While we in the Netherlands have been wrangling over a stretch of the A27 for a decade, the Swiss have quietly built an entire underground empire. Beneath idyllic mountain peaks lies a network of more than 1,400 tunnels with a total length of 2,000 kilometres. The goal of this megalomaniacal project? To bully trucks off the road and save the climate, without you noticing.
The molehills of Europe
It sounds like science fiction, but it is reality. If you put all Swiss tunnels (rail, road, water, power) back to back, you end up in southern Spain. The showpiece is the NRLA (New Rail Link through the Alps), with the Gotthard base tunnel as its king. At 57 kilometres, it is the longest rail tunnel in the world.
Where you used to spend hours twisting hairpin turns behind a smelly truck, you now whiz right through the mountain base in 20 minutes. It is an engineering marvel involving the cutting of 28 million tonnes of rock. But it’s not just about your holiday trip to Italy.
War on trucks
The real reason for this billion-dollar project is the ‘Alpine Initiative’, a law the Swiss passed in the 1990s. They were fed up with diesel fumes and noise in their valleys. The goal: get trucks off the tarmac and onto trains.
And damn, it works. According to Ecoticias, 72 per cent of all freight transport across the Alps now goes by rail. The number of trucks on the road is down by a third compared to 2000. Without these tunnels, 650,000 extra trucks would thunder through the Gotthard pass every year. A nightmare for every motorist (and for the lungs of mountain dwellers).
Safety in a bunker
Besides clean air, the tunnels offer another benefit: safety. In a world heating up, with more avalanches and landslides, these underground tubes are the safest place to be. While above, trains (and cars in the road tunnels) are running merrily below ground, while above the road is swept away by severe weather.
Switzerland shows how to build infrastructure with a 50-year vision, instead of four years until the next election. The result is an invisible land under the mountains that ensures you don’t choke on smog in summer, but enjoy the view.
Image source: Cooper.ch, via Wikimedia Commons – CC BY-SA 2.5
