Car breakdown assistance back to pre-crisis level – salzburg.ORF.at
traffic
The ÖAMTC Salzburg 2021 recorded practically as many breakdown missions as before the pandemic. The breakdown helpers had to move out around 54,000 times across the entire state.
The level of breakdown operations in spring and autumn was significantly lower than before the outbreak of the pandemic, among other things because everyday traffic was not yet as dense according to ÖAMTC measurements. The extremely heavy car travel in summer compensated for this minus.
“Because people are less able to travel by air, they switched to cars and drove more and more to the south. Then there are the big construction sites that were in Salzburg over the summer months, where everything has been jammed. Batteries broke here because of the constant starting and stopping process, which was clearly felt during the breakdowns, ”says Michael Kocher, deputy head of the ÖAMTC breakdown service.
January 11th was the busiest day
Batteries are still the number one reason for a car breakdown: In the previous year, breakdown assistance was necessary in more than a third of the cases due to a defective battery. The busiest day for the ÖAMTC in 2021 was not in summer, but in winter on January 11th – a cold day on which a particularly large number of car batteries had given up the ghost. Breakdown helpers have died here 370 times across the country, which is more than double the daily average.
Use record in summer months
In the past, the ÖAMTC breakdown helpers in Salzburg deployed 38,893 breakdown services and 14,934 tows. This meant that they were required to do 147 missions per day, 5.5 percent more than in 2020. And domestic vacations instead of flights and long-distance travel were a strong increase in assignments.
The automobile club therefore recorded a record number of missions like never before in the summer months of July with 5,592 missions and August with 5,953 missions. Overall, the number of operations last year was similar to that before the crisis.