Wed 5 Jun 2002
Last week we had a 4 day weekend from Thursday to Sunday in Germany. Because of this, we decided to take our first overnight trip since arriving here. We decided to go to Salzburg, Austria, which meant that we took a different stretch of the autobahn than we had previously. Our route took us from Niedereschach to Stuttgart to München (Munich) to Salzburg.
As it turns out, the route (the A81) between Stutgart and München is one of the oldest in the country, and was commissioned by Hitler himself. As a result it provides a much different driving experience than the relatively modern portion of road we have driven on before.
Since the road is quite old, there are a lot on-going construction projects. Some of these are quite extensive. Each of the zones has a sign at the start showing the estimated completion date. We saw one area that wasn’t due to be completed until December 2006.
In addition, the road is very heavily travelled, which means that traffic jams are possible, even out in the middle of nowhere. This is especially true at the end of a long holiday weekend, as we discovered.
There are several things that the government has done on this stretch of road to try to make travel safer, if not faster. For one, about half the route has a daytime speed limit of 120kph. In another section there are periodic overhead electronic signs which change the speed limit based on the traffic flow. This can be bewildering the first time you see it– especially since the signs can change while you are approaching them. It’s also not clear what you are supposed to do when you come to one of these signs and it is completely blank. Most of the drivers around us took this as an opportunity to floor it. I didn’t try this tactic, since I don’t know what the rules are, and there are a lot of those speed monitoring cameras I mentioned before used in these zones.
(Picture stolen from the Texas Highwayman’s Driving In Germany Site) Incidentally, the two unlit signs in the picture above can be used to add other traffic rules, such as no passing zones for trailers, construction zones, etc.
Our speed on this road rarely even approached the posted limits on Sunday. No matter what the sign said, we almost always were travelling 20kph below the limit.
At one point during our return we sat through nearly 10km of road where our average speed was less than 20kph. Our trip to Salzburg, which we started on Friday (thereby missing most of the traffic at the beginning of the holiday weekend), took about 4 1/2 hours from the time we left home including a lunch break. Our return trip on Sunday afternoon took almost 6, and we didn’t stop for dinner.
Afterwards, we saw a Stau (traffic jam) on the other side of the road. From our odometer, I estimated that the backup was about 12km in length.
This is not to say that the travel was all bad. Near both Stuttgart and München, there are bypass roads that have between 4 and 6 lanes each direction. These portions could be travelled very quickly. In general, the trip got easier then nearer we were to Stuttgart.
Clearly though, the Autobahn is not always the driving paradise we Americans sometimes imagine it to be!
I still managed to average 180kph between Stuttgart and our exit, though.
Local Tags: austria, autobahn, construction, driving, driving in germany, germany, holiday, ken, munich, niedereschach, salzburg, stuttgart
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