Prime Minister Rutte’s urgent advice to start working from home en masse has not yet been successful. The road is hardly less busy than a few weeks ago.
This is evident from data from the traffic app Flitsmeister. The company behind the app analyzed the number of kilometers driven by the 1.8 million users at various times over the past year. After the announcement of the intelligent lockdown, which took effect on March 16, people stayed home en masse: the number of cars in the morning rush hour halved.
Now that Prime Minister Mark Rutte again called for home working during the second corona wave on 28 September, that advice seems to have made a lot less impression. Data from Flitsmeister shows that there was only 6 percent less traffic on the road during the first week. A week after that, this fell by another 3 percent. All in all, even more kilometers were made than at the beginning of March, when the Netherlands still went to work without corona.
First lockdown
Of course the situation is not the same as it was then. During the first lockdown, many professional groups (including teachers, catering staff, hairdressers, gym instructors) stayed at home because their school or business remained closed. The government has not been that strict in recent weeks. Yet Flitsmeister director Jorn de Vries calls the slight decrease in road traffic “striking”. “The data doesn’t lie, the advice of working from home has hardly been followed. Apparently there is less sense of urgency. I am very curious about the effect of Mark Rutte’s press conference tonight. We will be able to see that again in a few weeks. ”
Despite the fact that the number of kilometers driven is approximately at the old level, this is still not the case with the traffic jams. “We have already seen that traffic spreads more throughout the day. We actually still see that pattern. It is much less busy, especially in the morning rush hour. The evening rush hour has started to pick up again recently. Apparently people don’t mind being at the office a little later in the morning, but everyone would like to be at home at the dinner table at the same time. ”
