Dover holidaymakers brace for ‘horrible’ traffic jams as Olympics exit

Holidaymakers have been warned of “horrendous” queues in Dover as the Paris Olympics set to bring the busiest summer traffic since the pandemic.

Traffic is expected to increase by 30 percent as sports fans travel to France for matches from next week through August, with many families traveling next weekend when most schools are closed.

In the ongoing battle to control congestion at the Port of Kent, drivers in Dover are using artificial intelligence to predict traffic volumes. In previous years, travellers have been stuck in traffic jams for up to 20 hours.

A new licensing system is also being introduced to reduce the number of lorries using shortcuts and congestion on the roads into Dover by bypassing the Operation Brock traffic calming scheme.

Dover reported on Friday that operations were running smoothly despite the port being initially hit by the global IT outage that sparked a worldwide travel crisis.

This comes just months before new EU border controls come into effect after Brexit, requiring British holidaymakers to provide fingerprints and facial photographs, with experts warning of huge delays.

This summer is expected to be the busiest for the Kent port in “a long, long time”, warned Toby Howe, tactical lead for the Kent and Medway Resilience Forum (KMRF), with heavy bookings across the Channel from this week and every weekend through to August.

Mr. Howe said i: “Next weekend looks terrible, which is the normal holiday. But then we have the Olympics and Paralympics during the summer.

“So while normally it would go back down when there’s a mad exodus, we’re now seeing busy weekends – and busy weekdays.

“It extends that really busy summer all the way into July and August. It’s going to be the busiest since pre-pandemic.”

The installation of new infrastructure in Dover to support the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) from November will also reduce capacity for drivers waiting at the French border.

After Brexit, British travellers will need to have their passports stamped when crossing the EU border. Dover has increased the number of stamps from seven to 11 in preparation for the introduction of EES, which involves drivers’ biometric data being recorded by officers holding a device that looks like an iPad. Long delays are expected.

According to Doug Bannister, general manager of the Port of Dover, around 12,000 drivers will depart Dover next Saturday, with around 10,000 leaving on Friday.

Mr Bannister said: “Since we left the European Union, the border control process has become a lot more difficult.

“The response to get the same volume of traffic is to try to create more border processing capacity and have an agreement with the Border Patrol to provide them with resources, which we have.”

He urged motorists to arrive no earlier than two hours before the ferry departed and to stick to main routes to avoid Dover becoming gridlocked with tourist traffic, adding that preparations had worked well last summer.

However, Dover authorities can only “mitigate” the impact of congestion, Howe said, because they “simply don’t have the resources” to prevent congestion.

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“It’s such a fragile system that when it’s that busy, all it takes is one thing – one person in the port getting sick, or a car accident, or a truck breaking down somewhere – and then you’ve got that congestion,” Mr Howe added.

Data from the port and Eurotunnel allows KMRF to rate days as red, orange or green based on the expected level of congestion. This summer there were many more red days.

To prevent roads in Kent being blocked, lorry drivers will now need a permit to travel to Dover, in a bid to stop hauliers dodging Operation Brock, the system used to direct lorries to the port and keep traffic moving.

Under Brock, lorries queued along one side of the M20 for 13 miles between junctions eight and nine. But drivers who bypass the system by using shortcuts could only exacerbate congestion.

Meanwhile, new artificial intelligence technology called Entopy is helping Dover predict traffic flows in time intervals from 15 minutes to as much as two weeks ahead.

The network of AI models weighs factors that affect travel, such as weather or time of day, as well as real-time data such as accidents, so the port can direct traffic management procedures and try to avoid congestion.

Toby Mills, CEO of Entopy, said 40-45 AI models are being deployed across Kent’s road network, helping Dover manage freight flows and ease congestion.

“When something happens, like a traffic accident, and we get alerts from highways, we capture that in real time and feed that into the network as well,” Mills said.

“This allows us to combine the approximately 40 AI models with real-time, more deterministic data to achieve truly dynamic intelligence.

“This means we can make very accurate predictions of how much traffic will arrive at the entrance to the Port of Dover in 15-minute intervals.”

Since the system was introduced in September last year, accuracy has been 95 percent.

“If I give you an example, last Saturday, which was a very busy Saturday, the daily number of cars was 5,981, while two weeks in advance we predicted 5,976,” he added.

Their AI “knew exactly” how bad the traffic congestion would be in Dover when the summer holidays start, he added.

Dover’s managing director, Mr Bannister, said the data was “very valuable” and would help the port make decisions about how to design the buffer zone to optimise traffic flow.