Motorway 1 (Belgium)
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| Overall length: | 70 km | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Development condition: | 2 × 2 lanes + emergency lanes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A1 at Mechelen | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Course of the road
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The Belgian Autobahn 1 , also on French. Autoroute 1 or Dutch Called Autosnelweg 1 , it connects Brussels past Antwerp with the Dutch border at Hoogstraten .
course
The A1 starts at the Hoogstraten border crossing and ends at the Machelen junction . For the first few kilometers, the motorway leads past the small towns of Meer and Brecht to Antwerp , where it joins the R1 ring of Antwerp . At the Antwerp-Süd junction, it continues past Rumst and Mechelen to Brussels , where it joins the Brussels Ring, R0 .
The median
What is remarkable about the section between Antwerp and Brussels is the extremely wide median (40 meters wide, over a length of approx. 35 km). The original plans from the early 1970s assumed unrealistic traffic growth from today's perspective. It was planned to add on the remaining free median strip at a later date Express lanes between Brussels and Antwerp, which only in Mechelen would still interchanges, (which also explains the complicated interchanges in Mechelen North and Mechelen-South). Only between Antwerp and Kontich were the 2 × 2 center lanes actually built. The implementation on the rest of the route was later abandoned despite the increased volume of traffic. Because the Brussels and Antwerp ring motorways can no longer handle and handle the entire volume of traffic at rush hour , an additional expansion of the A1 would only shift the traffic jams from the A1 to the junctions around Antwerp and Brussels. This broad median, including the unnecessarily long bridges over the A1, the partially functionless motorway junction in Mechelen and the interior street lamps that illuminated the unused median, all of them make the A1, in all its secondary features, an investment ruin caused by planning errors . The inoperative lamps were dismantled in 2006.
In 1997, shortly after the Marc Dutroux scandal, some trees, the “White Children's Forest” (“Witte Kinderbos”), were planted in memory of the children who were killed by him and in traffic.
On the median between Zemst and Brussels, construction work began on a high-speed rail line between Antwerp and Brussels-Zaventem Airport in the summer of 2007 . As a result, 32 hectares of the White Children's Forest will disappear and be replaced by a green zone on both sides of the A1 to shield the adjacent residential areas. Most of the White Children's Forest, which is located between Mechelen and Antwerp, remains unchanged. The route was completed in June 2012.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Diabolo, the northern rail connection from Brussels Airport ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Infrabel press release of June 7, 2012
