This publication is the fourth in an annual 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 2022, and include comparisons with 2021 traffic congestion levels.

This is the first year since the initial report, in 2019, where none of Australia’s capital cities experienced major lockdowns as part of the COVID-19 pandemic, and city-wide congestion levels have more or less returned to pre-pandemic levels. In particular, city-wide vehicle congestion, as measured by the mean excess time index, increased (worsened) in Sydney, Melbourne and, to a lesser extent, Adelaide between 2021 and 2022, but decreased (improved) in Brisbane and Perth. Many individual motorway routes exhibit increased congestion at morning and afternoon peaks in 2022, compared to 2020 and 2021. On some routes measured congestion is still lower than the pre-pandemic results in 2019. On other routes, congestion peaks exceed 2019 levels. Copies of the data displayed in the report are available here and on data.gov.au.

• Freight vehicle congestion in Australia’s five major cities – 2022 [PDF: 12.88 MB]