More congestion and more accidents in 2014

Wednesday February 18, 2015 (March 10, 2016)
In 2014, the National Central Reporting Point (LCM) of Stichting Incident Management Nederland received 21,898 reports of accidents involving passenger cars, a rise of 5% as compared to 2013. These figures make 2014 the first year since 2008 in which the number of accidents rose as compared to the previous year. The growth in the number of accidents was probably caused by the increase in traffic volumes. The rise in the number of accidents occurred mainly in the period May to December, and specifically during this period, congestion levels on Dutch main roads also demonstrated a considerable rise, for the first time in years.


Jeffrey Brockotter of Wolves Berging

The recovery operators on IM roads were not only required to respond to more accidents in 2014. There were also more breakdown assists, more wasted callouts and more requests to secure accident locations. The number of breakdown assists rose by 11% from 29,407 to 32,531 and the number of wasted callouts by 7% from 11,566 to 12,376. At the same time, Rijkswaterstaat deployed IM recovery operators on more occasions, to secure incident sites. Whereas only 78 such requests were received in 2013, in 2014, IM recovery operators were responsible for securing their own work on 676 occasions. The deployment of recovery companies for securing incident locations is a sign of the growing trust of Rijkswaterstaat in the professionalism of the recovery sector.


The total number of IM reports in 2014 amounted to 69,307, 9% more than in 2013. The rise was above all attributed to the Rijkswaterstaat traffic control centres. In 2014, they passed on almost 5,000 additional reports. The number of police reports fell slightly. As usual, the police still remained the most important source of reports of road traffic accidents. Two thirds of all accidents on IM roads were reported to the LCM by one of the Dutch police control rooms.


Type of report 2014 2013 Growth
Accident21.89820.8795% 
Breakdown32.53129.40711% 
Safety67678
Unattended vehicle1.8261.895(4%) 
Wasted callout12.37611.5667% 
 
Main road network59.85354.9679% 
Underlying9.4548.8587% 
 
Police25.84826.140(1%) 
Rijkswaterstaat31.42926.48719% 
ANWB and other12.03011.1987% 
 
Total reports69.30763.8259% 

The use of incident management on the underlying road network was not tangibly extended in 2014. Nonetheless, the number of reports on these roads also rose. The breakdown showing the number of IM reports in the various recovery districts appears in the document IM-meldingen per rayon in 2014 (IM reports per district in 2014). The growth in the number of reports was clearest in the busiest districts around Rotterdam and Amsterdam.

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