The rush hour in and around Dutch cities is leveling off. Last year, Tuesday evenings and Thursday evenings were no longer the busiest times on the road. Motorists experienced the most delays during the weekend in 2021. Haarlem remains the busiest city in the Netherlands.
That is what traffic experts at TomTom say. The Dutch manufacturer of navigation technology released the eleventh edition of its worldwide overview of traffic information† TomTom analyzed the (anonymized) data of millions of users in 404 cities around the world.
Traffic – from car and train to bus and plane – was still strongly affected by the consequences of the corona crisis last year. For example, total city traffic in the Netherlands was 12 percent quieter in 2021 than in 2019, according to the TomTom researchers. In rush hour it was even 30 percent. TomTom calculated the average delay of motorists in and around all the cities studied. Also outside the city, on the Dutch highways, there were fewer traffic jams last year than in 2019, according to figures from the ANWB†
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Traffic experts have been wondering for some time to what extent the corona crisis has a lasting effect on mobility† In recent months, part of the working population was still working from home, and you noticed that on the road and in the train. But will that remain the case now that the government will soon withdraw the advice to work from home?
Importance of government measures
Much depends on the measures taken by the government, says traffic expert Jeroen Brouwer of TomTom. “But based on our data, I really see a structural change in road traffic. Traffic on working days is lower, especially in regions where many people work from home.”
Amsterdam continues to fall on TomTom’s list of busy cities, according to Brouwer. Many people work there in the information sector and it is easier for them to work from home. In contrast, road traffic around Rotterdam had fallen less in 2021 than around Amsterdam. Brouwer: “Anyone who has a job in the port cannot work from home and often takes the car to work.”
‘Rethinking traffic models
Brouwer believes that the insights from the corona crisis force us to think differently about tackling the traffic jam problem and – more generally – mobility in the Netherlands. In the past, investments in bottlenecks, such as the widening of motorways or the construction of more rails, were mainly intended to solve the peak during rush hours. But if this so-called ‘hyper peak’ decreases, the need to spend millions on those bottlenecks may disappear.
“Investing in asphalt can still be a solution in the short term,” says Brouwer, “but based on this data you should reconsider all traffic models from before the pandemic.”
Bert van Wee, professor of transport policy at Delft University of Technology, mainly points to the current uncertainty with regard to mobility. “We do not yet know what the long-term effects of the corona crisis are. Research does show that people continue to want to work from home and telecommute more. Employees and employers are now familiar with working via Zoom, Teams, WebEx, et cetera.”
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Employees have also become “spoiled” by the flexibility that working from home offers, says Van Wee. “And then you can ask yourself what the social return is from tackling bottlenecks on the road and rail. That is extremely uncertain.” Van Wee believes that the government should therefore be reluctant to invest a lot of money in solving bottlenecks in the infrastructure at the moment.
Amelisweerd
A concrete example is the planned widening of the Utrecht ring road near Amelisweerd. The previous cabinet wanted to widen the A27 there, but the new coalition may renounce that† Can the widening be deleted based on the TomTom data? “You make such a choice for the long term,” says Jeroen Brouwer. “I only look at the figures for 2021. And then the congestion around Utrecht was not that bad.” Brouwer sees more in ‘smarter’ driving, more distribution of road traffic, both in times and in routes.
Utrecht is fifteenth in TomTom’s list of busy cities in the Netherlands. The city is 333rd worldwide. It took 15 percent longer to get from one side of the city to the other in Utrecht last year than at a quiet time of the day. At the top of the list in the Netherlands are Haarlem and The Hague. The delay in Haarlem was on average 28 percent, in The Hague 26 percent.
None of the Dutch cities is in the top 100 of busiest cities. Globally, Istanbul is the city with the most congestion; there you spend 62 percent longer on the road during rush hour than in the middle of the night. Moscow (61 percent), Kiev (56 percent) and Bogota (55 percent) follow. Western Europe and the US show the same picture as in the Netherlands: rush hour there too is generally less crowded.
Where TomTom maps car traffic in and around cities – in Amsterdam the company also includes the A10 ring road – the ANWB looks at the highways throughout the country. According to the organization, there were 57 percent fewer traffic jams on Dutch roads last year than in 2019. In 2020, the number of traffic jams was even 65 percent lower than in ‘calibration year’ 2019.
“Before the corona crisis, it was always said: if you get a few percent of road traffic out of rush hour, you will get rid of the traffic jams,” says Arnoud Broekhuis of the ANWB. “Everyone has been able to experience in the past year and a half that that is true.”