‘More traffic jams in the coming years due to nitrogen impasse’

Partly due to nitrogen emissions, several projects for the construction or expansion of roads in our country have been temporarily halted or delayed. As a result, traffic jams at sixteen bottlenecks on the Dutch national highways will increase in the coming years, while according to the EIB this would have actually decreased if the projects had been continued. In total, the EIB calculates that this will amount to 14.5 million additional vehicle loss hours, or hours of delay, in the period 2024 to 2030. For comparison: in the whole of 2022, all road users together had to travel 58.1 million extra hours due to traffic jams, according to figures from Rijkswaterstaat. “Total congestion at these sixteen bottlenecks will double if the projects are not implemented,” the EIB warns. Tackling the Hoevelaken junction in particular could have significantly reduced the severity of traffic jams at various bottlenecks, the institute says. That project is now on hold.

Moreover, the budgets that were made available for the road projects cannot all be transferred to other projects, such as maintenance, which on balance leads to a production loss of €1.2 billion for the infrastructure sector in the Netherlands between 2024 and 2030. Projects for construction and expansion of national highways are the most affected with a production loss of €800 million, according to the EIB. Nitrogen losses also run into hundreds of millions of euros in road investments by provinces and municipalities and in replacement and renovation projects by the government.