Holidaymakers have been warned of “horrendous” queues at Dover with the Paris Olympics set to cause the busiest summer of traffic since before the pandemic.
Traffic is likely to spike by 30 per cent as sports fans head to France for the games from next week and into August, with a huge surge in families travelling next weekend when most schools break up.
In the ongoing battle to control congestion at the Kent port, Dover officials are deploying artificial intelligence to predict traffic numbers, with travellers stranded in jams of up to 20 hours in previous years.
A new permit scheme to slash the number of lorries using rat runs and gridlocking roads to Dover by avoiding the traffic-holding system Operation Brock is also being rolled out.
On Saturday, the port said it was seeing hundreds of displaced airport passengers after a worldwide IT outage caused thousands of flights across the world to be cancelled, including at least 338 in and out of the UK.
Chief executive of the Port of Dover Doug Bannister encouraged stranded airport passengers to use the ferry services.
Drivers heading to Dover were told they needed to have a ferry booking.
Mr Bannister told the PA news agency: “We are seeing hundreds of displaced passengers trying to take a ferry.
“We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down.
“The greater visibility we have the better.
“But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers, ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.”
On Friday, Dover said operations were running smoothly despite the port being affected initially by the IT meltdown.
It comes just months before new EU post-Brexit border checks requiring British holidaymakers to provide fingerprints and facial photos come into effect, with experts warning of huge delays.
This summer is expected to be the busiest at the Kent port in “a long, long time”, warned Toby Howe, tactical lead of the Kent and Medway Resilience Forum (KMRF), with heavy cross-channel bookings from this week and every weekend into August.
Mr Howe told i: “Next weekend looks horrendous, which is the normal holiday getaway. But then we’ve got the Olympics and Paralympics throughout the summer.
“So whereas ordinarily it would dip down again once that there’s that mad exodus, we’re seeing busy weekends throughout – plus, busy weekdays.
“It’s dragging out that real busy summer all the way through July and August. It’s going to be the busiest since pre-pandemic.”
The installation of new Dover infrastructure to support the EU’s Entry/Exit system (EES) from November is also set to reduce capacity for drivers waiting for French border clearance.
Post-Brexit, British travellers must have their passports stamped when they cross to the EU, with Dover increasing the number of booths from seven to 11 ahead of the EES rollout, which will see drivers’ biometric details logged by officials holding an Ipad-type device, with long delays expected.
Mr Bannister said about 12,000 drivers were expected to leave Dover next Saturday, with around 10,000 departing on Friday.
He said: “Since we left the European Union, the border control process has has become a bit stickier.
“The response to get the same amount to traffic through is to try and create more border processing capacity and secure agreement from Police aux Frontières to resource them, which we have.”
He urged drivers not to arrive more than two hours before their ferry, and to stay on main routes to avoid Dover getting snarled up by tourist traffic, adding preparations had worked well last summer.
However, Dover authorities can only “mitigate” the impact of tailbacks, Mr Howe said, as they “simply do not have enough tools in our toolkit” to prevent logjams.
“It is such a fragile system that when it’s that busy, it only takes one thing – one person at the port to be sick, or a car crash or a lorry breakdown somewhere – and you’ve then got that congestion,” Mr Howe added.
Data from the port and Eurotunnel allows KMRF to rate days as red, amber or green according to the expected level of congestion, with a much higher number of red days this summer.
In a bid to help stop Kent roads being blocked, lorry drivers will now need a permit to travel to Dover to stop hauliers dodging Operation Brock, the system used to manage lorries heading to the port and keep traffic flowing.
Under Brock, trucks queue on one side of the M20 over a 13-mile section of the motorway between junction eight and nine, but drivers using rat runs to dodge the system can add to gridlock.
Meanwhile, new artificial intelligence technology called Entopy at Dover is helping to predict traffic flows in 15-minute time intervals up to two weeks in advance.
The network of AI models weigh up factors impacting travel, such as weather, or time of day as well as real-time data like crashes, allowing the port to inform traffic management procedures and try to avoid congestion.
Toby Mills, CEO of Entopy, said 40-45 AI models were being deployed across Kent’s road network allowing Dover to manage the arrival of freight and reduce congestion.
“When something like a traffic accident comes and we might be alerted by highways, we capture that in real-time and introduce that into the network as well,” Mr Mills said.
“So that allows us to combine the 40-odd AI models and real-time, more deterministic data to give really dynamic intelligence.
“This means we can deliver very accurate predictions in 15-minute intervals of how much traffic is going to arrive at the entrance of the port of Dover.”
The system has been showing a 95 per cent accuracy rate since it was rolled out last September.
“If I just give you an example, the Saturday just gone, which was a very busy Saturday, the daily count was 5,981 for cars and we predicted 5,976, two weeks in advance,” he added.
Their AI “knew exactly” how bad congestion was going to be in Dover as the summer getaway begins, he added.
Dover boss Mr Bannister said the data was proving “very valuable” and allowing the port to take decisions around configuring the buffer zone to optimise traffic flow.