At 20km/h you are moving only slightly faster than a donkey in Jinan, China’s most gridlocked city

The average speed during rush hour in Jinan, the capital of China’s eastern Shandong province, is slightly faster than that of a donkey.

Once described in Marco Polo’s 13th century travelogue as a city with rich trade in silk goods and spices, Jinan is now known for its traffic jams, the worst in all of China, according to a ranking of 100 cities by AutoNavi, the navigation service provider owned by Alibaba Group Holding. For the report, AutoNavi calculated and analysed data collected from devices installed on vehicles that can record their speed and location.

Traffic in Jinan is compounded by the large number of streets, roads and subways under construction. At slightly more than 20km/h, riding in peak-hour traffic is not much faster than a donkey-drawn cart, which is still used in the countryside today as a means of transporting goods. The average speed of the slow-moving and stubborn creature is 9mph, or 15km/h.

Sharing in the misery at No. 2 on the list is the northeastern city of Harbin, while Beijing was the third-most congested metropolis, according to AutoNavi’s findings. These three cities also reported a rush-hour delay index of more than 2.0, which means commutes during peak hours took twice as much time as they would during non-peak hours.

Hong Kong, which lies south of Guangdong province, stood at 51st in terms of congestion, with an average rush-hour speed of 38km/h, almost double the speed in Jinan, thanks to its advanced transport infrastructure and high proportion of motorways.