It will come as no surprise that last year was still less busy on the road than in 2019. Rijkswaterstaat mapped out the differences in traffic jam lengths between last year and the last pre-corona year. 2021 was not always below the level of 2019.
In 2021 we were again confronted with corona measures that had a direct impact on the traffic on the road. Work from home advice, sometimes more urgent than other times, is the best example of this. This ensured, among other things, that after initial busyness last autumn, the unusual calm on the country’s roads returned. Rijkswaterstaat has mapped out the development of the traffic jam length over the entire year in a clear graph and compares this with 2019.
As can be clearly seen above, it was significantly quieter on the road in 2021, especially at the beginning of the year than in 2019. This was of course due to a combination of the lockdown, curfew and the advice to work from home. Towards the summer, the brake went off a bit and 2021 was closer to 2019 in terms of traffic jam length. In the summer there was hardly any difference and in the autumn there were occasionally even longer congestion totals than in 2019. As can be seen in the graph, the beast almost looked like the old situation for a while. On October 12, the busiest morning rush hour since the corona outbreak was a fact. The fact that congestion length does not always say something about the overall traffic on the road, however, is apparent from the fact that the congestion intensity (kilometers and minutes of delay per traffic jam) was still lower than in 2019.
Since the tightening of the home working advice and certainly since the introduction of the current lockdown, 2021 is clearly lagging again. Although we don’t like to be stuck in traffic, we still hope that in a year’s time we can look back on a somewhat ‘more normal’ year.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl