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Traffic jam on Munich's Blumenstraße: traffic level back to pre-corona level
Photo: Wolfgang Maria Weber / IMAGO
Empty streets, lonely intersections - this is how it looked in German cities during the first Corona lockdown.
A completely different picture is now emerging: while the pandemic is winding down, traffic has long since returned to normal.
Even more: in 2022, the volume of traffic in Germany, measured in vehicle kilometers on weekdays, was again eight percent above the pre-crisis level of 2019. This is shown by data from the traffic analyst Inrix.
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And where there are many cars, there is a traffic jam.
In 2022, car drivers in Germany spent an average of 40 hours where they actually wanted to drive.
This value is still just below the pre-Corona level, even if the standing times in many cities have increased again compared to 2021.
The title of Germany's most congested city goes once again to Munich: According to Inrix, drivers lost 74 hours there over the whole year - more than three full days.
The bottleneck is the Mittlerer Ring, where you lost 13 minutes a day at peak times.
Berlin (71 traffic jam hours) and Hamburg (56 hours) follow in the next places.
Inrix analyzed data sources from smartphones, vehicles and cities, thereby comparing travel times during peak, off-peak and off-peak times.
The competitor TomTom comes up with different results with its own data and calculations - on this interactive map you can understand the level of traffic jams in the largest German cities down to street level.
Four European cities in global top 10
London tops the traffic jam hit list worldwide – with an average of 156 hours in 2022, people stood there more than twice as long as in Munich.
While that meant an increase of just five percent compared to the previous year, standing times in Chicago, in second place, increased by almost 50 percent compared to 2021. Four European congestion cities are among the international top 10.
"Despite the geopolitical and economic uncertainties, the number of vehicle kilometers rose again worldwide," says Inrix analyst Bob Pishue.
"In the long term, traffic will continue to increase, but in the event of a severe global recession, the figures for 2023 could be slightly lower."
The ADAC, on the other hand, does not quite see the traffic level from before Corona.
The automobile club announced in December that by 2024 at the latest, car traffic would be as high as before the pandemic.
But more traffic was also registered here in 2022, namely five percent more than in the previous year - despite higher fuel costs.
