Dhaka, the bustling capital of Bangladesh, has ranked top on the list of the slowest cities in the world, according to a new study.
Besides, Mymensingh and Chittagong ranked ninth and 12th, respectively, on the list, according to the study published as a working paper by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study analyzed traffic in over 1,200 cities in 152 countries.
A nine-mile trip from the airport in Dhaka to Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed Park in Gulshan-2 can take as long as 55 minutes, according to Google Maps.
A trip of the same distance in Flint, Michigan, from the airport to the Sloan Museum of Discovery in the US, takes about nine minutes, according to the report.
Per the study, the speed of travel in a city is only partially related to the amount of traffic on its roads. Other factors, such as the layout and quality of a city’s roads and natural obstacles like hills and rivers, play a significant role in how fast cars can drive.
As a result, the study’s authors make a distinction between travel speed, a measure unaffected by traffic, and congestion, which is the interaction of speed and traffic.
“The slowest cities aren’t necessarily the most congested, and most congested aren’t the slowest,” says Prottoy Akbar, an economist at Aalto University in Finland and the lead author of the paper.
Meanwhile, two Nigerian cities, Lagos and Ikordu, ranked second and third on the list, followed by Manila, the capital of the Philippines, Biwandi, a town in India, and Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
Besides, eight cities of India are in the top 20 slowest cities.
Akbar and his fellow researchers used data from Google Maps to analyze traffic in more than 1,000 global cities with populations over 300,000.
Their data set excluded China and South Korea because the app cannot collect data in those countries, while a few other cities, like Pyongyang, North Korea, were dropped because of unreliable data.
According to the paper, the fastest cities are almost all mid-sized municipalities in the US—like Flint, Memphis, and Wichita, Kans—where highways are wide and plentiful.
Of the 100 fastest cities in the world, 86 are in the US, including 19 of the top 20 (the exception is Windsor, Ontario, across the Canadian border from Detroit).
Even relatively poor cities in wealthy countries are fast, according to the study.
