Cape Town is really in a jam

CONGESTION: BEHAVIOUR ADJUSTMENTS ARE KEY TO SOLUTION OF FEWER CARS ON ROADS

Desperate need for efficient public transport as private cars clog highways.

While Johannesburg motorists lament the high volumes of traffic in the country’s largest metropole, Cape Town has been singled out as the most congested city in South Africa.

Navigation systems developer TomTom released its annual Traffic Index 2016 that detailed the traffic congestion worldwide.

The report also warned that drivers in Cape Town should expect to spend 30% additional travel time stuck in traffic at all times of the day, and up to 64% on a Friday between the peak period of 4pm and 5pm. This would add up to 152 hours of extra travel time a year for these Capetonians.

The overall daily congestion level will add 25% of extra travel time in the Mother City.

However, in Pretoria and Durban, traffic congestion was said to be easing.

Next on the congestion ranking is Johannesburg (18% extra travel time on highways), Bloemfontein (15%) and Pretoria (12%). They are followed by Durban and East London with 11% and 10% respectively.

Using data from 2015, the TomTom Traffic Index looked at the traffic congestion in 295 cities in 38 countries on six continents.

TomTom communications manager Jana van der Spuy said they worked with 14 trillion data points that have been accumulated over eight years.

Van der Spuy said this was the fifth year of the TomTom Traffic Index.

“This year we have done something different with the TomTom Traffic Index, by giving cities the right to reply. This is very exciting for us here in South Africa, since Cape Town and Johannesburg have both been selected as profile cities.”

Globally, Van der Spuy said, the report revealed that traffic congestion was up by 13% since 2008.

The report also showed a marked difference between continents. While North America’s traffic congestion has increased by 17%, Europe has increased by only 2%.

Van der Spuy said the European figure could be influenced by southern European countries such as Italy (-7%) and Spain (-13%), where there had been a marked drop in traffic congestion in eight years.

TomTom Traffic vice-president Ralf-Peter Schaefer said: “We really want everybody to think about how they can lower the amount of time they waste in traffic every day – and to realise that we all need to play a part. If even just 5% of us changed our travel plans, we’d improve travel times on our major highways by up to 30%.”