July 1, 2010

Dutch traffic: not that bad after all

Filed under: Automobiles,General by Orangemaster @ 1:25 pm

IBM just published a survey they did called the Commuter Pain Index, which measured how bad traffic actually is in major cities around the globe. Lo and behold, it’s not as bad in the Netherlands as we thought. It always sucks to be in traffic, but hey, the Netherlands has not yet heard of flexible working hours – I kid you not.

My dad use to have to travel from the South shore of Montréal to the island of Montréal. That meant taking a tunnel or one of the many bridges. My dad left to go to work around 6 am with light traffic to get to work at 7 am, work his 8 hours and head home on an almost empty road. By working those hours, he didn’t spend his last working years in traffic. And Montréal has less traffic than Amsterdam. Coincidence?

On a list of 20 major cities around the globe, Amsterdam, with its congested A10 ring road, comes in quietly at 13.

Here’s the list:

1. Beijing
2. Mexico City
3. Johannesburg
4. Moscow (I’ve seen this in 35 degree weather, it’s insane)
5. New Delhi
6. Sao Paolo
7. Milan
8. Buenos Aires
9. Madrid
10. London (scary but calm enough)
11. Paris (1 km took 1.5 hours last Christmas)
12. Toronto (nasty, all those 4-5 lane highways)
13. Amsterdam (it feels worse than it is)
14. Los Angeles
15. Berlin (not that bad, but that was once)
16. Montreal (avoid the Lafontaine Tunnel!)
17. New York (avoid the Holland Tunnel!)
18. Houston
19. Melbourne
20. Stockholm

(Link: rtl.nl)

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September 9, 2008

Bucks for biking

Filed under: Bicycles,General by Branko Collin @ 9:16 am

Biking to work can net you 5 euro a day from 22 to 26 September, if you live along one of the five designated routes of the Fiets Filevrij campaign. The organizers, local and national governments and cyclists’ unions, hope to call attention to the use of bicycles as a means to reduce the rampant traffic jam problem. After registration participants have to print out their own bar code which they must then scan at booths along the bicycling routes. The routes are all between cities, and therefore longish.

Photo: Fiets Filevrij. Via Dagelinks (Dutch).

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