The bike tunnel under the main train station should have been finished in 2014. Now it will be the end of 2024, and the price has also roughly quadrupled. Anyway, construction work is starting now.
This is what the motorway stub looks like under the train station.
Sometimes it is the case that at the beginning of a completely barren plan there is a good idea in itself. In this case, it’s an idea that makes sense to everyone right away: a bicycle tunnel could be built into the no-longer-used autobahn stub under Zurich’s main train station, which would allow cyclists to clearly see the dangerous route around the train station abbreviate.
An important step
The problem, however, is that the idea was born in 2012 – with a petition from the association Pro Velo Kanton Zürich. The city took up the idea immediately and calculated that the project could be realized with a single-digit million amount. The Velotunnel could then be put into operation as early as 2014. Once again, politicians and planners were very wrong: the costs have now risen to over 40 million Swiss francs, and the opening will not take place until 2024 at the earliest.
The new head of civil engineering, Simone Brander (SP), gave the go-ahead for the construction work on the Velotunnel on Thursday. It is a decisive step forward in terms of promoting bicycles, she told the media. Work begins with the construction of auxiliary bridges on both sides of the tunnel. Work inside the former car tunnel will start in April 2023.
The vote last year showed how popular the project is. 74.1 percent of Zurich residents approved the CHF 27.7 million loan for the construction of the tunnel. The city council is contributing a further 16 million on its own authority – for the construction of an additional bicycle garage and a second entry/exit ramp on the District 5 side.
From the “Ypsilon” to the “City Tunnel”
The motorway stub under the main train station is a remnant of the road planning from the 1960s. At that time, it was envisaged that Zurich would have a bypass ring, but also a link between the south, west and north motorways in the middle of the city.
This connection was planned as a tangled knot directly above the Bad Oberer Letten. The so-called “Ypsilon” was controversial from the beginning, was fought and finally dropped. In 2005, however, the tunnel idea experienced a brief renaissance: the so-called “city tunnel” was now to connect the south with the north of the city, with just a few entrances and exits, under the station.
But even these projects soon fell out of time and ended up way back in the drawer. “Definitely deferred,” the Federal Roads Office soon said. And when the idea of the bicycle tunnel came up, it was relatively easy to get involved in the relevant discussions.
But here, too, the devil is in the detail: For years, the city, canton and federal government have been debating whether only bicycles or possibly also electrically powered motorcycles are allowed to use the tunnel. The costs for any dismantling also provided material for many a meeting between the communities involved. Officially, the contract for the use of the tunnel with the canton as the owner now runs until 2041, after which renegotiation must take place.