The history of the Autobahn stretches back to 1913, when work commenced on what was to be the world's first highway. The Automobil Verkehrs und Übungsstraße (AVUS) was a 19 km-long highway southwest of Berlin that consisted of two 8-meter lanes. This was followed by Germany's first car-only roads, with the first built in 1929 between Dusseldorf and Opladen, and a second one in 1932 between Cologne and Bonn. Adolf Hilter commenced a building program in the mid-1930s to increase the number of high-speed roads in Germany for strategic military purposes. By the end of World War II the Autobahn was a network of roads that totaled 2,128 km.
Two-thirds of the Autobahn has no speed restrictions for cars and motorbikes, although there is an advisory speed limit of 130 km/h (81mph). The rest has some form of speed restrictions ranging from 80-130 km/h for sections in urban areas, in places with consistently high volumes of traffic and near interchanges. Some sections also have speed restrictions that apply in wet weather and at night. Trucks and coaches have a speed limit of 80 km/h on all sections of the Autobahn.
The accident rates on the Autobahn are surprisingly low. In 2004 the road network accounted for 6 percent of accidents on German roads, despite carrying a third of all Germany's traffic. In the same year it was reported that 12 percent of the country's road deaths occurred on the Autobahn, making a fatality rate of 3.2 people per billion kilometers or road. This compares to the U.S. rate in 2003, which was five people per billion kilometers.
The Autobahn in Germany is made up of two, three and four lanes of 3.75 meters in each direction, with a grass median of 3.5 or 4 meters. Some of the more recent additions to the motorway have medians that are made of concrete. As of 2010 the Autobahn was a network of roads that covered 11,000 km (6,800 miles) across the whole of Germany.
The traffic on the Autobahn is heavy, with motorists notching up an annual total of 218.9 billion kilometers in 2004. This means that all segments of the autobahn see 50,000 vehicles a day. As would be expected, the road network suffers from traffic jams which are particularly bad on Fridays and Sundays, plus during national holidays.
