The Madrid City Council’s web portal has a large amount of mobility data that allows us to know the evolution of traffic in the Spanish capital and to analyse the impact of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, and specifically on how the rush hour has varied and whether traffic intensity has now fully recovered.
The Open Data Portal is a website that contains all the information from the traffic sensors of the city of Madrid in different formats, which are published monthly, and all the traffic gauges of the 60 permanent stations in the city of Madrid since January 2018.
Peak hour traffic reports are also available from the Mobility Management Centre, which describe and analyse the development of traffic during the peak hour (between 6 and 10 a.m.) on working days. The report reflects the incidents and works that have caused the most problems for traffic, as well as the weather for each day. These reports provide data on intensity (vehicles/hour) and load (an indicator that gives the level of saturation of the roads), collected by the measurement points of the vehicle detectors in three zones: M-30 (47 measurement points at entrances and exits), roads inside the M-30 (1,678 measurement points) and roads outside the M-30 (2,009 measurement points). The daily reports also compare the day’s data with the value of a typical day created on average for the same days of the week of a similar period of the previous year and with the same day of the previous week.
According to data from September 2022, traffic on the M-30 in the morning peak hour has almost fully recovered. On an average working day in September 2022, the morning peak hour intensity is almost 99% than on an average working day in September 2019, and there are days when traffic peaks have occasionally been reached with higher values than in 2019. Traffic jams and congestion on the M-30 have returned and show that traffic levels on Madrid’s main ring road have recovered and therefore the impact of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is no longer visible.
The same is not true for the roads within the M-30 where the peak hour traffic intensity on an average working day in September is 9 points lower than in 2019.
To find out the impact of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 within the M-30, data from one of the permanent gauging stations located on one of the main backbones of the city of Madrid, Paseo de la Castellana, was analysed.
The ADT (average daily traffic) on Paseo de la Castellana on an average working day in September 2020, the year in which the pandemic began in Spain, was 25 points lower than the average for the same period in 2019. The mobility restrictions imposed as a result of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 meant that for a long period of time there was a large decrease in travel and, therefore, in the number of vehicles on the streets of Madrid.
As it can be seen in the graph, ADT values have been gradually restored, with an increase of 13.5% in 2021 and 1.3% in 2022. However, working from home and other restrictions mean that at present the ADT has not been restored to 100% traffic at “pre-COVID” values but is at 87%.
Another impact that the pandemic has had on traffic, is on the hourly distribution of traffic and hourly concentration. In the data analysed for the month of September, a slight shift has been observed in the morning rush hour. Whereas in 2019, the maximum hourly concentration was between 7 and 9 a.m., in 2022 the maximum concentration is between 8 and 10 a.m.
This trend points to a faster recovery of the private car on the M-30 more so than in the urban area. The pandemic has facilitated the adoption of changes in mobility within the M-30 with greater use of scooters (VMP) and bicycles and non-motorised mobility in general, while mobility by car and public transport has declined.
