BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — With construction on a new LA 1 Intracoastal Bridge set to start in April, we thought it would be a good time to look at traffic in the United States and where the Red Stick stands compared to other cities.

Specifically, a GPS navigation company called TomTom took a look at the top 80 cities and measured time lost per year and congestion level.

TomTom defines time lost per year as “extra travel time as compared to a one-hour period during free flow conditions, multiplied by 230 working days per year.”

Motorists in Baton Rouge lost 62 hours in 2021 and drivers in New Orleans lost 48 hours over the same time period.

Did you know that Baton Rouge finished with a 27% congestion level in 2021?

So what exactly does that mean?

According to TomTom, “A 27% congestion level means that on average, travel times were 27% longer than during the baseline non-congested conditions. This means that a 30-minute trip driven in free-flow condition will take 8 minutes longer when the congestion level is at 27%.”

Based on this information, would it surprise you that two cities in Louisiana made the top 15?

Baton Rouge came in at number four and New Orleans came in at 14.

Baton Rouge is the only city in the top ten that saw a continuous increase in traffic from 2019 to 2021.

When it comes to the overall ranking, Baton Rouge comes in behind New York, Los Angeles and Miami and that it is.

Cities like Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia and Atlanta sit between the Red Stick and New Orleans.

So what can we do to improve the traffic situation in Baton Rouge and New Orleans?