A Cost-Effective Methodology to Compare Travel Time and Speed: a Tale of 11 Cities

Urban commuters and road authorities are interested in knowing how well their city can manage traffic conditions. It is challenging to make a fair comparison among global cities due to the absence of a consistent, publicly accessible and inexpensive framework. This study proposes a methodology to compare travel time and average speed in different cities. Large cities have a central core, in which many of the major activities take place. This core is called downtown or the central business district (CBD). In this study, a comparison is made by simulating the morning commute trips from origins outside to destinations inside the CBD. The proposed framework outlines how the city and the CBD borders are defined. The data are collected by an accessible location service (Google Maps Distance Matrix Application Programming Interface). The framework is conducted on 11 major cities from the five continents, namely Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Moscow, New York, Paris, Singapore, Sydney, Tehran and Toronto. As such Singapore and Cairo had the shortest, while London and Paris had the longest travel times. According to the distribution graphs of average speed and travel time, Asian and African cities experienced a relatively higher average speed and a lower travel time.