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The Grauholz Autobahn was the first section of the A1 to go into operation. 60 years later, opponents are calling for a motorway stop.
In 1798 the French defeated the Bernese troops at the Grauholz and sealed Old Bern’s dreams of becoming a great power. Today, up to 120,000 trucks and cars thunder across the battlefield. Despite the six-lane expansion in the 1990s, traffic backs up on the bottleneck in the north of Bern almost every day. Is Switzerland’s motorway policy also failing because of the Grauholz?
How a battlefield became a storage machine
The federal government wants to get rid of the daily traffic jams between Bern-Wankdorf and Schönbühl. He is planning an additional motorway lane in each direction for CHF 250 million. The Spurwechsel association sees a never-ending vicious circle in the planned eight-lane expansion. Because in the case of the Grauholz section of the autobahn, history is an example: every autobahn widening leads to additional traffic.
Who sows roads, reaps traffic
Farmer Christian Salzmann is said to sacrifice a twelve meter wide field strip along the A1 for the Grauholz expansion project. He, too, sees the widening of the motorway as “tackling the symptoms instead of the causes”. Salzmann asks rhetorically: “And then it’s another 30 years and we’re at ten tracks?”
Opponents of the motorway expansion plead for alternative concepts. They demand that private transport be shifted to public transport or that carpooling be promoted.
Jürg Röthlisberger, Director of the Federal Roads Office Astra, also sees potential for more efficient use of the existing transport infrastructure. However, future traffic growth simply cannot be managed without selective expansion, such as that at Grauholz.
Will there be a ten-lane expansion in 2050?
But can the vicious circle – increased capacity equals traffic growth – be broken with improved traffic management? Astra director Röthlisberger leaves the question of a possible ten-lane expansion in the 2050s open: “Each generation deals with the problems that it is currently facing.” Perhaps future generations would one day dismantle motorway lanes.
Markus Heinzer from the Spurwechsel club does not want to make this bet. Heinzer is currently trying to motivate as many environmental protection organizations as possible to take legal action against the project. The execution project will present the Astra this August.