a scalable solution that can reduce congestion in towns and cities across the world. If you would like to find out more about our offering, please do get in touch!