Commuters spend an average of 40 hours a year in traffic jams

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The streets on the Mittlerer Ring in Munich are regularly full.

Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa

Those who commute to work in Munich lose an average of 79 hours a year in a traffic jam - time in which one could watch more than 50 films and which corresponds to the two-week workload of many employees.

Nowhere else in Germany is the traffic jam load as high as data from the traffic analysis company Inrix shows.

Across Germany, the time that commuters spend in stationary traffic has increased again: a typical car driver had to reckon with an extrapolated 40 hours loss of time in 2021.

That was 14 hours more than in 2020, said Inrix.

However, the corona pandemic and the associated restrictions led to a significantly lower volume of traffic in the past year.

In 2019, drivers spent an average of 46 hours in traffic jams.

The exposure is also above average in Cologne and Dresden

The investigation into Berlin follows on Munich as the German traffic jam capital: Here, commuters were stuck in traffic jams for an average of 65 hours a year.

Third place in the traffic jam ranking was taken by Hamburg with 47 hours, followed by Potsdam, Pforzheim, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Nuremberg, Dresden and Münster.

The average duration of traffic jams in these cities was between 46 and 41 hours per year.

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In an international comparison, German drivers get off lightly: In London, there was an average loss of time of 148 hours for the current year - more than six full days or almost 100 films of one and a half hours in length.

The British capital is followed by Paris with 140 and Brussels with 134 hours.

In Europe in particular, the traffic jam situation on the roads has worsened again compared to pre-pandemic times.

In the USA, on the other hand, traffic is much more fluid compared to 2019.

The realities of a city are not taken into account

But: How well can the situation in individual cities be compared?

The traffic expert Justin Geistefeldt, for example, considers rankings for traffic jams to be "somewhat problematic" - because they do not sufficiently take into account the characteristics of the individual cities.

Geistefeldt is Professor of Transportation at the Ruhr University in Bochum.

"The topography, the transport network structure and, above all, the commuter networks in the cities under review are only comparable to a limited extent," he says.

Nevertheless, the studies provided evidence of exposure.

And: There is hardly a better data basis to evaluate the congestion.

vki / dpa