If you are on the highway with a broken car, you will wait much longer for protection from a road inspector in Drenthe than in the Randstad. In the evening and at night you wait twice as long. Recovery companies and emergency services must therefore protect themselves and victims more often. “We are in much more danger in these dark days.”
In the event of a breakdown or accident, road inspectors ensure that road users can continue driving quickly and safely. They park their car before a breakdown or accident, so that recovery vehicles and emergency services can do their work safely behind it. An inattentive road user is then the first to hit the (unmanned) Rijkswaterstaat service car, instead of the emergency responders and/or the victims.
But in the Northeast Netherlands – which in addition to Drenthe also includes Overijssel, Groningen, Friesland, Gelderland and Flevoland – it takes longer for a road inspector to reach you than in the Randstad.
Especially when it is dark, in the evenings and at night, the minutes increase. In eighty percent of cases it takes longer than half an hour, sometimes almost 45 minutes. As long as the road inspector is not there, emergency services and recovery workers take over the task of securing.
That is not without danger, says chairman Rob de Jong of the trade association of recovery companies VBM. “The highways in the east are less lit. This means that we are in much more danger during these long, dark days. The speed also increases in the evening, to 130 kilometers per hour. Then it is a shock for the motorist when we standing there with a recovery vehicle.”
According to Rijkswaterstaat, the large difference in arrival times is because road inspectors in the Northeast Netherlands are not on the road 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They work on-call services from home at certain times, which means it takes longer before they can arrive at an incident.
In the Randstad, road inspectors work night shifts, where they are on the road for the entire shift. Arrival times are clearly shorter there: you usually don’t have to wait longer than twenty minutes.
Rijkswaterstaat states that on-call services were chosen in the Northeast Netherlands because the number of incidents at night is too small to have a road inspector on the road continuously.
But that is no excuse for recovery companies. “It doesn’t matter whether it is Sunday morning at 8 a.m. or Monday at 7 a.m., it remains dangerous,” says chairman Rob de Jong of trade association VBM. “We can be on site in fifteen minutes. If the road inspector takes twenty minutes, or sometimes forty on weekends, we will be waiting all that time.”
This is a dangerous situation for the recovery companies and the broken down car. “In the east it is indeed less busy in the evening and at night. Then you have less traffic jams in the event of an incident, but the danger is the same.”
Salvage personnel can protect themselves by sending a second car. Rijkswaterstaat asks for this if it cannot be there itself. Figures from the Incident Management Netherlands Foundation show that recovery companies had to protect themselves in 4.8 percent of accidents in 2022. That’s more than eighteen times a day, a record.
The trade association has therefore been advocating for some time that recovery companies should take over the security task from Rijkswaterstaat as standard. “We often get there before the road inspector. Then it is better for us to immediately start driving with two vehicles.”
In a response to Omroep Gelderland, Rijkswaterstaat states that more efforts in the Northeast Netherlands are not necessary ‘due to the small number of incidents and the effects of these incidents on safety and traffic flow’. But internal emails show that the number of incidents is still large enough to switch to early and late shifts on weekends in the course of next year.
Research by Omroep Gelderland shows that the South of the Netherlands – Zeeland, Brabant and Limburg – already run such services during the weekend. This makes a visible difference in arrival times.