Metabyte149

Every summer, the Netherlands splits itself into three zones so the whole country doesn't try to leave on the same day. North, middle, and south each get out of school on a different week. The government set it up this way for one reason: traffic. Look at the map and you can see why. A thick blue cloud of movement sits over the Netherlands, then drains south in thin lines through Belgium, down across France, over the Alps into Italy, Austria, and Croatia. Roughly the same roads, every July. A big part of what makes it so packed is the caravan. Dutch families own more of them per person than anyone else on the planet. Around 450,000 on the road, another 20,000 sold each year, at least one household in ten with one parked somewhere. They sit in old greenhouses all winter, then get hooked up to the car in summer. The Dutch nickname for them is sleurhut, which means "dragging hut." This is a fairly recent thing. Kip, the most popular Dutch caravan brand and also the Dutch word for chicken, sold its first one in 1947 and took off in the 1960s, right as the two-week family holiday became a normal part of Dutch life. Time off helped it stick. Dutch law now gives every full-time worker at least 20 paid days a year. All of it pours onto a few big motorways at once, and the jam spreads across the continent. France has a name for the worst weekend of the year, samedi noir, or black Saturday, when the roads south lock up. In 2021 the traffic jams inside France hit 1,096 kilometers in one day, longer than the whole Netherlands three times over. The A7 out of Lyon, the old Route du Soleil, backs up for hours. The Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland can add two more. Dutch, German, and French drivers all aim for the same beaches on the same afternoon. Which is the whole point of the three zones. Spread across three weeks, more than 18 million people can get away without every road grinding to a stop. The dates are set years ahead and printed on every school calendar. The tweet calls it a canonical European event. For a country that rearranges its school year just to get everyone out the door, that reads about right.