Baregg tunnel
Baregg tunnel | ||
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Access to the Baregg Tunnel at the Baden West connection, the three tunnel tubes in the background
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use | Road tunnel | |
traffic connection | ||
place | Baden AG | |
length | 1'390 m, 1'148 m | |
Number of tubes | 3 | |
business | ||
toll | vignette | |
location | ||
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Coordinates | ||
West portal | 664121 / 256786 | |
East portal | 665228 / 256856 |
The Bareggtunnel is a 1.1 kilometer long tunnel under the Baregg, a hill of Heitersberg -Höhenzugs in Canton Aargau . It is located south of Baden between Dättwil and Neuenhof and forms part of the A1 , the most frequented motorway in Switzerland . The volume of traffic is particularly high at this point, as the A1 from Bern and the A3 from Basel merge a few kilometers to the west .
About 50 to 80 meters above and a little north of the tunnel is the Teufelskeller , a prehistoric landslide area with striking rock towers.
history
In October 1970 two tunnels with two lanes each were opened. These reached their capacity limits in the 1990s, as the busy six-lane motorway narrowed to four lanes in the area of the tunnel, creating a bottleneck. Long traffic jams regularly formed on weekdays in the direction of Zurich (in the morning) or in the direction of Bern / Basel (in the evening). With the construction of a third tunnel tube, the traffic should be liquefied again and the environment should be relieved of the increasingly frequent evasive trips.
The construction of the three-lane third tunnel tube began in March 2000 and was completed in June 2003. In the months that followed, the two old tubes were refurbished, so that in August 2004 the full capacity of seven strips was reached. The three newly built strips in the northern tunnel now lead from Zurich in the direction of Bern and Basel, the old tunnel tubes are used for traffic flowing eastwards. The costs for the construction to remove the bottleneck on the Baregg totaled 425 million francs , of which the new third tube accounted for 265 million.
After the expansion, traffic grew by more than 10% to well over 100,000 vehicles per day within two years. As a result, the streets in the area were largely freed from the previous bypass traffic, but on individual days with traffic volumes of over 130,000 vehicles, the limits of capacity have already been reached again.
On April 14, 2004, there was a serious traffic accident in the new tube with a truck fire as well as one death and five injuries. The rapid intervention of the Baden and Wettingen base fire brigades , who already knew the tunnel from a major alarm exercise in January 2004, prevented worse things from happening.
Web links
- Baregg Tunnel (1970). In: Structurae
- Baregg Tunnel (2003). In: Structurae
- Baregg-Info, June 1998 edition (Building Department of the Canton of Aargau; PDF file; 914 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ fest / sda: 52-year-old Swiss woman died in an accident in the Baregg tunnel. news.ch, April 15, 2004, accessed on March 26, 2013 (newspaper article).