When it comes to congested roadways New York always gets a bad rap. Sometimes it seems as if New York has had traffic since before we had cars. It is easy to imagine a line of horse and buggies wrapped around Manhattan waiting to cross an intersection.

In reality, although some specific roadways in New York have high rates of congestion the city itself is normally not so bad. In fact, streets in New York City itself are often clear from congestion. It is the outlying roads which are the most congested as everyone avoids the downtown roads thinking THEY will be congested.

A recent report from INRIX, a company which does nothing except track track congestion all around the country, showed that the Long Island Expressway was the second most congested traffic corridor in the nation after the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles. The Long Island Expressway tops everyone’s list of most congested roadways year after year because it is the simplest, most direct route around New York City. If it were in Idaho, it likely wouldn’t be the second most congested traffic corridor in the nation because not as many people would be driving on it. But heavily congested roads are not the same as roads blocked by traffic. Nope. New York roads might be congested, but at least traffic is moving.

However, New York is not #1 when it comes to the most traffic. In fact, it isn’t even #2. When it comes to how long drivers spend sitting in traffic (not just road congestion) Honolulu ranks numero uno. In 2011 drivers in Honolulu wasted a whopping 58 hours sitting in traffic. just sitting. We are not talking busy roads with high congestion. Nope. We are talking complete stand still. That means that Honolulu drivers spent more than two whole days going no where fast. Considering it takes just hours to get around the entire island that was enough time wasted to get to work and back probably 100 times.

Experts say if the rates of traffic on Hawaii continue the way they have people will soon be able to walk to work across the tops of stopped cars.