Traffic movement: Dhaka ranked slowest in world

Dhaka is the slowest city in the world, according to a new study that analysed traffic in over 1,200 cities in 152 countries.

Apart from the capital, two other cities in Bangladesh -- Mymensingh and Chattogram -- are on the list of 20 slowest cities in the world, said the study, published as a working paper by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research.

The cities ranked ninth and 12th on the list, respectively.

Two Nigerian cities, Lagos and Ikordu, ranked second and third on the list, followed by Manila, the capital of the Philippines, Biwandi, a town in India, and Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.

India has the most cities in the top 20, with eight in total.

Researchers used data from Google Maps to analyse traffic in more than 1,000 global cities with populations over 300,000.

According to Google Maps, a 9-km trip from Dhaka airport to Justice Shahabuddin Ahmed Park, in Gulshan-2, can take as long as 55 minutes, whereas a trip of the same distance in Flint, Michigan, the world's fastest city, from the airport to the Sloan Museum of Discovery, takes about nine minutes, writes Time magazine in its report published on this particular study.

Mentionable, 19 of the top 20 fastest cities are in the United States.

However, according to the study, the speed of travel in a city is only partially related to the amount of traffic on its roads. Other factors, such as the layout and quality of a city's roads and natural obstacles like hills and rivers, play a significant role in how fast cars can drive, the report adds.

"The slowest cities aren't necessarily the most congested, and most congested aren't the slowest," Prottoy Akbar, an economist at Aalto University in Finland and the lead author of the paper, told Time magazine.