Whether it's going home to the family or to the south under the sun: Before Christmas, many people in North Rhine-Westphalia make another trip. This Friday it should be particularly crowded on roads, airports and train stations.

Düsseldorf/Cologne (dpa/lnw) - On the way to the gifts, travelers in North Rhine-Westphalia will probably have to be patient on Friday. It is the main travel day before the Christmas holiday. The ADAC expects a lot of traffic and longer traffic jams on the motorways. The greatest potential for congestion is on the A1 (Cologne-Dortmund-Münster), A2 (Dortmund-Bielefeld), A3 (Cologne-Frankfurt), A40 (Duisburg-Dortmund), A43 (Wuppertal-Recklinghausen) and the Cologne ring road. But it shouldn't be as crowded as it is at the start of the summer or autumn holidays.

At the airports in Düsseldorf and Cologne/Bonn, the federal police want to ensure that there are no longer long waiting times at the security check with enough staff. Düsseldorf expects 600,000 passengers during the Christmas holidays, Cologne/Bonn expects 290,000. This means that significantly fewer people are out and about than in the summer or autumn holidays, when queues in Düsseldorf and Cologne/Bonn, some of which were several hundred meters long, formed in front of the security checks. The Verdi union criticizes that there are still too few security personnel available.

When it comes to rail traffic, Deutsche Bahn uses additional trains on the connections that are in high demand. In North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, travelers between Cologne, Düsseldorf and Berlin benefit from this. In regional traffic, however, there will be no or significantly fewer trains on some lines until the end of January due to a high level of sick leave among railway employees. Passengers should switch to buses or other train connections there.