Black Forest Bridge
  Black Forest Bridge
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| use | Road bridge | |
| Convicted | A2 , A3 | |
| Crossing of | Rhine | |
| place | Basel | |
| construction | Prestressed concrete bridge | |
| overall length | 233.5 meters | |
| location | ||
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The Black Forest Bridge is the most used Rhine crossing in the Swiss city of Basel . It is the heart of the motorway connection between the Swiss A 2 and the German A 5 . It also serves local traffic.
history
As the German north-south autobahn from Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main approached Switzerland, people also began to think about how to absorb the resulting traffic. The Swiss Parliament decided on in 1960 to build a Swiss national road network and, as probably one of the most important elements for the international transit , the realization of the then National Road N2 ( now A2 ) from Basel via Lucerne and the Gotthard to Chiasso .
From the mid-1960s onwards, federal motorway 5 ended a few hundred meters north of the Swiss border at Weil-Friedlingen , and traffic was provisionally connected to the existing federal highways. Two variants were considered for the continuation: an outer eastern bypass led through the local recreation area Lange Erlen and Birsfelden and an inner one as an urban motorway across the city of Basel.
After long, heated disputes that were carried out in public, the Grand Council decided to give priority to the inner eastern bypass, which is less than 6 kilometers long. The decisive factor for this was the route running closer to the city center, following the existing SBB tracks and the connecting railway . In addition, it was hoped to be able to relieve the inner-city traffic with many connecting structures.
In the summer of 1966, construction work on the city motorway began.
bridge
A new bridge had to be built over the Rhine for the construction of the N2. This came to lie between the connecting railway bridge and the St. Alban bridge . The new structure was a continuation of the Schwarzwaldallee-Strasse and was therefore given the name Schwarzwaldbrücke . It also had lanes for local traffic and therefore made the adjacent St. Alban Bridge superfluous, which was demolished in 1973.
The construction work lasted from 1970 to 1973 and was carried out by ten companies participating in an international tendering competition.
The ten-lane, 47.7 meter wide and 233.5 meter long prestressed concrete bridge has two groups of four pillars each, has a central opening of 119 meters and then an opening of 59.5 meters ( Kleinbasel side ) or 55.2 meters ( Grossbasel side ).
The pillars were founded in an open excavation in the load-bearing molasse , and the abutments are partly part of the adjoining foreland bridges, which are used for commercial and water sports purposes.
Of the ten lanes, four in the middle are reserved for the motorway and then three each to the outside for local, individual city traffic. On the sides of the bridge there are approx. 3 meter wide, slightly raised sidewalks for pedestrian traffic . When planning the bridge, however, the non-motorized two-wheelers were forgotten; this had to be corrected later with color markings .
A considerable part of the traffic flows along the north-south axis over the Black Forest Bridge. Traffic counts in July 2005 determined up to 81,800 vehicles per day.
See also
Web links
Rhine bridges: Holzapfelweg at the Birsfelden power plant | Railway bridge | Black Forest Bridge | Wettstein Bridge | Middle bridge | Johanniterbrücke | Dreirosenbrücke
City bridges: Birskopfstegbrücke | Birsig Viaduct | Dorenbach Viaduct | Heuwaage Viaduct | Peter Merian Bridge
Former bridges: Dufour Bridge | St. Alban Bridge
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The next bridge upriver: connecting railway bridge |
Bridges over the Rhine |
The next bridge downstream: Wettsteinbrücke |