Alamy Limited
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NOS News•today, 13:42•Amended today, 16:34
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Once again, British holidaymakers and truck drivers are queuing for hours outside the port of Dover to travel to mainland Europe. There are traffic jams due to the long waiting times at customs in the ferry terminal. There are also long traffic jams to the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone. Travelers are stuck for up to seven hours.
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Waiting times are probably even longer today than yesterday, when Brits also had to queue for hours. On the first day of the school holidays, the delay was up to six hours. The forecast is that a total of ten thousand cars want to go to the mainland today. Yesterday 8500 cars went through customs.
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This is what the long lines at Dover looked like today:
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Long lines for the ferry at Dover
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The British blame France for the congestion: according to the port company, the French have sent too few border personnel to England. The French say checks are taking longer because Britain is no longer a member of the European Union. Since Brexit, anyone who travels to the European mainland from England has to go through a more extensive passport control than before.
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French Member of Parliament for the Calais Region, Pierre-Henri Dumont, responds at Sky News on the long waiting times. In addition to Brexit, these have to do with the size of the port in Dover: “The reality is the port of Dover is very small, about three to four times smaller than Calais.” There is hardly any delay at Calais for travelers to England.
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The only way to reduce waiting times is to invest heavily in the facilities in the port, but the British are refusing to do so, says Dumont: “It will be this way for years to come if the port of Dover does not undergo transformation.”
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Traffic jams in France
It is also busy on the European mainland today. However, the traffic jams in the afternoon gradually decrease. On the French A7, the well-known Route du Soleil, traffic between Vienne and Orange was delayed by three hours this morning. By 1.30 pm that had decreased to about two hours. On the A10 from Paris via Bordeaux to Spain, the delay is more than three and a half hours in total.
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It is also very busy at a number of tunnels in Austria and Switzerland. Traffic is stuck at the Gotthard tunnel, among other places, where the delay is almost an hour and a half.
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Rudolf
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Water was distributed at Schiphol –
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Mireille van Lunteren
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Long wait at the Karawanken tunnel on the border of Slovenia and Austria –
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Long wait for a vignette in Slovenia –
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The ANWB has warned that the whole holiday period busy on European roads. Next Saturday is expected to be the busiest day of the summer, when southern Europeans will also go out en masse.
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