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 2019, 330 cars were counted per 1,000 inhabitants in Berlin – with numbers fluctuating greatly between the inner city and the periphery. The traffic load is not evenly distributed across the Berlin road network. It is particularly high along the sections of the urban motorway and on the routes leading to the city centre from the surrounding areas, which mostly serve as federal highways. Almost 200,000 vehicles, a peak value in Germany, pass the section of the A100 motorway between the Messedamm junction and Kurfürstendamm per 24-hour period.
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.