Hessen Traffic Topic

Anyone who lives around the state of Hessen (Germany)  will grumble to a fair extent about traffic jams, and near-shutdowns of the autobahn system. 

Yesterday, the SPD Party within the state....called upon the state government to develop some type of concept to 'fix' the problem.  To be honest, it'll just generate a couple of PhD-type folks in traffic management to admit in a year that you can't fix traffic jams, unless you lessen the number of cars. 

The number of hours for the whole state with jams?  31,600 hours for 2016.

My wife travels 20.8 kilometers (13 miles, each way) to work each morning.  You can expect this trip to take near 45 minutes.  One might laugh over the trip and the amount of time required.  I've driven it with her on at least a hundred occasions.

There are at least five bottlenecks in this 13-mile drive, which add at least two to four minutes in a waiting pattern.  Rain?  You can add another five minutes onto the trip.  Snow?  Add at least fifteen additional minutes. 

The urbanization of the region?  Well....this is really where you go and discuss the bulk of this topic. As you look across the Rhine Valley area....I doubt if anyone back in the 1960s would have envisioned this number of cars moving within the region and the dense nature of traffic.