Reducing pollution by forcing truck/freight traffic on to the railway network

probe

By 2009, the Swiss want to reduce the number of trucks that pass over the country's north-south roads to 650,000 a year, from 1.4 million in 2000, which would continue a long decline in truck traffic.

Since 1995, such traffic has swollen by 40 percent in the European Union, but has declined by 8 percent in Switzerland.

The story from today's International Herald Tribune:

Swiss shunt trucks into huge Alpine tunnels
By John Tagliabue


FRUTIGEN, Switzerland: With all the tunnels that pierce them, the Swiss Alps have often been likened to an enormous Swiss cheese. That comparison was awakened in recent months when a 35-kilometer rail tunnel was opened near this Alpine town.

Costing 4.15 billion Swiss francs, or $3.5 billion, the tunnel supplements a 19th-century tunnel through the Lötschberg, the mountain in whose shadow Frutigen lies.

But the new one differs from older tunnels by piercing the base of the mountain, rather than its upper reaches.

In addition to the main tunnel, for rail traffic, the mountain has been laced with 32 kilometers, or 20 miles, of additional tunneling for maintenance and emergencies.

"You can say it's a true Swiss cheese," said Patrick Belloncle, a spokesman for BLS, the Swiss company that built and operates the tunnel, ferrying visitors in a van through service tunnels that flank the main railway tunnel.

But the Lötschberg tunnel is only part of an ambitious program to protect the Alps, a Swiss national heritage, from environmental damage.

The environmental problem arises because the Alps lie right between two of Europe's most dynamic economic regions, northern Italy and southern Germany, which have threatened to overwhelm the mountains with truck traffic. So more than a decade ago, the Swiss voted to impose steep tariffs on trucks passing through their country. They also voted to ban the construction of four-lane highways in the Alps.

By last year Switzerland had collected more than $1.1 billion in tolls. The money has been used to improve older tunnels and build new ones to put freight on rails, either directly or by putting truck trailers onto flatbed rail cars.

But when the Swiss go, they go first class. When the tunnel is fully operational in December, it will accommodate not just 70 freight trains a day, but also as many as 30 passenger trains capable of going 190 kilometers per hour, cutting an hour off the trip from Basel, in northern Switzerland, to the south.

The Swiss are not finished, either. They are now busily digging an even more ambitious 56-kilometer tunnel under the St. Gotthard Pass to the east, to supplement two existing 19th-cent-ury tunnels, to be completed by 2016.

By 2009, the Swiss want to reduce the number of trucks that pass over the country's north-south roads to 650,000 a year, from 1.4 million in 2000, which would continue a long decline in truck traffic.

Since 1995, such traffic has swollen by 40 percent in the European Union, but has declined by 8 percent in Switzerland.

Of course, all of this digging was a boon for little Frutigen, whose squat wooden chalets, liberally sprinkled with geraniums, shelter hikers in summer and skiers in winter.

"There was quite a bit of noise and dust," said Peter Josi, 40, who works at the garden center and grocery store near Frutigen's remodeled train station. "On the other hand, the workmen came and shopped here."

Bert Wäfler, 23, who works out of a small wooden shop jammed with bicycles for sale and rent, recalled wistfully the busy days of construction, when the town was flooded with 1,200 or so workers, many of them employees of big Austrian contractors.

"Lots of Austrians worked on the tunnel, and they needed bikes to get around," he said.

"On weekends they had free time but couldn't go home to Austria, so they rented bikes."

"Now it's quieter," he said. "Only a few Austrians are here. It didn't really bring us very much."

Karl Klossner agrees that for some, the party is over. Klossner, 56, the part-time speaker of Frutigen's town council, recalled how big contractors from abroad came and created jobs.

"Not only in construction, in retail, too," he said. "Construction workers shopped here, they ate in the restaurants, and in the evening they went out to drink a beer."

He added, "I think it's fair to say that we lived above our means."

But the tunnel brought some lasting benefits as well, and the town intends to exploit them, said Klossner, a civil engineer with the rank of colonel in the Swiss Army. The gash in the mountain to build the tunnel has freed up warm underground waters that the town wants to channel into a new center for raising warm-water fish, like sturgeon, and tropical fruit.

When the $21 million center is finished, Klossner said, it could produce as much as 6 tons of Swiss caviar a year and 60 tons of tropical fruit.



http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/19/europe/tunnel.php