Is 2023 the turning point?
Statistics Netherlands has released new mobility figures for 2022, showing that motor vehicles started driving more again last year, but still did not cover as many kilometers as before corona. 2023 may be the year in which this is the case again.
Dutch passenger cars, vans, trucks and buses drove a total of almost 144 billion kilometers at home and abroad in 2022. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reports this based on new figures. More than three-quarters of the kilometers traveled in 2022 were driven by passenger cars. Statistics Netherlands sees a significant growth in the share of plug-in cars driven: in 2022, fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars together traveled 55.7 percent more kilometers than in 2021. According to Statistics Netherlands, the growth can be explained, among other things, by an increase in the number of plug-in cars in the Netherlands.
Dutch people also traveled abroad more often, CBS reports. Compared to 2021, passenger cars traveled almost 43 percent more kilometers abroad last year. The total number of kilometers traveled by all Dutch motor vehicles is 7 percent higher than in 2021. However, less is still driven than in 2019, the last year before the outbreak of the corona pandemic. At that time, the total number of kilometers traveled was 150 billion.
Vans were already driven more than in 2019. Trucks traveled approximately the same number of kilometers as in 2021 and are therefore at pre-corona levels. Dutch buses drove slightly more kilometers in 2022, a total of 544 million. There has been a particularly strong increase in coaches: the number of coach kilometers has increased by 82.8 percent.
| Passenger cars | Vans | Heavy freight vehicles | Buses | |
| 2018 | 120.34 | 17.96 | 9.90 | 0.67 |
| 2019 | 121.23 | 18.44 | 9.78 | 0.66 |
| 2020 | 99.65 | 17.90 | 9.50 | 0.51 |
| 2021* | 105.42 | 18.64 | 9.85 | 0.50 |
| 2022* | 114.31 | 19.14 | 9.85 | 0.54 |
Number of kilometers in billions per vehicle type. Source: CBS
As you may have noticed, the roads will be quite busy again in 2023. At the beginning of last summer, the ANWB already concluded that the severity of traffic jams in the first half of the year was already above that of 2019. At the beginning of this month, the association released more figures, which showed that several rush hours are busier than in 2019. There is therefore a good chance that 2023 will be the year in which the number of kilometers driven across the board will exceed the number of 2019. .
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl