I just learned about the TomTom Traffic Index today. It covers 404 cities across 58 countries, and uses anonymized traffic data from more than 600 million drivers (people who use TomTom's tech) to come up with a list of the cities with the worst traffic congestion.

Here's the global top 10 (for 2021):

And here's the North American top 10 (also for 2021):

The way to interpret these congestion level percentages is to think of them as additional time over and above baseline free-flowing traffic times. For example, a 62% congestion level for Istanbul, means that a trip that would take 30 minutes without any traffic congestion, will instead take, on average, 18.6 minutes longer (0.62 x 30 minutes).

We all like to complain about traffic in our home city, but these percentages certainly help to put things into a global perspective.

This afternoon we went to the Mucem (Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean) here in Marseille. By far, my favorite exhibition was one that dealt with the urbanization of five cities surrounding the Mediterranean — namely Marseille, Venice, Istanbul, Cairo, and Alger. At one point, this was the center of the commercial world. Great empires were forged and great fortunes were made here. But things have changed a little since then. And in some cases, what we are now left with are scenes like the one you see above (photograph by Martin Parr). This is easily the greatest photo of Venice I have ever seen. Venice is a tiny city, but it receives tens of millions of tourists each year. This photo does an extraordinary job of capturing what that might feel like.

The New York Times recently published “a portrait of new single-family homes” in the US in 2016. Here’s that portrait:

For those of those living in dense urban centers, this portrait is perhaps a reminder that in many other places a large single-family home can be had for about the price of a studio apartment.

Nothing in the above portrait likely surprised you, but it’s interesting to note that over half of all new single family homes delivered last year were in “The South.” Only 7% were built in the dense northeast.

The New York Times also recently looked at “international rents per square foot” using data from RentCafe. Here they are:

New York City sits at the top with an average rent of $4.98 psf. This is across all boroughs. I am surprised by how low some of these international rents are. But averages rarely tell you the whole story.

In any event, I do think that these two graphics start to speak to the economic spikiness that we are seeing across the US.