Motor vehicle traffic is one of the key threats to health and the environment in urban areas. Cars, buses, trucks and other vehicles with combustion engines emit pollutants, cause noise and take up a lot of space. This does not only damage our health, but also the environment.
In 2015, 335 cars were counted per 1,000 inhabitants in Berlin – with numbers fluctuating greatly between the inner city (below 200 in part) and the periphery (above 500 in part). Although the number of cars has remained relatively stable since the mid-1990s after decades of steady growth, the city continues to suffer from high traffic volumes. In 2015, two sections of the A100 urban motorway were listed among the top three roads with the highest daily traffic volumes for the entire country: the section between Alboinstrasse and Tempelhofer Damm and the section between Dreieck Charlottenburg and Spandauer Damm.
There have been regular traffic counts in Berlin since 1951 – initially only for the western part of the city and from 1993 for the entire city. We discovered: traffic is not distributed evenly across the road network. Rather, it is particularly heavy on the urban motorways and the major arterial roads connecting the centre to surrounding areas.
Find out here how traffic volumes and motorisation levels have developed over the past decades and more. The maps provide an additional visual representation of traffic volumes in the Berlin road network. This data is used to plan measures for noise reduction and air pollution control amongst other things.