This is apparent from the trend forecast for road traffic 2022-2027 of the Knowledge Institute for Mobility Policy (KiM). The increase applies to both the main and the underlying road network and will already rise by 16 percent in 2022 compared to 2021, despite the fact that contact-limiting measures were still in place in the first months of the year and a lot of people still worked from home.
But after the abolition of the advice to work from home, things went wild in our country and the daily congestion arose again and again. Together with population and economic growth, KiM sees this as the main cause of the return of traffic jams in our country.
But that is only the beginning of the extra travel times that we have to plan for a car trip, because the researchers expect in their trend forecasts that it will only get busier in the coming years. “In the period up to and including 2027, road traffic will continue to grow, and then the total distance traveled on the main road network will be approximately 13 percent higher than in 2019. The growth on all Dutch roads together will amount to 7.4 percent,” the forecaster predicts. researchers.
In these estimates, the knowledge institute of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management takes into account that the corona crisis has structural consequences for the distance traveled by car because people adjust their behaviour. For example, they are more likely to work from home and some have switched from public transport to the car.
energy prices
It is uncertain how the situation in Ukraine will develop and what the consequences will be for energy prices and the economy. That is why KiM has also estimated mobility on the basis of a CPB scenario in which economic growth is lower and oil prices are even higher than in the basic estimate in 2022 and 2023.
In addition to an estimate for the total distance covered for total road traffic consisting of passenger cars, delivery vans and freight traffic, KiM has also made a separate estimate for freight traffic. In the basic estimate, the distance covered by freight traffic on Dutch roads is expected to grow by 1.5 percent in 2022 compared to 2021. This growth is less strong than the growth in total road traffic, but this is mainly because the contact-limiting measures do not have had a demonstrable effect on the total distance covered by freight traffic.