Kwa wakazi waishio jiji la Dar es Salaam, katika siku hizi mbili mpaka tatu watakuwa wanashuhudia foleni ya kufa mtu iliyosababishwa na mvua kubwa zilizonyesha na kusababisha madhara makubwa katika barabara. Kutokana na hali hiyo watu wamejikuta wakitumia masaa mengi barabarani kutokana na foleni kali za magari. Hata hivyo, foleni hiyo ni cha mtoto tu ukilinganisha na majiji haya 14 duniani yanayodaiwa kuwa na foleni hatari za magari.
Miji hiyo ni:
Mexico City
Mexico City has been a boomtown since the 1968 Olympic Games. In just four decades the population has gone from 5 to 22 million people. Set in a valley and intertwined with an inadequate road system, the city has a topography similar to L.A.’s and presents similar pollution and traffic issues. Respondents to a survey done by IBM (a poll of 8,192 people in 20 major cities worldwide) rated Mexico City 99 out of 100 as having the world’s most painful commute. Instead, take the Metro; it carries five million people a day—as many as New York’s subway—and has special carriages for women.
New York City
If you can get caught in a traffic jam at 4 a.m. in New York (and you can), then just imagine what Midtown rush hour is like. And it doesn’t get much better outside of Manhattan: New York takes the honor of being home to four of the five worst bottlenecked roads in the U.S.—three of which include the westbound Cross Bronx Expressway. Yet another reason to love the aging subway.
Brussels
What’s the most congested city in Europe? If you guess Rome, you’d be wrong. According to satellite-navigation manufacturer TomTom, it’s Brussels. The company examined speed data from more than 30 million units currently in service, and Brussels came in as the most congested of 59 European cities. (Rome ranked No. 14.) The reason is simple: lots of cars. The World Atlas of Atmospheric Pollution ranks Luxembourg as having the second-highest rate of car ownership next to the U.S., and lots of commuters border-hop. In fact, there are two million commuters to the downtown area every day, and residents are outnumbered by vehicles three to one. Put simply, Brussels is a bottleneck.
Bangkok
Development is rapidly being outpaced by car ownership in Bangkok, and the notorious traffic jams can occur at any time of day. Generally, afternoon rush hour starts at 3:30 p.m. when school gets out and continues until dinnertime. Monsoon rains make matters worse, as much of Bangkok is at sea level. The streets—many of which were originally canals—flood, and Bangkok returns to the name by which it was once known: Venice of the East. Fortunately, an elevated train makes life a little easier, as does a 100–300 percent tax on new vehicles is aimed at reducing traffic.
Moscow
Moscow is in a class of its own. Drivers in the IBM study reported the average delay being 2.5 hours, with more than 40 percent of respondents claiming to have been stuck in traffic for more than three hours. By contrast, 25 percent of the commuters surveyed in Buenos Aires (a city of similar size) reported never having been stuck.
Los Angeles
The appearance of the City of Angels on this list won’t shock anyone—after all, who in this city walks anywhere? According to the Texas Transport Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report,” residents of Los Angeles wasted 485 million hours and consumed 367 million gallons in excess fuel at a total cost of roughly $10.3 billion while stuck in traffic jams every single year. That’s 70 hours a year on top of the normal commute—pretty impressive given that some people don’t even get this much vacation time.
Beijing
Beijing
Every day, more Beijingers abandon the bicycle and embrace the motor vehicle…to the tune of 1,900 new cars a day. In 1997, when the city saw the one millionth car hit the streets, few could have foreseen that number reaching four million in a decade. Urban planners certainly didn’t. The asthmatically narrow roads and booming economy have driven authorities to ban alternate-number license plates from entering congestion zones on weekdays. Yet while Beijing scored very high on IBM’s commuter pain survey, 16 percent of respondents felt that, overall, the congestion was getting better.
New Delhi
It’s the urban sprawl of Delhi that has aggravated the congestion. People drive farther in stop-start traffic (the joint category leader along with Johannesburg), and for half a century the population has increased by 50 percent every decade—a trend showing no signs of abating. While Delhi’s street life is certainly colorful, all the exhaust fumes can be quite dizzying. To combat this, authorities declared in 1993 that all public vehicles run on compressed natural gas.
It’s the urban sprawl of Delhi that has aggravated the congestion. People drive farther in stop-start traffic (the joint category leader along with Johannesburg), and for half a century the population has increased by 50 percent every decade—a trend showing no signs of abating. While Delhi’s street life is certainly colorful, all the exhaust fumes can be quite dizzying. To combat this, authorities declared in 1993 that all public vehicles run on compressed natural gas.
Warsaw
Warsaw may come as a surprise; according to TomTom, it’s the second-most congested city in Europe. This city of 3.5 million is at the gridlocked crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe, and more companies are opening offices here than in any other city in Europe. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, for now, Warsaw has no city bypasses. (That will change when a new ring road opens in 2012.) For the visitor, an ever-growing subway and tram network alleviates the stress a little.
Warsaw may come as a surprise; according to TomTom, it’s the second-most congested city in Europe. This city of 3.5 million is at the gridlocked crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe, and more companies are opening offices here than in any other city in Europe. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, for now, Warsaw has no city bypasses. (That will change when a new ring road opens in 2012.) For the visitor, an ever-growing subway and tram network alleviates the stress a little.
São Paulo
Residents of São Paulo feel stressed. This prosperous metropolis is the 10th-richest city on the planet, but with a haphazard labyrinth of streets, 20 million people, 8.5 million vehicles, and carjackings and petty crime to boot…who could blame them for their stress level? The IBM survey found that 55 percent of São Paulo commuters felt stressed as a result of the growing congestion. (Even commuters in Delhi were comparatively unfazed.) Wealthy residents have discovered a way to rise above such concerns: they fly. São Paulo has one of the highest helicopter ownership rates on the planet.
London
For urban planners, London is a beacon of hope. Granted, the city center is still overcrowded with vehicles (TomTom ranked it No. 4), but the congestion is spread out over more of the road infrastructure for a longer duration. The London Congestion Charge, introduced in 2003, charges drivers eight British pounds a day to use congested areas during peak periods.
Chicago
Maybe everyone’s gazing out their car windows at Chicago’s legendary architecture. It would help explain Chicago’s awful traffic jams, which include America’s second-worst single bottleneck (at the junction of the Dan Ryan Expressway and Canalport Avenue/Cermak Road). This ignominious gridlock contributes to 189 million hours, 129 million gallons of excess fuel, and $4.2 billion of wasted resources. Thankfully, Chicago has The Loop.
Cairo
Cairo may well be the only city in the Middle East with a subway, but it also has camels, cows, carts, and 20 million people. “Signals are an effective way to fight traffic congestion, but you have to get people to obey them,” says Michael Manville, professor at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. Another problem? The lack of rain worsens pollution from the old cars, since the atmosphere is not cleansed by the water vapor.
Jakarta
The theory: motorcycles are the ideal solution to mobilizing the masses. But Jakarta throws cold water on that theory. Indonesia’s capital has 6.5 million motorbikes and just 2 million cars, yet still the congestion is deplorable. “Motorcycles can slow down the flow even more because it introduces another element that is hard to predict,” says UCLA professor Michael Manville. To help alleviate the clogged arteries, the government’s considering a plan to stagger school and work hours.
Source: travelandleisure.com