According to the ranking of the famous GPS company TomTom, published on Tuesday, Bordeaux is now the most congested city in France and is even ranked 24e world rank. Its motorists spent 113 hours in traffic jams in 2024.
Its ring road will perhaps one day be the first to be covered with solar panels, but in the meantime Bordeaux sits at the top of the most congested city in France in the latest annual ranking from the GPS company TomTom. Released Tuesday, the index positions the town led by ecologist Pierre Hurmic at 24e rank of the most congested cities in the world, far ahead of Paris (45e rank) and Marseille (63e rank) which complete the tricolor podium.
In 2023, Sleeping Beauty was listed on 28e rank in this ranking. It will therefore be worse in 2024, where motorists spent 113 hours in traffic jams (the equivalent of 4.7 days). This Wednesday, at 10 a.m., the travel time to complete 10 kilometers in Bordeaux was estimated at 33 minutes and 40 seconds, or an average speed of 17.8 km/h. A pace which represents a congestion rate of 57%, or 12% more than the traffic jams usually expected at this time, specifies the TomTom site.
“Reduce car space”
Led by Les Écologists, the city of Bordeaux has tended to limit car use for several years. In accordance with its program, the municipality has pedestrianized 12 additional hectares in the city center in 2024, thus bringing to 245 hectares and 40 kilometers the roads closed to motorists. Conversely, cycle paths are multiplying, with an assumed desire to “reduce the car space”. A policy, which also results in a de-artificialization of the land and the elimination of parking spaces, sometimes to the great dismay of local residents. And for good reason: this development in Bordeaux urban planning makes it more difficult to park in the city center, where the parking meter reaches, for example, 15 euros for four hours near Place Pey Berland.
On the row of platforms, which allows motorists to cross the town of Bacalan to the station via Les Chartrons, Porte de Bourgogne or Saint-Michel, the desynchronization of the traffic lights also considerably slows down motorists, already limited at 50 km/h.
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Engineer at GRDF, Augustin Sebaux, a neo-Bordelais who walks this path daily around 7 a.m. (from the North of Chartrons towards Latresne), despairs of it even though he is nevertheless in favor of the “limitation with intelligence” cars in the city center. “I have no other options than the car to go to work, because by public transport it would take me an hour and a half to travel. On the 12 kilometers that I travel each day, I come across between 20 and 25 lights which do not follow one another. This causes excessive downtime and increased pollution.testifies the thirty-year-old. While he only moved to Sleeping Beauty in mid-September, he also admits to having already “broke down and turned around to go home” while he was going to a party, unable to find a parking space in the city center.
The young man who traveled from Toulouse to Nancy via Albi, is annoyed by the situation which he claims to have not encountered anywhere else. “It’s 2025 and the mayor of Bordeaux (Pierre Hurmic, Editor’s note) is an environmentalist. We should still have the means to configure traffic lights with artificial intelligence to reduce pollution with signaling that adapts to traffic and schedules. he concludes.
