Boston Traffic Not America's Worst For First Time In 3 Years

Fine, New York. We'll let you have this one.

Boston no longer has the worst traffic in America, an ignominious distinction it carried the past two years but put the brakes on in the annual INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard released Tuesday.

Boston ranked fourth in the new rankings, behind New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.

INRIX found that Boston drivers lost 48 hours — or two days — in 2020 due to traffic congestion. Rough, but far fewer than the 149 hours lost in 2019 or 164 hours lost in 2018.

Trips downtown dropped by 87 percent from February 2020 to April 2020 and 56 percent from last February to this February.

The dramatic drop in traffic started almost exactly a year ago. Trip durations plummetted March 9, 2020, according to the Department of Transportation. It wasn't like the commute was shifting to public transit; Workplaces and schools closed as life shifted remote while major gatherings and sporting events were outright canceled.

Then came the COVID lockdowns.

"The lockdowns, in general, restricted business operations and consumer activity, leading to large decreases in travel across all modes, the likes of which has not been seen since vehicular, rail and air travel data has been collected," the INRIX report said.

People were just staying home. By September, Boston traffic was estimated to be at 48 percent of pre-pandemic levels, highway officials said.

The abrupt downturn in traffic came just months after state officials said the bumper-to-bumper quagmire had reached a "tipping point."

"Congestion is a complicated problem with a complicated and interconnected set of causes," Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack said at a news conference unveiling an ominous report detailing the congestion crisis. "There is no silver bullet. There is no one thing the commonwealth can do that will make congestion better here. But there are a lot of things that we have to do if we take congestion seriously."