This is stated by Evofenedex, the association for companies in the logistics sector, and Transport en Logistiek Nederland (TLN) in response to the figures of tunnel closures that Rijkswaterstaat (RWS) collected for De Telegraaf.
“Standing in a traffic jam for an hour costs a truck company 200 euros. If you know that in a bit of traffic there are quickly a hundred trucks, then the calculation is quickly made,” says a spokesperson. “Of course, not every traffic jam lasts an hour, but even if it is only half of it, it quickly amounts to 30 million euros just because drivers are careless about loading their vehicles.”
Closed tunnel
A trucker who makes a mistake causing a tunnel to be closed will be fined up to 1200 euros. “But that is an amount that is disproportionate to the damage he causes. A closure of an average of ten minutes results in a traffic jam of about two kilometers”, says Bert van Wee, professor of transport policy at TU Delft.
Research agency Panteia, which maps the economic damage of traffic jams for TLN and Evofenedex, says that there are an average of 115 cars per kilometer per lane. “Over two or three lanes, this involves 460 to 575 vehicles. Then it quickly exceeds a thousand vehicles if there are two kilometers”, says a researcher, who states that 15 percent of this is freight traffic.
It is not clear why drivers do not always follow the signals from the height detection. „The driving task of a driver is difficult, he has to pay attention to many things at the same time. But to gain more insight, we will keep track of the data from the measured cars in a more targeted manner, in the hope that we can intervene even earlier and prevent traffic jams,” says an RWS spokesperson.
Economic damage
Thomas Reitsma of Evofenedex hopes this will help. “The largest part of the transport flow adheres to the rules, it is only a very small part that does not. If we gain insight into which group that is, we can also look at how we can better reach them in order to limit the economic damage.”
According to the most recent calculations by Panteia, the economic damage caused by delays in freight traffic on the main road network amounts to about 1.2 billion euros. The costs of travel time losses due to lorries amount to more than 468 million euros. There are also costs of detours and unreliable travel times of about 750 million euros.