The unremarkable UK town named one of the worst places to live for traffic jams

Swindon is the worst traffic hotspot in the country – with drivers spending 11 days a year sitting in their vehicles, according to a recent study.

Research from Comparethemarket.com using data from Numbeo shows 86 percent of residents commute by car in the Wiltshire town which is arguably best known for its “magic roundabout”, a baffling series of eight mini-roundabouts arranged in a circle.

The city also has the fourth highest traffic index of 55 cities featuring in the study, which was published in July.

Traffic indices provide insights into a city’s overall traffic conditions, including commute times, traffic misery, CO2 emissions and overall inefficiencies in a traffic system.

Southend-on-Sea had the highest traffic index (226) while Swindon was in fourth place on 196, according to the study.

Swindon is followed as the worst UK traffic hotspot by Peterborough, Bradford, Bedford, Huddersfield, Bournemouth, Barnsley, Newport and Chester with Inverness in tenth place, according to the analysis.

In Peterborough, the ​second worst location in the UK for traffic, residents spend an average ​12 days per year commuting. The cathedral city also has one of the highest traffic indexes with a score of ​210.

Third placed ​​Bradford has a whopping ​80 percent of residents commuting by car with the city’s drivers spending about ​15 days a year commuting.

The city also has the second highest traffic index of all the cities analysed, with a score of ​217.

Dundee, identified in the study as ​one of the best place for traffic in Britain, has only 29 percent of residents travelling by car.

Drivers in the city spend just​ four days commuting per year and also enjoy a low traffic index, with a score of ​69, which is almost​ three times lower than Swindon’s.

​Blackpool is in second place with only a quarter ​​(25 percent) of the population commuting by car, although drivers there spend around ​13 days commuting per year.

​Colchester is in third place with a traffic index score of ​91 and a third ​(33 percent) of the city’s residents commuting by car. Drivers who commute​ spend only three days a week kdoing so, which according to the study is the lowest of all cities analysed.

Those three places are followed by ​Lancaster and ​Plymouth in the top five cities with the best traffic conditions, the study shows.

To come up with the figures, number crunchers considered the percentage of residents who commute by car and distances travelled per minute with slower speeds indicating less free-flowing or efficient traffic.

This in turn was based on minutes spent and the distance travelled per one-way commute.