If you thought you’d beat Switzerland’s traffic by leaving on Good Friday (30 March 2018) you’ll be disappointed. The two worst days for traffic in the first quarter of this year are Good Friday and the day before it – 29 March 2018.

© Mikael Damkier | Dreamstime.com
This map shows Easter traffic hotspots.
Traffic predictor Via Suisse has four gradations of traffic: normal, relatively dense, dense, very dense – shown in red.
Using last year’s predictions we can guess at how the rest of the year’s car crawling might slowly unfold. Across 2017, 29 days were red, or very dense.
From 2017 we can predict very dense traffic on Easter Monday, followed by more of the same on the Saturday and Sunday the weekend following.
May could bring five red days around the spring school holidays.
The worst part of the year will be summer. Last year 17 days between the start of June and the end of August were highlighted red, every Saturday and most Sundays in July and August among them.
After summer the worst is over. Last year, the period from September to December last year didn’t contain any days with very dense traffic.
While the Swiss government continues to invest heavily in its national highways – around CHF 3 billion a year from 2018, the amount of traffic keeps rising. Imagine you’re trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
The chart above shows hours spent in traffic jams caused by congestion and the total number of kilometres driven over the last few years, taken from the latest government traffic report – opens a PDF.
More on this:
Latest traffic predictions – (in French) – Take a 5 minute French test now
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