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Germany stands still here. Maps of the most congested cities

2020-10-30T08:54:06.221Z


Fear of the corona virus drives commuters from buses and trains into cars - and into traffic jams. Where are they particularly bad? Interactive maps show where you lose the most time in major German cities.


Anyone who is out and about in the big city in the morning usually knows exactly where the traffic is stalling.

On the way to Hamburg, whether via Elbe bridges, Elbe tunnel, Horner roundabout or on the A7, it jams almost every day.

Dodging back roads and secret routes hardly helps - and the corona-related decrease in traffic was only of limited duration.

Shortly before the new Corona measures come into effect, the volume of traffic and congestion levels are almost at the previous year's level.

Among other things, because people avoid public transport for fear of infection and - if they can - prefer to drive their own car.

They rarely switch to cycling in autumn.

Places prone to traffic jams, such as the entrance to Hamburg, can be found in almost every major German city.

Sometimes there are junction of the autobahns, sometimes inner-city traffic axes such as Frankfurter Allee in Berlin and sometimes there are crossings like when changing the banks of the Main in Frankfurt.

But rush hour isn't just at these critical points.

The cities are criss-crossed by arteries through which traffic pumps.

Not in a constant flow, but hindered by a multitude of bottlenecks and blockages.

In order to illustrate the traffic jam level in detail, we examined ten particularly congested major cities in Germany to determine how much the speed at which they are driven drops at rush hour.

The results can be broken down into individual road sections; for this purpose, we have analyzed mass tracking data from the navigation device manufacturer TomTom.

Use the map in the head of the article to explore the congestion situation in the individual cities

- and the

arrows next to the city name to scroll through the maps.

methodology

How was the morning congestion level calculated? Up arrow Down arrow

The morning congestion level indicates for each road section how much the average speed (median) decreased during the time with the maximum traffic volume (7-10 a.m.) compared to the time with the minimum traffic volume (0-5 a.m.).

If the median speed was above the maximum permitted speed at night, the decrease compared to the maximum permitted speed was calculated.

Since greater fluctuations are to be expected with a very small number of observations in a road section, only road sections with at least 100 observations are shown on the map.

By scaling the line width according to traffic volume, road sections with more traffic are highlighted.

In order to minimize temporary distortions (construction sites, closures, vacation times), data over at least several months is necessary for a correspondingly detailed presentation.

In view of the serious effects of the corona pandemic on traffic, the second half of 2019 (July 1, 2019 - December 31, 2019) was used as the basis for the visualization.

As a result of the pandemic, the volume of traffic had fallen sharply at times, but has been around the previous year's level since the beginning of July.

Where does the data come from? Up arrow Down arrow

The calculation is based on data from the navigation

device manufacturer TomTom

.

This collects anonymized GPS data and makes it available in aggregated form at the level of the road sections.

Originally, the data comes from both portable and built-in navigation devices and smartphones.

The database comprises more than 600 million data sources worldwide.

According to TomToms, this corresponds to a share of 20 percent of all car traffic.

But how can it even be that traffic regularly collapses despite constant road expansion?

And is it really getting worse and worse with the traffic jam at rush hour?

Stress test rush hour traffic

The biggest challenge for the transport systems is the morning and evening rush hour - in normal times not only for the streets, but also for the public transport networks.

Between seven and ten o'clock in the morning, the volume of traffic in Germany's major cities is usually around 75 percent higher than the daily average.

Spread over the day and differentiated according to days of the week, the result is a picture that has only changed slightly due to the corona pandemic, as can be seen from data from TomTom:

How much time is lost in rush hour varies from city to city.

What they all have in common is that the commuter-related traffic jam arrives on time and regularly - the clock can be set according to it.

The rigid patterns only soften a little on Fridays and weekends, and the overall volume of traffic decreases.

If you add up the time commuters spend in traffic jams each year, the results are absurdly high: Those who need an hour to commute to work - with a free route - are stuck in traffic jams between 101 and 131 hours in the cities under review.

More and more traffic

So far, the traffic jams have not stopped people in the big cities from commuting by car.

But on the contrary.

The number of cars per inhabitant reached a record level in 2019.

In the long term, there has been a clear trend towards longer commuting distances and times over the decades.

More than one in four employees now has an easy journey of 30 minutes or longer.

But not only car traffic has increased in recent years.

In January, before the corona pandemic, the Association of German Transport Companies reported increasing passenger numbers for the 22nd year in a row, and bicycle use has been booming for years, especially in metropolises.

This trend, which has been stable for many years, is currently interrupted due to corona.

It is quite conceivable that even after the end of the pandemic, many more people will work regularly from their home office and that living on the outskirts or in the country will become more attractive again.

This could lead to a weakening of the rush hour and noticeably change the flow of traffic.

This is hardly predictable.

It's tight in the city centers

The fact is that city centers are tight, even during the pandemic.

The number of people who want to go to one place at the same time is often too large for the streets, subways and commuter trains.

Transport policy becomes a matter of dispute, locally, in local politics, but also at the federal level.

Many cities are currently exploring ways out of the traffic jam crisis - in some cases with model tests in which roads are closed to cars.

We looked at numerous transport projects in detail, evaluated data, and interviewed residents and experts.

How successful are plans that redistribute the limited street space?

What are the conflicts?

How did the Corona period change mobility?

And what can be learned from examples from abroad?

Read the other articles from our thematic block on the traffic transition here:

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2020-10-30

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