Hi to all,

Can anyone offer advice and/or experiences on this?

I make a regular trip to visit a friend on the Baltic coast of Germany. I take a motorway/autobahn route from Calais, as the objective is to see my friend, not spend lots of time travelling there. My route takes me on the autobahns round some large cities (e.g. Hamburg) which in my experiences are always clogged up with traffic. (I've been doing this trip for about 5 years now).

And quite often, the traffic can be stationary for significant periods.
I never know what to do about filtering through the traffic on these clogged-up autobahns. Usually I do, and keep a lookout for the police. But that's distracting.

What about when the traffic is stationary? The law in Germany (as it's been explained to me) is that when traffic comes to a halt car drivers in certain lanes have to move to one side to ensure that a continuous gap exists wide enough for emergency vehicles to use. It seems to me it would be asking for trouble from the police to ride a bike down such a gap. So when this happens I squeeze between the other lanes if there's room and if it looks safe. But still dodgy.

I'm going again soon, and would like to avoid what happened last year.
On an autobahn around some large city the traffic was stationary for a long time, maybe 20 minutes or longer, I didn't time it. I filtered carefully until I came up behind a couple of German bikes stationary in the lane. Ahead, there was a police van, also stationary in the lane. So we just waited there for maybe 20 minutes, with a perfectly good-looking filter-gap ahead of me stretching miles into the distance.


When you're a UK biker, over 40 years riding up and down to London and round and round the UK motorway system (including the M25), sitting there like that is a supremely difficult thing to do........


Anyone any experience of filtering on clogged-up German autobahns?
Other countries are similarly restrictive, but Germany is the one I visit most.

The friend I visit can't offer any advice - she hardly drives and doesn't like it and knows nothing about bikes!

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TTR250 - London to Cape Town