877km of jams on holiday roads
Drivers caught up in 118km ‘slow-down’ on A71 with 75km bouchon on A7 and 46km jam on A63
DRIVERS faced a summer record of 877km of traffic jams at the weekend – with one “slow down” covering 118km of autoroute.
Figures from the Centre National d’Information Routière showed that for 20 minutes before Saturday lunchtime drivers on the A71 between Vierzon and Clermont-Ferrand were jammed solid over 118km.
The road was nowhere near its full capacity of 3,000 vehicles an hour and poor driving was blamed, with drivers slamming on the brakes and causing others behind to do the same.
The 877km figure is not an all-time record as the centre has recently changed its way of calculating delays and now includes smaller traffic jams that were missed from the previous system.
That means Saturday’s jams were not as severe as the all-time record of 842 of “bouchons” registered on August 4, 2007. That jam was equivalent to traffic being halted all the way from Paris to Toulon.
Despite this, it was still taking drivers 3hr20min to travel from Lyon to Orange in Vaucluse; a journey that should have taken just 1hr40.
Elsewhere, the A7 saw 75km of bouchons between Vienne and Valence and a maximum 110kph speed limit enforced, 46km of jams on the A63 south of Bordeaux plus 20km of delays north of Montpellier on the A9 and 15km at Narbonne.
Photo: Vinci autoroutes
