Heavy early-morning traffic congestion across Copenhagen causes 4,000 hours of delay during the peak hour. But traffic congestion is no longer just a city phenomenon. There are more and more vehicles on the roads throughout the Greater Copenhagen area and heavy traffic increasingly occurs throughout the day.
Today it is difficult to pass the throngs of vehicles in the afternoon, and problems are also occurring at other times of the day. The situation is becoming so severe that traffic congestion is causing an estimated 100,000 hours of delays daily across the Greater Copenhagen area. These are the conclusions of Project Congestion, the first major research project to study Copenhagen's sometimes chaotic traffic. For the first time, automated and manual traffic counts have been combined with speed measurements from Global Positioning System receivers installed in 400 cars. This enables systematic measurements of speed per second at all times of the day. Measurements have been taken in Roskilde, Frederiksborg and Copenhagen counties and in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg municipalities.
"It is surprising that there are significant congestion problems outside the morning rush hour. Traffic congestion is increasingly occurring in the afternoons too," says COWI project manager Erling Hvid. "We can see from our measurements that even just a little extra traffic results in an explosive growth in traffic congestion. Consequently many motorists are nearing the threshold of what they are prepared to tolerate. One more vehicle on the roads driving 1 km costs other motorists on the same stretch of road up to DKK 8. This is substantially more than the average accident and environmental costs generated by the same vehicle."
Project Congestion was carried out by COWI, Copenhagen City Council, the Greater Copenhagen Authority, the University of Copenhagen, the Danish Road Directorate and the Technical University of Denmark's Centre for Traffic and Transport. The main aim of the project is to determine what congestion actually is, develop methods of assessing congestion and establish the extent of the problem.
The project was divided into two phases. In the first phase, completed two years ago, the project team developed methods for determining congestion and ways of calculating its socio-economic costs. The methods were piloted on three test road sections in the Copenhagen area prior to embarking on phase two: calculating the total delays to cars and buses caused by congestion throughout the Greater Copenhagen area. Jens Christian Højgaard, section head with Copenhagen City Council, adds:
"The research project has provided us with methods for determining the extent of congestion. Whereas previously we only had measurements for selected road sections, we now have a comprehensive picture for the entire Copenhagen area. It will be interesting to follow up on the results over the coming years to see how congestion has developed." The project received support from the Ministry of Transport and the Danish Transport Council.By Christina Tækker, cht@cowi.dk Published: 07.09.2004