Traffic jams on the Zakopane route. Tourists break the record for the number of journeys in a single day

“Over 44,000 cars drove through the tunnel along Zakopianka last Sunday. The previous record from September 10 last year was broken by almost 4,000 cars,” she reported on Wednesday. GDDKiA. So far, on these two days alone, the number of cars driving through the tunnel on the S7 route has exceeded 40,000.

According to Kacper Michna, spokesman for the Kraków branch of the GDDKiA, the average daily number of vehicles driving through the tunnel on the Zakopane route increases almost every week of the holidays. In the first week of the holidays, there were 26.4 thousand vehicles, and in the first week of August, over 30 thousand cars drove through the tunnel to Zakopane and back.

According to the spokesman, in total, during the seven weeks of the holidays, almost 1.5 million cars used the crossing near Mały Luboń. For comparison, during the same period of last year's holidays, just over 1.3 million vehicles used the tunnel. Traffic during the same period increased by 8.5 percent.

The over two-kilometer-long Maria i Tunnel Lech Kaczyński along the Zakopianka route in the Luboń Mały massif was opened in November 2022.

The investment cost almost a billion zlotys and lasted six years. Each of the two tunnel lanes has two lanes in each direction and an additional emergency lane, which in the future may become an additional lane. Driving through the tunnel with a maximum permitted speed of 100 km/h takes exactly 75 seconds. The crossing significantly shortened the journey to the Tatras.