Frankfurt/Main (dpa/lhe) - In 2022, drivers in Hesse stood in traffic jams for as long as the year before. They spent a total of 25,251 hours in traffic jams, 86 hours more than in 2021, as the ADAC Hessen-Thüringen announced in its traffic jam report on Thursday. There were more traffic jams in the first half of the year than in the second, since many people would have used the nine-euro ticket from summer 2022 or traveled by plane instead of by car, explained ADAC traffic expert Wolfgang Herda. Overall, there was significantly less traffic and congestion than in the pre-Corona year 2019.
The closure of the A66 and the construction of the new Salzbach Viaduct caused the worst traffic jams last year. The ADAC identified the sections on the A4 from the Bad Hersfeld junction to the Kirchheimer Dreieck and on the A44 from the Kassel-Süd triangle to the Kassel-West motorway junction as further traffic jam hotspots. In a nationwide comparison of the number of traffic jam hours, Hesse is in 5th place, North Rhine-Westphalia leads the ranking with 104,191 traffic jam hours.
The longest traffic jam in Hesse was measured last year on September 23 on the A5 between the Hirschberg junction and the Darmstadt Nordkreuz. Because of construction work, it was backed up over a length of 29 kilometers for almost seven hours. For this year, the ADAC expects traffic and congestion to continue to increase.
