In Mexico City, 10 km takes 34 minutes

In 2025, driving 10 kilometers in Mexico City took 34 minutes and 29 seconds on average. At rush hour, the average speed dropped to 13.5 km/h. With those numbers, the TomTom Traffic Index placed the capital at the top of its ranking, with a congestion level of 75.9%: a typical trip takes almost twice as long as it would on empty streets.

For a field operation, that changes the question of who to send. "The nearest technician" looks obvious on a map and is often wrong on the street. TomTom estimates you cover 4.4 km in 15 minutes of driving in the capital. A technician 3 km away on the other side of the ring road can arrive later than one 8 km away on a clear route.

It isn't only the capital

Guadalajara and Monterrey also rank with high congestion. Measured in hours lost per year by someone driving at rush hour, the gap between cities is large:

	Hours lost
Mexico City	184 h
Guadalajara	126 h
Monterrey	89 h

TomTom Traffic Index 2025, Mexico report

If your operation covers several cities, a fixed "maximum radius in kilometers" rule doesn't mean the same thing everywhere. A 10 km radius in Monterrey and one in Mexico City are very different arrival promises.

The decision: rank by arrival time, not distance

That's why waydot's dispatch engine calculates, for each candidate, the travel time with traffic at the time they would leave, not the straight-line distance. On top of that time it applies three more filters:

• If they don't hold the current certification the job needs, they don't appear. An expired certification counts as none.
• If their shift is already full, they drop down the list even when they're close.
• Among those who can go, the one who arrives with the most margin against the SLA wins, not the one who arrives first.

The last point is the least intuitive. A technician arriving with 60 minutes to spare is a better bet than one arriving with 5, even if the second is closer, because traffic in the capital isn't stable: the same route can take far longer at 3 p.m. than at 11 a.m.

Why the dispatcher still decides

Some things no traffic index knows: there's a march on Reforma today, the client at the north branch only opens the door to one particular technician, someone left early for a family emergency. So each operation sets its own policy:

• Automatic assignment when the best candidate clearly beats the second.
• A suggestion with the top three when there's a tie or the margin is thin.
• Escalation when nobody can arrive in time, at minute one rather than when the customer calls.

Every suggestion shows its reasons (estimated arrival, certification, workload, margin) and every manual reassignment is recorded. Those corrections are the best input for tuning the policy.

What this prevents

Aquant analyzed more than 600,000 service records from nearly 160 organizations and found that one in seven on-site visits was unnecessary. Sending the wrong technician, without the part or without the certification, is one of the most common ways to add to that count. In a city where every 10 km costs half an hour, one extra visit costs at least an hour of driving.

Sources

• TomTom Traffic Index 2025: Mexico City and Mexico report.
• Aquant, 2025 Field Service Benchmark Report (press release, February 13, 2025).