Interesting Facts

There are 800 miles of roadworks in place on motorways and major A roads in the UK. (Just in time for the bank holiday traffic, where 14.5 million drivers will set off for the spring break. Gridlock is expected on the M25, M4, M5, M53 and M62.  Happy days.) Source

According to a report by traffic information firm Inrix, the average driver in the UK spends 30 hours stuck in traffic jams, every year. (That rises to almost 82 hours in London, which is the second most congested major city in Europe after Brussels. I'm so grateful that I don't have to commute any more, just get up and roll downstairs every morning. There's never a traffic jam, but I sometimes have to fight my way past Laika to turn the computer on.)

Brazil's Sao Paolo has the dubious honour of having the world's worst daily traffic jams in terms of distance. Brazilian traffic jams may stretch up to 265 kilometers! (On June 10, 2009, they experienced complete gridlock with an accumulated traffic jam of 182 miles (293 km). China holds the record of the world's worst traffic jam, for A 100-kilometer long traffic jam in 2010, which took ten days to disappear, some drivers were stuck for five days. Imagine phoning your boss with that excuse. "Er, I'm stuck in a jam, I'll be about five days late.)

According to traffic researcher Frank Schmid, there are 160,000 traffic jams in Germany every year. (This means that 288 million litres of petrol are wasted and 714,000 tons of C02 created. I'm afraid that on my last two holidays I was a contributer, for some reason every time I drive a long way in Germany, someone decides to demolish a bridge on the motorway I'm on.)