Editor in chief at IamExpat Media
Anyone hitting the roads in Germany this coming weekend is almost guaranteed to get stuck in traffic at some point on their journey, according to the ADAC motorists’ association. With the school holidays starting in some federal states and ending in others, July 28 to 30 is expected to be the worst weekend of the year for traffic jams.
ADAC wrote on its website that anyone planning to head out in their car on the last weekend of July would need “strong nerves”, as travellers are in for one of the worst congestion weekends of the summer. The motorists’ association wrote on its website that on the autobahn “almost every journey will end in a traffic jam”, with the longest queues expected on Friday afternoon, Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon.
The reason for the traffic bottleneck is the staggered school holiday rota used in the German school system: this weekend, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria are the last federal states to start their summer holidays, while a second wave of travellers is expected from Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and the Netherlands, where the holidays are in full swing. At the same time, term is already starting next week in North Rhine-Westphalia and Scandinavia, so lots of families will also be on their return journeys.
ADAC warned that congestion would be particularly bad on the “holiday highways”, where traffic is expected to frequently slow to a walking pace. Drivers are recommended to plan ahead with plenty of buffer time and switch to quieter alternative routes or different travel days, wherever possible.
It will be especially busy on the A7 south and north of the Elbe Tunnel in the north, and in the south on the Tauern, Fernpass, Inntal, Brenner and Gotthard routes, as well as journeys to and from the Italian, French and Croatian coasts.
Returning traffic is also likely to cause heavy congestion on the A1 between Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck, all motorways heading to the coastal regions on the North and Baltic Seas, the A19 between Dreieck Wittstock and Rostock, the A9 between Halle / Leipzig, Nuremberg and Munich, and the A95 / B2 between Munich and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.