Avoiding holiday traffic jams: that’s how it was done 30 years ago – Out of the Old Box

If you go on holiday abroad by car, you hardly have to do any route planning these days. Of course it doesn’t hurt to look up whether you can expect holiday traffic jams on certain routes, but otherwise it is basically a matter of entering the destination and, go ahead, eat up the miles! 30 years ago it was not so simple. The average motorist could only dream of a navigation system and looking up a route on the internet or checking traffic information was not an option either.

In AutoWeek 26 of 1993 we gave advice on how to drive to your holiday address as smoothly as possible by staying informed about holiday traffic jams. In retrospect it is very nice to see what you had to work with at the time. It started at home with good preparation. That wouldn’t hurt in 2023, but in 1993 that preparation looked slightly different: “Sit down in front of the TV and look on Teletext where and when holiday peaks are expected. Also listen to the radio stations that broadcast traffic and pass on weather reports. Start with this at home before leaving and also keep an eye on those channels in the car in case things should go wrong on the way.”

Along the way you had to rely on the radio to keep some idea of ​​how things were going on your holiday route. You were lucky if your car radio could receive long wave, medium wave and short wave. On long wave you could already receive information from a great distance, on medium wave you could receive regional traffic information and on short wave local information. Nice and nice, but how did you know which channel you needed? Well, sometimes that was indicated on signs along the road, but it was advisable to write down some frequencies in advance that you could find on your route. AutoWeek had added two cards with which you could keep the long wave transmitters in Northwest Europe and the medium wave transmitters in Germany at hand.

Didn’t want to make it difficult to adjust frequencies along the way? Then a modern car radio could offer a solution. The Grundig pictured above could not only receive a wide spectrum of frequencies, you could also store 42 presets in it. Saving the channels in advance in the order of the route made life a lot easier. A very useful addition was the ‘Radio Data System’ on FM frequencies. Most of you will probably remember that and you may still use it. Thanks to RDS, which, among other things, could display texts on the screen of your car radio, your radio automatically switched to traffic information when it was read out on an FM station. Even if you were listening to a cassette tape or CD. Then it was just a matter of being able to understand the local language. It was only later, thanks to TMC, that translated messages could also arrive.

Maybe you can still remember it all or maybe you’re glad you didn’t experience that time as a driver, if you read all this. In any case, it is now a lot easier to drive smoothly to your holiday address.