The Netherlands is a small country in Western Europe with an extremely high population density (508 people per Km2 as of 2022). Moving people efficiently in such a dense environment is no easy task, but the country is known for its top-notch bicycle infrastructure and public transport, as well as for its pedestrian and bike-friendly urban design.
That being said, motor traffic is still very much present, and is of course a pillar of its highly-developed economy. The country has one of the most dense highway networks in the world, which in turn have one of the highest traffic densities in the world! The Wikipedia article has some very interesting insights:
- The busiest Dutch motorway is the A13 between The Hague and Rotterdam, with a traffic volume of 140,000 motor vehicles per day.
- The province of Utrecht in the centre of the country however, has the busiest motorways on average (almost 100,000 vehicles a day).
- The busiest 4-lane motorway in the Netherlands is the A10 in the Coen Tunnel in Amsterdam with 110.000 vehicles per day.
- The widest Dutch motorway is the A15/A16 just south of Rotterdam with 16 lanes in a 4+4+4+4 setup.
Although I always enjoy this type of “fun facts”, I cannot help but think that they are only a small part of the story. Each one of these facts is an insight about a specific point in space, at a certain point in time – they are each a “tree”, but I want to see the “forest”. With this in mind, I decided to create a visualization of my own that would show a global view
The result is a series of animated maps representing a full day of traffic in the Netherlands, using color to represent the traffic intensity. For this, I used R for the animations and the data from INWEVA for the year 2019. I also chose a few highway exchanges (Knooppunten) which I thought were of interest, each of them next to one of the four major cities (Utrecht, The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam). If you would like to create your own animation with different highway exchanges, check out the code on Github!
Car Traffic
The first video represents car traffic, i.e. automobiles. It is the average weekday during the year 2019 (the last “normal” year before the COVID-19 pandemic). On the left-hand side, a map can be seen which shows the traffic intensity (purple – lowest, red – highest). On the right-hand side, you can see a time series representation of the traffic intensity for each of the four highway exchanges.
This shows the whole picture much better than the fun facts before! The map shows that the busiest areas are clearly within the Randstad. In the line charts, two “rush hours” in the morning (8am) and evening (around 4-5pm) are clearly visible, suggesting most car traffic is due to commuters.
Middleweight Cargo Traffic
Up next is the middleweight cargo traffic. (vans). Bear in mind the red color represents the maximum traffic intensity for this map – i.e. the “red” for automobiles is not the same as the “red” for middleweight cargo traffic. Also, notice that the axes of the line charts are different since there is much less middleweight cargo traffic:
Even though the numbers are low compared to cars, you can still clearly see the rush hours. The busy areas are similar to cars (Randstad), but the A4 between Amsterdam and The Hague has somewhat less traffic – notice how the Knooppunt Badhoevedorp has comparatively lower intensity (graph on the bottom right).
Heavy Cargo Traffic
Finally, we have heavy cargo traffic (trucks):
There is a morning “rush hour”, but the rest of the day follows a smoother curve than for car and middleweight cargo traffic. The busiest areas are noticeably different to those for car traffic! The A15 and A1 highways, linking the port of Rotterdam to the European mainland, are much busier than in the other videos. The A67, crossing Noord-Brabant and Limburg in the south, is also one of the busiest. Although it is not visible in this map, this highway ends in Antwerpen (Belgium), also one of the largest ports in Europe. Comparatively, little traffic is seen around Amsterdam and The Hague (see the Knooppunten Prins Clausplein and Badhoevedorp), which seems to suggest most heavy cargo traffic has the seaports as either origin or destination.
I decided to stop here for now, but some interesting comparisons could be:
- A weekday vs a weekend
- 2019 vs 2020 (year of the lockdowns)
- A winter vs a summer day
Creating the animations
The animations were created using R, specifically the animation package. I created the map and the charts individually as GIF files, and then joined them in one. For those interested, check out INWEVA for the underlying data, and Github for the code. Feel free to leave a comment for feedback, suggestions, or questions!my
