This study develops a spatiotemporal framework for identifying recurrent urban traffic congestion hotspots in Balikpapan, Indonesia, addressing misclassification caused by speed thresholds and GPS density measures that overlook operational stops. The framework integrates direction-specific road segmentation, coverage-adjusted recurrence measurement, spatiotemporal clustering, and independent validation. GPS trajectories from 120 four-wheeled vehicles were collected across three arterial corridors over 212 days (August 2025–February 2026), yielding 86,089 traversals and 1,713,246 GPS points after deduplication and map matching. Congestion was identified using speed ratios below 0.50 of the 85th-percentile reference speed within 15-minute directed segment intervals containing at least five unique vehicles. ST-DBSCAN clustered 3,357 congestion episode cells into 419 daily spatiotemporal clusters across 30 directed segments. Jalan MT Haryono exhibited the highest congestion intensity, accounting for 1,664 episode cells and 24,960 congestion-minutes. Recurring congestion, defined as a congested-day proportion of at least 0.30 among sufficiently observed days, affected 49 segment–time-window combinations across all 30 directed segments, particularly during weekday afternoon (15:00–18:00) and morning (06:00–09:00) periods. Independent validation demonstrated high precision (0.97), moderate recall (0.53), and an F1-score of 0.69. October 2025 recorded the highest monthly congestion episode fraction (13.3%). These findings provide reproducible hotspot identification methods and evidence-based insights for traffic management in sensor-limited urban environments.