Changes

Traffic flow is one of the main variables taken into account when assessing traffic. It is the total number of vehicles passing a road section in a given time.

The following paragraphs are devoted to comparing the average weekly traffic flow recorded at some of the gauging stations managed by the Directorate-General for Roads (Ministry of Transports, Mobility and Urban Agenda) from March to June. The information is displayed by vehicle category, and data for light-duty vehicles (ldv) and heavy-duty vehicles (hdv) are shown separately. The graphs show the variation in traffic flow for each type of vehicle in 2020 in relation to 2019.

Over 140,000 light-duty vehicles/day (ldv/d) were recorded in 2019 on the motorways in the metropolitan areas of Madrid (gauging station located on the orbital motorway M-40), Málaga (orbital motorway), and València (gauging station located on the motorway accessing from the south), all of which are areas of significant demographic and economic importance. Traffic on these motorways fell as low as 20,000 ldv/d during the most restrictive period of lockdown in 2020. Other roads, such as the A-2 motorway connecting Madrid-Saragossa (Zaragoza)-Barcelona-Montpellier, the orbital motorway in Alicante and Corunna urban motorway (A Coruña), recorded metropolitan traffic flows of 80,000 ldv/d to 120,000 ldv/d in 2019, yet figures dropped in 2020 to 20,000 ldv/d or even 10,000 ldv/d in Saragossa (Zaragoza).

The largest statistical group comprises gauging stations that recorded traffic flows of 25,000 ldv/d to 55,000 ldv/d during the reference months in the year 2019, i.e. in Asturias, the gauging station located on the motorway that connects the metropolitan area of Central Asturias (Oviedo-Gijón-Avilés) to inland Spain; in Cantabria, the gauging station located on the motorway that runs along the northern coast in Spain; in Burgos, the gauging station on the motorway that links Madrid to the Basque Country (Euskadi/País Vasco) and Paris; in Valladolid, the gauging station on the orbital motorway; in Toledo, the station on the motorway that connects Madrid and Lisbon (Lisboa); in Seville (Sevilla), the gauging station on the road that runs from the north to the south of Spain parallel to the Portuguese border; and in Murcia, the gauging station located on the motorway that runs along the Spanish Mediterranean coast. All these stations registered a drop in traffic to around 5,000 ldv/d during the most restrictive weeks of the state of alarm. Lastly, two more gauging stations were to be found registering figures below 25,000 ldv/d during the 2019 reference period, i.e. in Badajoz, the gauging station on the motorway from Madrid to Lisbon (Lisboa); and in La Rioja, the gauging station located on the motorway connecting Pampeluna (Pamplona/Iruña), Logroño and Burgos from east to west, both of which located in sparsely populated areas accounting for a relatively low share of GDP. These stations registered equally significant falls in vehicle traffic flows in the 2020 reference period, with decreases to 5,000 ldv/d in Badajoz and 2,000 ldv/d in La Rioja.

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