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Paris is "only" the 4th city in France for traffic jams in 2025!

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The Editor

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While people often associate the capital and its surroundings with kilometers of cars stuck in traffic, crawling along, often due to all kinds of construction, that’s not the case—almost. In fact, in 2025, the capital saw a surprising decrease in traffic jams.

For those of you who grew up without smartphones equipped with cameras, calculators, a compass, a raclette machine, and GPS, you surely remember TomTom, that navigation system we used to install in our cars to find our way. Well, if you thought that the company had disappeared, think again! It is very much alive, dominates the global traffic information market, and has just published its 15th annual report on traffic jams in over 500 cities worldwide, which reveals a lot about the situation in Paris.


There’s improvement in the City of Light

To compile its study, TomTom bases its findings on the congestion levels of cities, an index that measures the percentage impact of traffic jams on travel times.Average travel times compared to an "ideal" travel time. So, if the congestion rate is 20%, that means it will take on average 20% more time to make a journey because of traffic jams compared to the ideal time during smooth traffic.

And good news, in 2025, this rate surprisingly but also significantly decreased in the capital. Indeed, last year, the congestion rate went from 44 to 40%! This drop is even more surprising since, on a national level, the congestion rate has tended to increase across the average of the 29 cities studied. And it’s Lyon that takes the lead in 2025, with an index of 47.2%, followed by Bordeaux (43.5), Montpellier (41.4), and Paris, which thus leaves the gold medal to grab 4th place in France. And we celebrate that!


A paradoxical result

However, be careful, this decrease in traffic jams doesn’t mean that we're driving faster in the capital, quite the opposite. In 2025, the average speed in P...

aris is baissé, thus extending travel times despite a lower congestion rate. A surprising result that can be explained in part by the widening of the speed-limited zone in the capital — more and more streets are limited to 30 km/h — as well as the reduction of the ring road to 50 km/h. But hey, even if the journeys are a bit longer, at least they happen without the stress and frustration of traffic jams, and we think that’s already a win, right?