You would think that thanks to corona and working from home we would have learned about traffic jams, but that turns out to be disappointing.
Crawling to work in the morning because you’ve decided to do this together with almost all of the working Dutch: it’s never really fun. At the same time, it is the reality, we are in traffic jams a lot if you spend a lot of time in the car.
Working from home
Now we don’t want to pretend that a pandemic was the only correct solution, but working from home did help for the traffic jam problem in 2020. After all, at the start of the scary corona virus we obediently followed what Mark Rutte said and you can still hear him say it: work at home if possible. In 2023, working from home is still an option for many and it is still being done. So you would expect fewer cars to be on the road. Figures from the ANWB, however, paint a different reality.
Situation worsened
The first quarterly figures of traffic jams in the Netherlands were compared with those of 2019, the last year before the corona crisis. In 2023 we will be in traffic jams again, with 10 percent more traffic jams than in 2019. Working from home is therefore not significant enough to make a difference. During the morning rush hour, traffic jams even increased by 17 percent and the situation has worsened by 20 percent, especially in North Holland. You are still stuck in traffic jams in North Brabant and South Holland.
Continuing trend
Why then is there such an increase? Especially since about 470,000 cars have been added to the country’s roads since 2019, resulting in a total of 8.9 million cars in the Netherlands. In addition to, of course, freight traffic, it can simply become very busy on the road. The ANWB does not see this trend declining either and expects the crowds to only get worse. In March, the traffic jam record was broken twice with 1,093 km (March 7) and 1,102 km (March 14). (via the Telegraph)
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