Much like its gridlocked traffic, London’s position as the most congested city in Europe has remained unmoved, with it coming top of the list ahead of Paris and Dublin.
Drivers in the capital spent an average 101 hours sitting in traffic last year, a 2% increase from the previous year, according to the transport analytics company Inrix.
There has been a consistent increase in congestion in the city in recent years, from 97 hours in 2022 to 99 hours in 2023.
The A40 Westway in London was judged the most congested road in the UK, with 5pm-6pm being its worst time.
Behind London was its Eurostar-connected neighbour Paris, with 97 hours of delays, followed by Dublin in third place with 81 hours.
Inrix estimated the cost to London to be about £3.85bn, which is equivalent to £942 for each of the city’s 4 million drivers.
The company said it used diverse sources of data to produce its analysis, including from phones and vehicles.
Bristol and Leeds completed the top three most congested cities in the UK, but were lagging some way behind London with 65 hours of delays and 60 hours respectively.
In Manchester, there was a 13% increase year-on-year in delays. It had one more hour lost to gridlock than Leeds but ranked below it, when taking into account the city’s relative size.
Birmingham, however, dropped from the second-worst city in the UK to sixth place, after traffic was moving 10% more freely than a year ago.
Bob Pishue, Inrix transportation analyst and author of the report, said: “While the UK did see a slight increase in congestion again this year, overall congestion has remained steady.
“Roadworks in key corridors such as the M25 Wisley interchange caused considerable traffic on a main artery into the capital.
“Interestingly it was cities outside of the capital that saw the greatest increase in congestion, with Manchester seeing a large increase, up 13%.
“While London only had a modest increase in time lost, it still represented half of the entire country’s delay.”
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Inrix said London contained most of the worst corridors for traffic delays in the UK because of the “concentration of population, employment and economic activity”.
A spokesperson for Transport for London, which is responsible for a network of red route roads carrying a third of the capital’s traffic, said: “We are committed to making sure Londoners can move around the capital as safely, sustainably and efficiently as possible.
“We support the movement of everyone across London and our investment in walking, cycling and public transport is making it easier to choose sustainable ways of travelling, helping to cut congestion.
“Our network includes some of the busiest roads in the country and we continue to invest in world-leading programmes to make sure roads are used as efficiently as possible.”
The capital has been renowned for its traffic problems, with Piccadilly Circus becoming a byword for somewhere chaotically busy. In his 1938 novel Scoop, the author Evelyn Waugh satirised the junction’s traffic, describing it as “still as a photograph, broken and undisturbed”.
Centuries earlier, the diarist Samuel Pepys had written of an hour-and-a-half’s delay to his journey for dinner with Lord Crew in 1661.
The problem of congestion led to the conception in the 1960s of the planned “box” mega motorway that would have resulted in large parts of inner London being demolished to create highways.
It was scrapped after vehement protests by residents whose homes would have been flattened for the 50-mile scheme.