Everyone hates sitting in traffic, but navigating through crowded streets and highways is the price many Americans pay for living in dynamic but congested urban areas.
There are a few cities, however, where heavy traffic is relatively rare.
A recently released report by mapping experts TomTom finds that Knoxville, Tennessee, is the city with the lowest traffic levels in the entire world, among the 174 metros it evaluated. Drivers there spend only about 11 extra minutes in their cars due to traffic each day.
Slideshow: 10 Best US Cities for Traffic Congestion
That’s about a quarter of the extra time that drivers in Los Angeles -- the worst U.S. city for traffic and the 10th worldwide -- spend in their cars during peak hours.
Mexico City has the worst traffic on the planet, with drivers there spending nearly an hour fighting traffic every day.
Globally, congestion has increased 13 percent since 2008. Nearly all of the 20 global cities on the list with the lowest traffic levels were located in the United States. After Knoxville, the cities with the next lowest traffic levels were Dayton, Ohio, and Omaha, Nebraska.
Surprisingly, congestion declined in several U.S. cities in 2015, including Las Vegas, Denver, Tucson and St. Louis. While job growth and bad weather in the United States would typically lead to more congestion, TomTom analysts believe that new traffic management policies and infrastructure investment kept traffic levels stable in some parts of the country.
Click here to see the 10 best cities in the U.S. for traffic.
