People hoping to cross the Channel to France this weekend are being warned it will be “very busy” again, after three days of queues and traffic delays. The AA has warned drivers could face a summer of repeat delays after miles of tailbacks built up in Kent from Friday.
Vehicles are flowing freely on Monday but a major incident remains in force.
Toby Howe, of the Kent Resilience Forum, said it was a “very vulnerable situation” and it took very little to cause congestion.
Queues of lorries have begun to build at Dover, although the port said traffic was flowing normally.
Ferry operator DFDS told passengers there were “queues of around an hour” for French border checks, while P&O Ferries said queues had picked up.
Over the weekend traffic built up on the roads leading to the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone and Port of Dover after the M20 motorway through Kent to the south coast was closed to cars from Maidstone to Folkestone because of Operation Brock, which sees lorries diverted to park on the motorway.
With the motorway shut, car drivers were diverted to smaller roads which then got jammed with miles of tailbacks.
Mr Howe said things were back to “business as normal” but remained “on a knife edge” with not much needed to create congestion.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the coming weekend was expected to be the second busiest getaway weekend of the summer holidays and, with traffic crossing the Channel back to pre-pandemic levels and additional checks at the border since the UK left the European Union, it took “very little to cause those tailbacks”.
He said on Friday the Port of Dover had issues with a lack of resources, which was compounded by a crash on the motorway.
“You only need another crash on the road or maybe a train breakdown or a power failure somewhere for it to then become a big problem.”
Mr Howe said there needed to be more infrastructure in place to take traffic off the roads, such as lorry parks.
“We shouldn’t really have to have queues of traffic due to all of this, so we need more infrastructure in place,” he said.
The AA’s head of roads policy Jack Cousens said it had been an “incredible weekend of traffic jams” but warned the group was concerned “we could be in for a repeat of this congestion across the summer”.
John Keefe, director of public affairs for Getlink – which operates the Eurotunnel between Folkestone and Calais, said the issue over the weekend had been caused by the expected “very heavy traffic of passengers” getting away on holidays alongside an unexpected amount of truck traffic, which would normally have crossed to France earlier but had been delayed by an accident on the motorway.
He said there were several factors that could help ease the situation, including bringing in digital technology to speed up border checks, increasing the resilience of the road network – with two of the UK’s biggest ports served by the same motorway – and improving the Channel tunnel railway network.
Mr Keefe added: “There are definitely solutions. These solutions are not new. They’ve been on the table for many, many years.
“But hopefully something like this will actually focus attention.”
The Dover delays led to a war of words between French and UK officials, with both sides blaming the other.
The UK government said French authorities failed to provide enough border staff to check passports at Dover over the weekend, while the French transport minister Clement Beaune highlighted additional border checks brought on by Brexit.
Travel journalist Simon Calder said we were seeing the impact of leaving the EU for the first time during peak summer travel season.
Whereas in the past passport control had been able to wave travellers through with a flash of their passport at their discretion during busy times, he said, now they had to check and stamp every passport.
Mr Calder said on average it was taking about a minute and a half for them to process a family of four.
Over the weekend the Port of Dover said it handled almost 142,000 passengers.
National Highways re-opened the coastbound M20 between junctions 9 and 11 in Kent shortly after 01:00 BST on Monday, but it remains closed to non-freight traffic between junctions 8 and 9 as part of Operation Brock.