In 2020, traffic decreased like never before, due to the coronavirus pandemic. According to preliminary analysis of data collected by Traffic Management Company Fintraffic Ltd, the decrease was about 10% in road traffic on the main roads, nearly 60% in flights in Finnish airspace and 4% in rail traffic, compared to the previous year. Shipping also showed a record drop in passenger numbers.
For traffic volumes to decline so sharply across all modes of transport is wholly exceptional. For instance, in road traffic over the past few decades, decreases have only occurred in years when the economy has suffered a severe downturn, and even then those decreases were slight. The year 2008 was a case in point. Air travel in Finland, meanwhile, has grown year on year practically throughout the 2000s, particularly because of passengers en route to Asia via Helsinki.
“The Finnish transport market and a majority of the enterprises in it have been exceptionally hard hit by the pandemic. People now travel less on land, at sea and in the air, and the use of public transport in particular has fallen drastically. In goods logistics, kilometrage and volumes have held up better,” says Pertti Korhonen, CEO of Traffic Management Company Fintraffic Ltd.
“Because of the pandemic, operators on the Finnish transport market need to come together to seek out solutions for reviving the industry so that they can offer competitive and sustainable passenger and goods transport chains after this crisis has passed. The coronavirus must not be allowed to cause permanent damage to the Finnish transport system. As an example, we need to make sure that attractive alternatives to private cars are available so that not everyone has to get a car.”
Fintraffic aims to expedite the digitalisation process in the transport system and thereby help the industry to revitalise after the coronavirus crisis. Digitalisation in transport means the active producing, processing and leveraging of data in all areas of the transport system. Traffic-generated data may be used for instance in optimising, planning and maintaining transport route investments, in producing new services for passenger and goods transport, for improving customer experiences and for increasing the automation rate of vehicles. Making full use of the data requires being able to use data generated by the various organisations, vehicles and users across all boundaries.
“Finland has a lot of world-class expertise in transport and in digitalisation. Therefore, we have a unique chance to get a head start on other countries and to develop transport data into a competitive advantage and an export product. By leveraging data produced by various operators, we can create smoothly running travel chains involving multiple modes of transport and enhance goods logistics chains. This would contribute to reducing transport emissions and would also improve safety. Leveraging open-source data can also help create new jobs and generate new business opportunities for enterprises beyond the Finnish market while producing better services for us here in Finland,” says Korhonen.
During the past year, Fintraffic has entered into closer cooperation with key players in the transport industry. The objective here is to seek out solutions for expediting the joint development of services for passenger and goods transport chains. Digitraffic, the open-source traffic data service provided by Fintraffic, is already available to operators in the field, facilitating efficient data cooperation in timetable data, location data, transport statistics, etc.
“We have found that the coronavirus crisis has fired up operators in the field to search for new smart transport solutions,” says Korhonen.
Further information on how Fintraffic is working to bring about closer cooperation between transport operators can be found here: https://www.fintraffic.fi/liikenteenekosysteemi.
Fintraffic publishes daily updates of road and rail traffic statistics on its website at https://www.fintraffic.fi/fi/fintraffic/liikennemaarat. Users can drill down to view traffic volumes by region.
