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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Łódź in Poland has been ranked as the world’s fourth most congested city in the annual Traffic Index produced by navigation-device maker TomTom. Another Polish city, Lublin, was sixth.
The ranking is compiled using anonymous GPS data from cities around the world, showing the movement (or lack of movement) of vehicles. The firm then calculates a “congestion level” that shows how much slower traffic moves compared to when roads are free.
Łódź, which is Poland’s fourth largest city with a population of around 650,000, had the world’s fourth-worst average congestion figure of 72.8%, meaning journey times are that much slower than when traffic is free flowing.
Only Mexico City (75.9%), Bengaluru (74.4%) in India and the Irish capital of Dublin (72.9%) had worse congestion. Łódź was followed by Pune (71.1%), also in India, and then, in sixth place, came Lublin (70.4%), a city of 330,000 people in eastern Poland.
Among European cities, Łódź and Lublin were the second and third most congested, while Poznań (64.9%), Poland’s fifth-largest city, followed in fourth (though it was 14th in the global ranking).
Other Polish cities to be ranked among the top 100 globally were Wrocław (27th, 59.2%), Bydgoszcz (28th, 59%), Kraków (31st, 58.7%), Warsaw (77th, 51.3%), Gdańsk (87th, 50.1%) and Szczecin (94th, 49.5%).
TomTom’s data show that congestion in all of those Polish cities worsened in 2025 compared to 2024. In Łódź, an average commuter loses 135 hours to rush hour traffic a year, while in Lublin the figure is 117 hours.
Łódź has consistently ranked near the top of TomTom’s Traffic Index in recent years, with local media ascribing some of the blame to constant major roadworks in the city centre.
After a driver failed to remove their car from a road that was being relaid in the city of Łódź, workers decided to pour concrete around it
Images of the stranded car have gone viral, prompting memes and resulting in it becoming a minor tourist attraction https://t.co/J5c4eWfevO
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 5, 2023
“I know we didn’t do very well in this ranking,” deputy mayor Tomasz Piotrowski told the TuŁódź news website last year, referring to TomTom’s 2024 index. “This is due to the renovation work and the coordination of it, which also left much to be desired.”
“I believe this year will be better [because] the [construction] work is better distributed across Łódź,” he added. In fact, the new TomTom ranking shows that congestion increased by 1.1 percentage points in 2025 and Łódź rose from seventh to fourth place.
Last year, another global traffic ranking by transport analytics firm Inrix, which uses a different methodology, found that Warsaw had Europe’s sixth-highest number of hours lost to traffic jams.
Road deaths have fallen by 35% in Poland since 2019, which is the largest decline in the EU.
The improvement has come after a series of measures by the Polish authorities to improve road safety, which was previously among the worst in Europe https://t.co/kXhpXSOwH9
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) October 21, 2025
Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.
Main image credit: Dave Collier/Flickr (under CC BY-ND 2.0)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
