Freight vehicle congestion in Australia’s five major cities – 2021 [PDF: 12.06 MB]
Freight vehicle congestion in Australia’s five major cities – 2021
This publication is the third in the series that uses vehicle telematics data to provide measures of traffic congestion for freight vehicles for selected routes across Australia’s five mainland state capital cities—Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. The selected routes comprise the major motorways, highways and arterial roads within each city that service both passenger and freight vehicles. This release includes measures for 71 routes. The estimates presented in this report cover calendar year 2021, and include comparisons with 2020 traffic congestion levels.
The results show that freight vehicle congestion returned to pre-pandemic levels across all five mainland Australian capital cities in 2021, largely due to the return of commuter traffic in our cities, particularly during peak periods, following the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. In particular, freight vehicle traffic congestion increases in 2021 were larger in Melbourne, and to a lesser extent Sydney, where lockdown-related reductions in congestion observed in 2020 were most significant. Relative to pre-COVID-19 congestion levels in 2019, freight vehicle congestion increases have been most significant in proportionate terms across Brisbane routes, even higher than experienced across Sydney and Melbourne routes. Brisbane routes also experienced the largest increases in average excess travel time variability (uncertainty) since 2019, greater than in Sydney and Melbourne. Copies of the data displayed in the report are available here and on data.gov.au.