THIS won’t come as any surprise to busy company car drivers but British commuters are wasting an average of nine working days a year stuck in traffic thanks to traffic congestion – and things have got worse in eleven of the UK’s seventeen biggest cities over the last year.

That’s according to the sixth edition of sat nav specialist TomTom’s sixth Traffic Index study.

Traffic congestion levels have gone up in Belfast, Brighton, London, Manchester, Leicester, Sheffield, Liverpool and Newcastle, but Edinburgh, Nottingham and the Leeds-Bradford area are now less jam-prone than before.

If you live in Bristol, Birmingham or Glasgow, things have stayed about the same. 

In London, rush-hour journeys take 60 per cent longer than in off-peak times but Belfast is the worst affected city in the UK, with journey times that are up to 88 per cent longer in morning peak hours.

Spare a thought, though, for drivers in Moscow, Rio de Janiero and Istanbul, where traffic congestion is a lot worse than in any UK city, according to TomTom.