The first months of this year are noticeably busier on the road than it has been for a long time, but the traditional rush hour is not really there yet.
This is evident from traffic jam figures that ANWB analyzed. There were only a quarter of the traffic jams in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year (just before the first lockdown). However, there is an upward trend in the traffic density this year, because in February there were already twice as many traffic jams as in January. The traffic jam severity has also doubled compared to the enormous traffic dip in the first lockdown last year. The morning rush hour is still almost completely absent, the ANWB sees, but the evening rush hour is slowly returning.
If there were already traffic jams, it was mainly due to accidents or frost damage. Not so much because of an excessive amount of traffic, as was often the case during rush hour before the crisis. The places where the biggest congestion took place last quarter were the A7 from Zurich to Den Oever at the Afsluitdijk, the A4 from The Hague to Rotterdam near Delft, and the A1 from Amersfoort to Apeldoorn near Barneveld.
There are therefore no really structurally recurring traffic jams, such as before the corona crisis. That’s good news, of course. Nevertheless, the ANWB expects that things will go in that direction again in the near future. Traffic jam specialist Arnoud Broekhuis suspects that the evening rush hour in particular will become more clearly visible again this spring and that ‘when the corona is defeated, we will come to a standstill with great regularity’. Whether that will be just as bad as before the crisis depends, of course, to a large extent on how we possibly keep working from home in part.