Motorway 1 (Switzerland)

	Template: Infobox high-ranking road / Maintenance / CH-A
	Autobahn 1 in Switzerland
	map
	Basic data
Operator:	Federal Roads Office
Start of the street:	Geneva ; ( 46 ° 9 ′ N , 6 ° 6 ′ E )
End of the road:	St. Margrethen ; ( 47 ° 27 ′ N , 9 ° 39 ′ E )
Overall length:	approx. 410 km
Canton :	Geneva ; Vaud ; Freiburg ; Bern ; Solothurn ; Aargau ; Zurich ; Thurgau ; St. Gallen ;

The Autobahn 1 crosses Switzerland in an east-west direction. With a length of 410 km, it is the longest motorway in Switzerland and makes up around a fifth of the Swiss national road network . It connects Geneva in the southwest with St. Gallen in the northeast and ends in St. Margrethen on the Austrian border. Today it is designed as a direction-separated motorway with at least two lanes and one hard shoulder in each direction .

The A1 is largely congruent with Nationalstrasse 1; it was signposted as N1 until 1996.

history

As early as 1956, the popular initiative submitted by the automobile clubs in Switzerland to improve the road network proposed the construction of a road on the west-east link.

On May 10, 1962, the Grauholzautobahn was opened as the first section of the N1. The eight-kilometer section served to relieve the main road through Zollikofen .

On May 1, 1964, just in time for the national exhibition in Lausanne, the first long stretch of motorway followed, the 60-kilometer Geneva - Lausanne section of the N1. On May 10, 1967, with the completion of the line from Oensingen to Hunzenschwil , another piece of the N1 was built. At that time, with a length of 84 kilometers, it was the longest contiguous motorway in Switzerland (from Bern to Lenzburg ). On August 16, 1967, the first rest stop was opened in Kölliken . The drivers first had to get used to the higher speeds. So there were several rear-end collisions on the weekend of Pentecost after the opening. The police also had to help various drivers who were left with empty tanks due to a lack of petrol stations.

A1 near Deitingen Süd shortly before the opening
Aare bridge at Rothrist
Motorway construction near Henau SG 1967, further up the old Wil-Gossau expressway

Chronology of the track openings
Section	Opening year	Length (km)
Bern -Wankdorf - Schönbühl	1962	08th
Geneva - Lausanne	1964	60
Rheineck - St. Margrethen	1964	07th
Schönbühl - Kriegstetten	1965
Kriegstetten - Oensingen	1966
Oensingen - Lenzburg	1967	40
Lenzburg - Zurich	1970	53
Winterthur - St. Gallen	1970
St. Gallen - Rheineck	1972
Zurich - Winterthur	1974
Bern- Bümpliz - Bern-Wankdorf	1977
Lausanne bypass	1981
Murten - Bern-Bümpliz	1981
Lausanne - Yverdon	1983
Zurich north bypass	1985	12
St. Gallen bypass	1987
Bardonnex - Geneva	1993
Yverdon - Murten	2001	46

The motorway service station near Würenlos in Aargau was the world's largest motorway bridge restaurant when it opened on December 1, 1972. The shopping bridge measures 140 meters and offers space for 16 shops. Because of its shape, the building was nicknamed "Fressbalken".

The Zurich northern bypass, opened in 1985, connects the motorway sections to the west and east of the Zurich agglomeration . After an earlier project that failed due to popular resistance, the so-called Zürcher Expressstrassen-Y , the N1 would have been built right through the city of Zurich. The transit traffic had before the opening of the northern bypass for years the temporary connection Hardbrücke use -Rosengartenstrasse.

In 1995 there was the longest traffic jam on the N1 when, after several accidents in holiday traffic , the route between Bern and Niederbipp was blocked for 53 kilometers.

In 1996, the Swiss motorways were renamed from N for Nationalstrasse to A for Autobahn according to the European model.

On April 5, 2001, the section between Murten and Yverdon was opened as the last section of the A1 . There was resistance to this part of the population, which culminated in April 1990 with the clover leaf initiative . The motorway is connected to the Payerne military airfield by a taxiway near Hall 5 and can be used as an additional take-off and landing runway if necessary, but this option has never been used since the motorway was built.

From 2009 to 2017, several entrances and exits in the canton of Aargau between the connections Aarau West and Birrfeld were extended with the help of the breakdown lane. This should make traffic on the motorway more fluid.

Motorway feeder

The motorway feeder roads (A1a, A1H, A1L and A23) are usually designed as a separate motorway. Most of them are also part of the national road network in Switzerland.

Expansion projects

Härkingen – Wiggertal

The road widened from 4 to 6 lanes with a bridge over the Aare was put into operation in 2015. In this area, the A2 and A1 use the same road.

Luterbach – Härkingen

According to a new project, the route between the Härkingen and Luterbach branches could be expanded to 6 lanes from 2022 to 2030. The A1 is very heavily used in this area, as there are no other east-west autobahns in this area at the southern foot of the Jura . Farmers affected by land consumption lit several warning fires on the affected areas on August 14, 2019. As of September 2019, almost 200 objections to the expansion are pending.

Zurich region

In the Zurich region, the volume of traffic on the A1 is particularly high, and several sections of the motorway are regularly overloaded. In the past, the traffic situation at the Baregg Tunnel , which is part of the Birrfeld- Limmattal junction shared by motorways 1 and 3 , was often difficult . The motorway has three lanes in both directions in this section, while the two old tunnels, on the other hand, were only designed as two-lanes (without hard shoulders). With the construction of a third three-lane tunnel tube for the direction of Berne and the allocation of the two old tunnel tubes to the lanes in the direction of Zurich, this bottleneck was eliminated. Since then, however, traffic jams have increased at the Gubrist tunnel , which was built as part of the Zurich bypass (N1c / N20) and only has two lanes, but today it accommodates the traffic on motorways 1 and 4. On June 6, 2016, the main work on expanding the northern bypass around Zurich began.

European roads

	( Metz - Vallorbe -) branch Essert FR - branching Ecublens (- Lausanne ) France
	( Hook of Holland - Basel -) junction Härkingen - Bern - Geneva - border crossing Bardonnex (- Palermo ) Netherlands Italy
	( Belfort - Porrentruy -) Schönbühl junction - Bern junction - Weyermannshaus (- Vevey - Aosta ) France Italy
	( Amsterdam - Basel -) junction Härkingen - junction Wiggertal (- Chiasso - Rome ) Netherlands Italy
	( Dortmund - Bargen -) junction Winterthur North - Zurich North - Limmattal motorway junction (- Altdorf )Germany
	( Brest - Basel -) junction Birrfeld - St. Margrethen (- Irkeschtam ) France Kyrgyzstan
	( Nantes -) border crossing Bardonnex - Geneva - junction Villars-Ste-Croix (- Simplon Pass - Genoa ) France Italy

photos

The Autobahn 1 near Bern
A1 / E 60 near St. Gallen
A1 in Zurich- Affoltern
A1 near Wettingen

Honor

A song by Toni Vescoli was dedicated to A1, entitled N1 and released in 1983. He describes the general love-hate relationship with the A1, which at that time was still called Nationalstrasse 1 (short form N1) and also mentions other highways in Switzerland.

Web links

Commons : Autobahn 1 (Switzerland) - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Photo series on autobahnen.ch :

Individual evidence

↑ At the eastern end of the autobahn in St. Margrethen, the kilometers end at km 406.8. Source: "National road axes" layer on map.geo.admin.ch
↑ Opening of the Neufeld Tunnel 2009 ( Memento from January 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)
^ Opening of the Grauholz motorway in May 1962. (No longer available online.) Swiss radio and television , archived from the original on March 2, 2014 ; Retrieved December 23, 2012 .
↑ ^a ^b The A1 motorway. SRF, accessed on May 31, 2016 .
↑ Traffic jams, accidents and the police as rescuers in the petrol emergency: Sunday drivers were initially overwhelmed . In: az Aargauer Zeitung . August 8, 2017 ( aargauerzeitung.ch [accessed on September 21, 2017]).
↑ Paul Schneeberger: The main road - The A1: Three perspectives on the busiest motorway in Switzerland . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . No. 3 , January 5, 2018, p. 44 ( nzz.ch [accessed January 5, 2018]).
^ Book Uno Zero Zero ISBN 978-3-9524239-0-5 page 230
↑ The Swiss motorways. 20 minutes , accessed March 24, 2013 .
↑ A car every two to three seconds: A1 connections are extended . In: az Aargauer Zeitung . September 21, 2017 ( aargauerzeitung.ch [accessed on September 21, 2017]).
↑ ASTRA - A1 Härkingen – Wiggertal 6-lane expansion. (No longer available online.) In: www.astra.admin.ch. Archived from the original on May 31, 2016 ; accessed on May 31, 2016 .
↑ ASTRA - A1 Luterbach – Härkingen 6-lane expansion. (No longer available online.) In: www.astra.admin.ch. Archived from the original on May 31, 2016 ; accessed on May 31, 2016 .
↑ Angry peasants set fire to fields. In: 20min.ch . August 15, 2019, accessed August 16, 2019 .
↑ Urs Moser: With a tunnel in the Gäu, 200 objections would come off the table. In: solothurnerzeitung.ch . September 11, 2019, accessed September 11, 2019 .
↑ Press release of June 6, 2016 about the start of construction work.
↑ Steffen Hung: Toni Vescoli - N1 - hitparade.ch. Retrieved October 23, 2017 .

[1] At the eastern end of the autobahn in St. Margrethen, the kilometers end at km 406.8. Source: "National road axes" layer on map.geo.admin.ch

[2] Opening of the Neufeld Tunnel 2009 ( Memento from January 3, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)

[3] Opening of the Grauholz motorway in May 1962. (No longer available online.) Swiss radio and television , archived from the original on March 2, 2014 ; Retrieved December 23, 2012 .

[:0-4] The A1 motorway. SRF, accessed on May 31, 2016 .

[5] Traffic jams, accidents and the police as rescuers in the petrol emergency: Sunday drivers were initially overwhelmed . In: az Aargauer Zeitung . August 8, 2017 ( aargauerzeitung.ch [accessed on September 21, 2017]).

[6] Paul Schneeberger: The main road - The A1: Three perspectives on the busiest motorway in Switzerland . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . No. 3 , January 5, 2018, p. 44 ( nzz.ch [accessed January 5, 2018]).

[7] Book Uno Zero Zero ISBN 978-3-9524239-0-5 page 230

[8] The Swiss motorways. 20 minutes , accessed March 24, 2013 .

[9] A car every two to three seconds: A1 connections are extended . In: az Aargauer Zeitung . September 21, 2017 ( aargauerzeitung.ch [accessed on September 21, 2017]).

[10] ASTRA - A1 Härkingen – Wiggertal 6-lane expansion. (No longer available online.) In: www.astra.admin.ch. Archived from the original on May 31, 2016 ; accessed on May 31, 2016 .

[11] ASTRA - A1 Luterbach – Härkingen 6-lane expansion. (No longer available online.) In: www.astra.admin.ch. Archived from the original on May 31, 2016 ; accessed on May 31, 2016 .

[12] Angry peasants set fire to fields. In: 20min.ch . August 15, 2019, accessed August 16, 2019 .

[13] Urs Moser: With a tunnel in the Gäu, 200 objections would come off the table. In: solothurnerzeitung.ch . September 11, 2019, accessed September 11, 2019 .

[14] Press release of June 6, 2016 about the start of construction work.

[15] Steffen Hung: Toni Vescoli - N1 - hitparade.ch. Retrieved October 23, 2017 .


Motorways and roads	A1 • A2 • A3 • A4 • A5 • A6 • A7 • A8 • A9 • A10 • A12 • A13 • A14 • A15 • A16 • A17 • A18 • A20 • A21 • A22 • A23 • A24 • A25 • A50 • A51 • A52
Motorway junctions and feeder roads	A1a • A1H • A1L • A3W • A10 / K10
Main streets	1 • 2 • 2a • 2b • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 ( N28 ) • 29 • 30