Many thousands of truck parking spaces are missing on freeways in Germany - following a check at rest areas, the Auto Club Europa (ACE) is complaining about a considerable risk to traffic. From April 15 to June 3, the traffic club counted how many trucks were parked on highways after 8:30 pm. In eastern Germany, the situation on the southern Berlin ring road (A10) and the A24 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, for example, is said to have been particularly risky due to incorrectly parked trucks.
In Saxony, the Oberlausitz Nord service area on the A4 near Bautzen stood out in the test with an overcrowding rate of 165 percent, as did the Nöthnitzgrund Süd and Nord service areas on the A17 near Dresden. With overcrowding of 100 and 120 percent, more than twice as many trucks were counted there as parking spaces.
"From 4 p.m. or 5 p.m., the petty war for parking spaces begins," says Dirk Engelhardt, spokesman for the Federal Association of Road Haulage, Logistics and Disposal (BGL). The federal government wants to curb the bottlenecks and points out, among other things, that the number of parking spaces has been steadily increased since 2018.
