Column “There and back”: The desire for traffic jams

Time is a beast, and free time is an even bigger beast. It slips and flies by like the pocket watches in Salvador Dalí's famous painting, which is why everything on vacation needs to be optimized. More and more is packed into ever shorter trips, and consequently, into the trunk, too: from the stand-up paddleboard to the three different bikes and, of course, the bag of books you've finally been meaning to read. And woe betide you if you have to wait in line at the Uffizi even though you bought the online ticket! It's only logical not to want to wait in line when you finally have time for yourself and your family.

It is all the more surprising that hardly anyone is really surprised anymore by what the ADAC published this week: In its latest traffic jam report for the twelve weeks of the summer vacation, the club, in its role as chronicler of the madness rampant with mobility, lists 116,020 traffic jams with a total length of 203,830 kilometers. That is five times the circumference of the earth or easily half the distance to the moon. And that's just in Germany. At least the number and length of traffic jams have decreased slightly compared to the previous summer vacation. However, the resulting time loss for travelers has increased by a total of 7.6 percent. While the time loss per capita cannot be calculated for the holiday season alone, according to an analysis by the traffic data service provider Inrix, every German driver spent 43 hours in traffic in 2024.

Another surprising aspect of the ADAC analysis is the temporal distribution. It would have been expected that the most numerous and time-consuming traffic jams would occur on the first weekend in August and the last weekend in July. However, as in previous years, German motorways are now congested about twice as often on Fridays as on Saturdays, once the traditional arrival and departure day and now the weekend with the least traffic. The reasons given for this include greater flexibility and more short breaks, which have led to a shift in the worst congestion times and overall higher congestion on the motorways. Furthermore, travelers are increasingly reacting to bad weather and cutting short their holidays.

At this point, the obvious conclusion isn't just that many Germans would rather sit out a traffic jam than bad weather. Given so much available ADAC data, all sorts of technical tools, and internet tips (avoid rush hour, check traffic apps, take the train), several questions arise: Why, despite all their flexibility, doesn't German vacationers simply avoid traffic jams? With all this time-optimization, do we actually harbor a secret longing for more downtime between the next Uffizi and road bike ride? Or have we even become a nation—or rather, a world—of traffic jam masochists who must successively increase their dose of traffic jam pain?

Those who still prefer a free ride can take a short vacation soon. Experience shows that travel traffic on the coming weekends won't be quite as bad as during the holiday season. At least for now.