Column: What worms worm
Off to the snail race
Sammy may not be the fastest, but he is a world champion. With a time of 2 minutes and 38 seconds, he beat 215 competitors at the 25th World Snail Racing Championships. In a thrilling finish, the little one put on the turbo again and not only crossed the finish line as the winner on the 33-centimeter-long track in Congham, UK, he is - behind Archie - the second-fastest snail in the world since records began in 1995.
A flood of metal at rush hour
What Sammy the snail can do, Germany, the reigning logistics world champion, has been doing for a long time. In 2018, we achieved an incredible 745,000 freeway traffic jams. People were stuck in traffic jams for 459,000 hours over a distance of 1,528,000 kilometers - each in their own car, of course. An all-time high. It's not much different in the cities. During rush hour, a never-ending avalanche of cars crawls through the streets at an average speed of 16 to 17 km/h, as a study by Here and the German Logistics Association has now discovered. This has consequences for pollutant emissions, as carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter are much higher at snail's pace than in flowing traffic at an ideal speed of around 50 km/h. If the average speed in Stuttgart, for example, were only a good 5 km/h faster, twelve percent fewer pollutants would be emitted.
Traffic is a snail and many a world championship title is only relative. One thing first: I haven't experienced traffic jams for ten years. I only have to walk from the east to the west wing to reach my office. Paradise conditions, I know. Others are less fortunate. It does something to people when they are at the mercy of gridlock and their nerves are regularly on edge. And what delivery drivers have to listen to every day as they haul our consumer goods from the second row into the surrounding houses and stores due to a lack of loading zones has long since crossed the boundaries of good taste. A vicious circle.
Everyone is talking about the traffic turnaround, about bikes, buses, trains, car sharing and e-mobility, but delivery traffic is rarely taken seriously in this discussion. Logistics service providers are optimizing their stops down to the smallest detail, but what good is it if they travel at a snail's pace in between and loading zones or the opening of bus lanes for delivery traffic - although there is no alternative - are discussed as if it were a matter of abolishing democracy.
To everyone: it is worth keeping traffic flowing. Anything that could contribute to this is by no means a gift for the economy, but worth a try.
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