Highways, traffic up by 6% but heavy vehicles are down

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Motorway traffic trends are always a good indicator of the state of health of the economy. The data relating to transits through the Telepass gates, both for private cars and heavy vehicles, along the national toll network (over 6 thousand kilometres) in the first four months of 2023 give back the image of a country that is rapidly returning to pre-Covid levels. Even if there are some gray areas specifically linked to heavy transport, which could be affected by the slowdown in industrial production recorded in the first quarter of 2023. But let’s go in order.

There are currently 7.5 million holders of Telepass, a company of the Mundys group (formerly Atlantia), and they represent around 70% of total payments made on Italian motorways. Therefore it is a statistically representative sample of the national universe.

Private traffic goes up

In the period January-April 2023, Telepass motorway transactions amounted to 322.5 million, with a growth of 3.45% on the same period of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2019, the last year before the pandemic, Telepass transactions amounted to 326.1 million. It should be noted that in the first four months of 2020, coinciding with the spread of Covid and the first lockdowns, transits from Telepass toll booths had dropped by 33.26%, to 217.7 million: over 100 million fewer transits.

Telepass also provides the breakdown of transits by type of customer: business, consumer (private cars), fleet (company fleets) and trucks (heavy vehicles). The first figure that catches the eye is that relating to private individuals, or the type of users who had recorded the greatest drops during the pandemic. Well, in the first four months of 2023 the consumer category recorded 158.6 million transactions, around 6% more than January-April 2022 (to be exact: +5.63%). In the first four months of 2019, transits of the consumer type amounted to 161 million: it can be concluded that private traffic along the Italian motorways has almost completely recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Pull under braking

The case of heavy vehicles is interesting: in absolute value, Telepass transactions in the first four months of 2023 relating to trucks, equal to 37.5 million, are higher than the 2019 figure (36.8 million) but down by around 4% on 2022, when there was a peak of over 39 million transits. Often, the trend of heavy traffic is influenced by the trend of industrial production and in fact we have seen that, in the first quarter of 2023, industrial activity in Italy slowed down compared to the previous year (Istat data).