Standfast

Monday, 6 February 2023
The northern entry portal of the Coen Tunnel was, for the third time in four years, the most dangerous section of road in the Netherlands in 2022. Between hectometre markers 33.0 and 33.9 of the left-hand (anti-clockwise around Amsterdam) carriageway of the A10, there were 57 accidents. That was a little fewer than the previous year, but still enough to stay ahead of the junction between the A4 and the N11 at Leiden. 53 accidents were recorded there.

Jan Pietersz Coen, the fourth Governor-General of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and founder of Batavia (now Jakarta)

What was noticeable was the large number of accidents on various sections of the A4. Of the twenty one-km sections of road on which the most collisions were recorded in 2022, eight were on the A4, all but one of them between Leiden and Rotterdam. More accidents had to be dealt with on all these sections of motorway in 2022 than in any of the previous years. In 2021 and 2020, the A4 occupied six places in the top twenty: in 2019 and 2018 no more than three.

Most dangerous 1-km sections of road in 2022

On the list of longer sections, the motorway between Amsterdam and Rotterdam was no less dominant. Top of this list are the eastern tunnels (northbound) of the Benelux Tunnel, where there were 125 accidents last year. That, too, is a record, not just for the relevant road section, but for all road sections of that length in the Netherlands since 2016! More accidents were also recorded on the A10, primarily on the northern carriageway (clockwise), on either side of the junction with the A2. Most mistakes happened here on the section of road between the A2 and the Gooisebaan (A10 14.0 - 15.9 right-hand, anti-clockwise carriageway). After two years of calm, the A10 is therefore back with a vengeance.

Most dangerous 5-km sections of road in 2022

in 2022. But there were roads that bucked the trend. The northern (westbound) carriageway of the A12 at the Gouwe Aqueduct, in previous years a repeated frontrunner, fell out of the top twenty. This applied both to the kilometre under the aqueduct and to the longer stretch either side. In the past few years the number of collisions here has fallen by almost 50%.

IM report LCM 22004808, the first of five collisions on the first kilometre of the A8 in 2022 (photo credit: Lorenzo Derksen)

And on the A8, north of the Coen Tunnel, there was little to report. The first kilometre of this motorway, which heads towards Zaandam, was ranked fourth in the accident top ten in 2019. Back then, there were 48 collisions. In 2020, the road was resurfaced. Since then there has been an air of serenity that has been broken just five times in the past year by a bump. The road section ended up an enviable 756th place in the classification.

Accidents on the A4 in 2022