At the very least, it is because of NEAT that a lot of decisionmakers in Switzerland think that closing the Gotthard road tunnel for three years is not an issue. And when you then look beyond that proposed closure, you have to face that many of those decisionmakers also think that the entire transit problem will solve itself through NEAT and that a second tunnel will only have an adverse effect on NEAT's success (which those decisionmakers see as guaranteed). As such, NEAT has been used as a prevention technique for any discussion about solving issues around road cargo through Switzerland.Coccodrillo schreef:If there is no second tunnel is mainly because the extreme slowness of government's decisions, not because of the Alpen Initiative.
I would fully understand this if there was no three-year closure of the existing tunnel to be expected. This is not about a duplication or about seasonal congestion. This is about the way Switzerland looks without a North-South motorway, and the impact that will take on national and international traffic between both sides of the Alps.Even much easier projects of any kind (not only transport infrastrcuture) take decades to become reality. Around 400 km of roads are expected to be congested in 2020, of these 81 km are considered to be the most serious bottlenecks, 182 km are in a second level of priority, 143 km in a third. The Gotthard tunnel is the second of these groups, with the note that congestion is seasonal, this probably means that nothing (even without the Alpen Initiative) would be done before all first level and most second level projects are completed. Construction in the Netherlands before the recent road boom proceded much more quickly than today in Switzerland.
Speaking of which, it strikes me how everybody mentions the use of the San Bernardino route during that closure (including the NIMBY-reaction from Graubünden that they do not want it), but that nobody considers the Simplon. In the 2020s, the A9 will be complete until Brig. As much as there is no road tunnel underneath the Simplon, the road over the pass is an easy drive. It will depend on your place of origination / destination, but the Simplon could take precedence over the San Bernardino when it comes to alternatives for the Gotthard.
How about the existing terminal in Novara?Beside that there is the idea of building one or more terminals near Chiasso (just north of the border) or somewhere in Lombardia with longer shuttle trains to Germany and The Netherlands for containers, swapbodies and semitrailers (as an exception of the rule of slowness, the government is apparently going to decide this year to enlarge loading gauge for 4m trucks within 10 years). Unlike the short road shuttles during the A2 clousure these trains will not be subsidized.