Europe return drive: plan beyond the Gotthard queue

At midday on 8 August, a car returning north from Italy could lose about two and a half hours around Verona and then wait roughly two hours south of the Gotthard. Beyond the tunnel, German roadworks, Sunday freight traffic and the final Dutch leg still remained. Those numbers are a historical snapshot, not today’s traffic. Their value is to expose a common planning error: treating the Gotthard as the route’s only major gate. This summer has another, less obvious variable. Low Rhine water forces some cargo vessels to carry less, increasing pressure to move goods by road. Four German states temporarily relaxed Sunday lorry restrictions through at least 31 August. Drought appears to be happening in a river and can later appear in a Dutch family’s rear-view mirror. That does not prove drought caused any particular Gotthard queue. The tunnel is a long-standing holiday bottleneck and meters vehicles for safety.

After the 2001 fire, traffic management limited equivalent vehicles per hour and spacing between lorries. Some waiting is time exchanged for tunnel safety. Dutch school holidays also finish on different dates in the north, centre and south, spreading returns across several weekends. A route comparison must cover the Italian A22, Gotthard or San Bernardino, German works and the final entry into the Netherlands.

• Check traffic three times: choose the corridor the night before, update 30–60 minutes before departure and check again before the last sensible diversion point.
• Sunday is not automatically quiet: temporary German exemptions allow more lorries, while driver-rest rules and fleet scheduling still constrain them.
• Do not cut through villages: local controls near the Gotthard are designed to keep transit traffic out; a navigation shortcut may not be open or appropriate.
• Compare full cost: tolls, energy, children’s stops and driver fatigue belong beside the arrival estimate.

Practical takeaway: do not search for a permanently empty secret route. Decide in advance at which junctions the plan can still change and set a latest stopping time for the driver. Traffic news should tell you when to decide again, not preserve yesterday’s two-hour wait.

Sources: NU.nl traffic reporting from 8 August; NOS on low water and German freight measures; TCS live Gotthard information; ANWB European roadworks. Last checked 9 August 2026.