Morning and evening rush hour almost completely disappeared

The morning and evening rush hours have almost disappeared. That is of course due to the corona measures. Those who had to drive during rush hour last year were home 32 percent earlier than in 2019.

Especially in Utrecht, Amsterdam and Leiden, people were much less delayed. This is reported by navigation maker TomTom in its annual overview. It is not certain that it will remain so quiet, says the Dutch company. This requires a ‘collective and conscious change in travel behavior’. This means that people (permanently) actually start working from home more, have flexible working hours and where ‘traffic data is used to determine the best time to get into the car’. According to TomTom, the highways and other roads do not need to be expanded. That can also save ‘billions of euros’.

However, according to the navigation maker, it was busier in some cities on the weekends than a year earlier, while it was quieter during the week. Apeldoorn is cited as an example. On the weekends in April 2020 (at the end of ‘the first wave’) people were on the road 74 percent longer than on the weekends in that month in 2019. In the same month, it was just 23 percent quieter during the week than in April 2019. Also in places such as Breda, Den Bosch, Utrecht, Amersfoort and Arnhem saw such a shift last year. “This implies that people often worked and lived from home during the week and took to the road for outdoor activities at the weekend,” TomTom concludes.

Haarlem is the busiest place in the Netherlands. The travel time there is 25 percent higher than average. This means that for a trip that would normally take an hour, people spend 15 minutes longer on average. The Hague is in second place, followed by Nijmegen, Leiden and Groningen. The top 10 also includes Apeldoorn, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Breda and Tilburg. Only in Apeldoorn and Almere did the delay remain the same compared to 2019, in the other cities it decreased. Almere is, according to TomTom, the quietest city in Europe after Cádiz in Spain.

TomTom bases the list on information from hundreds of millions of navigation boxes, built-in systems and smartphones. The researchers are not only looking at the motorways, but also at the roads in and around the cities.

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