Time is money, but AS Norge is struggling to speed up the transfer. The trains are as slow as they have always been, the planes take as long as they did – and in the car there is no country in Europe where it goes as slowly as in Norway.
The latest is reported by the Road Traffic Information Council (OFV), which refers to a survey carried out by Vista Analyze for them back in 2021. OFV says that there is nothing to indicate that this has changed since then. The problem is therefore the average speed between the cities, and we are therefore lagging behind despite large grants and investments in the road network, especially in the last 10 years. In the report “The quality of the Norwegian road network, a comparison with selected European countries” the average speed between the largest cities in Norway is revealed, and adjusted for traffic the average speed is below 70 km/h.
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Yes, it is clearly the lowest of the 16 European countries included in the survey. ‒ This shows that we have not succeeded in completing a piecemeal and divided development of the main road network, says head of department Rikard Gaarder Knutsen in OFV. ‒ We are not able to reap the big gains by developing an efficient trunk road network, it is bad policy for people, business and not least for the climate and nature. Norway is among the countries that put the most funds into the pot for the road sector, measured by both road sections and against gross national product, around NOK 40 billion annually. Nevertheless, the traffic is slow. OFV believes that the overall benefits of motorway development between the largest cities must be realized more quickly, and they say that this is best done by building the large road projects in a continuous manner. A piecemeal and divided road development gives little benefit to everyone – including nature. – Many landowners, municipalities and others have often waited for decades to get clarification on whether the road should be built or not, says Gaarder Knutsen. ‒ New NTP also shows that some projects still fall victim to this type of thinking. We have to reverse this development. So how slow is it between Norwegian cities compared to others? Well, here in Norway 1.1 per cent of the network is motorway, and here Spain tops the survey with 2.3 per cent. Poland also has the least share of motorways with only 0.4 per cent. France has the highest average off-peak driving speed at 105.3 km/h. It is literally miles ahead of Norway, because here you only get 68 kilometers in an hour. So an average speed of 68.5 km/h, and the French have then driven well over 3 miles further. A country with which it is a little more natural to compare is Sweden, and they are also miles ahead. The average speed there is 87.9 km/h. Even small Denmark, where the car population travels much shorter than we have to in long Norway, is far ahead of us in terms of average speed, because there it is 91.1 km/h. The country with the second lowest average is Finland with 85.7 km/h, while Switzerland has the third lowest with 86.8 km/h. Both are far higher than in Norway, which is clearly the slowest. It is also interesting to see the average speed between Norwegian cities starting from Oslo. Here, the average speed is only 65.5 km/h to Stavanger and 66.6 km/h to Bergen, while this increases to 77.6 km/h to Trondheim and 84.9 km/h to Kristiansand. So even the fastest average speed here at home is lower than the average for Finland, the second slowest European country. The very lowest average speed can be found between Bergen and Stavanger, and it really doesn’t go fast here. Here, there is an average of a staggering 44.2 km/h…
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