Property Newsletter | May 2022

Quiet Easter 2022 on SA’s roads

South Africans travelled almost 100 million kilometres in passenger cars over Easter 2022, 25% down on Easter 2021 and 33% down on the total kilometres travelled over the comparable period in February and March of this year.

Easter traffic (where we consider Thursday as part of the long weekend to capture the pre-weekend exodus) for 2021 jumped 34% over Easter 2019 after the fun-starved, hard lockdown of Easter 2020. Travel however slowed in 2022 and traffic was just 4% up on pre-pandemic Easter of 2019.

It is worth noting that a portion of the Easter 2021 ‘growth’ may be simply salary-access driven as it fell on the 2nd to 5th of April (as opposed to 2019 and 2022 which fell on 19th-22nd April and 15th to 18th April respectively). Along with this, another reason may also be that both 2019 and 2022 Easter weekends did not take place during public school holidays.

Although almost 100 million kms were driven by passenger cars over Easter 2022, this averages out at just 16km per passenger vehicle* across South Africa, suggesting that the majority of people opted for a quiet Easter weekend at home.

The proportion of travel within a home province increased significantly. In 2019 roughly a third of the Easter weekend kilometres were out of home province and this fell to just 20% in 2022.

All provinces suffered inflow losses on 2019 (and gains on local traffic) but only KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and Free State ended up with a nett deficit of total kilometres travelled within their borders. KwaZulu-Natal was the biggest loser on kilometres travelled and this is most likely attributable to the flooding. The Western Cape, although still busier overall than in 2019, experienced the highest inflow losses.

Easter 2022