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Car traffic at the intersection of Kurfürstendamm and Bornimer Strasse: Berlin was Germany's traffic jam capital in 2020
Photo: Stefan Zeitz / imago images
In congestion rankings there is usually a clear tendency: car lines are getting longer and the number of minutes that drivers lose while standing still increases.
In 2020, however, the level of congestion fell for the first time in all 26 German cities that the map specialist TomTom regularly examines.
The level of congestion, which expresses the time lost for drivers due to traffic obstructions, decreased to very different degrees.
While it was eight percentage points lower in Bonn and Bremen compared to the previous year, the decrease in Leipzig, Bielefeld and Wuppertal was only one percentage point.
For example, if the congestion level is 36 percent, a journey takes an average of 36 percent longer than it would without a traffic jam.
There was also a change at the top in 2020, where Berlin, which was in second place in the previous year, displaced Hamburg from first place.
The Hessian capital Wiesbaden took third place.
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In total, the TomTom Traffic Index shows traffic in 416 cities worldwide.
After all, 387 cities recorded a significant decrease in time lost during rush hour in 2020 - by an average of 28 percent.
The sharpest decreases occurred during morning and evening rush hour traffic.
The time lost in the morning hours in Düsseldorf fell by 16 percentage points, while in Stuttgart it fell by only ten percentage points.
According to the card specialist, this difference has to do with the different employers in the two cities.
Companies from the financial services sector such as those in Düsseldorf enable home offices more frequently than industry and commerce in Stuttgart.
The home office apparently also plays a particularly important role in Frankfurt and the surrounding area.
TomTom traffic expert Ralf-Peter Schäfer warned, despite the sometimes strong declines, that there was no trend reversal: “We will see in the next few months that the volume of traffic will increase again.
People will go back to work and return to old routines «.
Therefore, now is the right time for city planners, politicians and employers to decide how to relieve roads in the future.
The index is based on anonymized GPS data from TomTom's traffic database, from which travel times are determined.
According to the provider, the number of measurements is also taken into account for the index, so that busy roads have more influence on the result than routes with little traffic.
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