The news should come as no surprise to commuters to Darmstadt: According to a traffic jam ranking by the American traffic statistician Inrix, drivers in the southern Hessian university town spend 47 hours a year in traffic jams.

This means that the city has moved almost out of nowhere into the top ten German traffic jam strongholds, led by Berlin, Munich and Hamburg.

No other city has experienced such a strong rise.

Frankfurt, on the other hand, which was in fifth place just a few years ago, has fallen into the middle of the list of the ten main congestion cities.

Inrix analyzed data from 74 German cities and around 1000 worldwide.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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But can that be true?

This requires a look at the calculation: Inrix compares the travel times at peak times with those if free travel were possible.

"The


total time lost is the difference between the driving times in peak periods compared to free driving conditions for the individual motorist," explains the company.

In this study, "traffic jam" does not necessarily mean that drivers are stuck on the roads, but that they drive much more slowly in the morning or afternoon than, for example, at night.

The data is based on anonymized movement data, for example from navigation devices, smartphones and vehicles with Inrix software - the company cooperates with Ford, among others.


Tempo 30 now applies in many streets

The difference results in a calculated loss of time, which should add up to 47 hours in the Darmstadt case.

And since the American statisticians also multiply this time by 10.08 euros per hour, they arrive at a total financial loss of 27 million euros - or 472 euros per driver - which would result in the city as a result.

In recent years, however, the city of Darmstadt has converted several heavily frequented streets into 30 km/h zones.

Instead of the previous 50 kilometers per hour, the city council had decided that the maximum speed should only be 30 km/h to protect the climate and improve the quality of life in the city.

The city has also joined the “City Initiative Tempo 30”.

If, for example, cars adhere to this lower speed limit during the day, but are able to speed at night due to a lack of controls, Inrix evaluates this as a loss of time.

Conversely, if a lower speed limit applies at night than during the day, the calculated time loss will decrease accordingly.

Frankfurt, for example, which has such a regulation in some busy streets, now only has 24 traffic jams a year, according to Inrix,

In contrast, Darmstadt does not appear in the competing traffic jam ranking of the navigation data service provider Tomtom.

There, Wiesbaden is in second place behind Hamburg.

This may be partly due to the fact that the tomtom data is a year older and comes from other devices, but also partly because of the method of calculation.

For Darmstadt, for example, a significantly smaller commuting region is recorded - it extends to neighboring Weiterstadt - than for Frankfurt, where, according to the Inrix data, many commuters come from the Taunus or Hanau, 30 kilometers away.

Accordingly, they can use the intersection-free kilometers of motorway more frequently than the people of Darmstadt.

It is therefore more revealing to look at the average speed in the respective inner cities.

And there is Darmstadt with 26 kilometers per hour - including traffic lights and crossings - in the upper midfield, together and on a par with Leipzig, Bremen and Nuremberg.

Cologne and Frankfurt - which, according to Inrix, should have significantly fewer hours of traffic jams than Darmstadt - are only slightly faster with an average speed of 27 km/h.

In Munich, on the other hand, cars can only do just under 18 km/h, so they are around a third slower.

And this means that the people of Darmstadt are still much faster on the move than, for example, the residents of Brussels, Palermo, Paris and London.