After three days of lines and delays, those trying to cross the Channel to France this weekend are being cautioned that it will once again be “extremely busy.”
Since Friday, lorries travelling to the continent and holiday traffic have combined to cause miles-long backups in Kent.
On Monday, traffic is unhindered, but a serious situation is still going on.
It was a “highly susceptible condition,” according to Toby Howe of the Kent Resilience Forum, and it didn’t take much to produce gridlock.
At the Port of Dover, lines had started to form, though Mr. Howe claimed this was typical on a Monday.
While P&O Ferries reported that lines had gotten longer, ferry operator DFDS informed customers that there were “queues of roughly an hour” for French border inspections.
After the M20 motorway from Kent to the south coast was blocked to cars from Maidstone to Folkestone because of Operation Brock, which sees lorries diverted to park on the motorway, traffic grew over the weekend on the routes leading to the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone and the Port of Dover.
When the freeway was closed, cars were forced onto smaller routes, which quickly became congested with long lines of traffic.
Despite remaining “on a knife edge,” Mr. Howe claimed that things were returning to “business as usual” and that there was little need for congestion.
“All it takes is one more accident on the highway, maybe a rail breakdown, or a power outage someplace,” to make it a serious issue.
According to Mr. Howe, additional infrastructure, such as lorry parks, is required to divert traffic from the highways.
We should really not have traffic jams as a result of all of this, thus more infrastructure is required, he stated.
The problem over the weekend, according to John Keefe, director of public affairs for Getlink, which runs the Eurotunnel between Folkestone and Calais, was brought on by an unusual volume of truck traffic that would typically have crossed into France earlier but had been delayed.
Both French and UK officials engaged in verbal combat over the Dover delays, laying blame on the other.
The French transport minister, Clement Beaune, emphasised the increased border checks brought on by Brexit while the UK government claimed that French authorities did not supply enough border personnel to examine passports at Dover over the weekend.
