Six Swiss cantons say the rail network is overloaded and have demanded urgent investments in rail services and infrastructure.
Keystone / Claudio Thoma
Six Swiss cantons – Basel City, Basel Country, Geneva, Ticino, Valais and Vaud – have submitted a joint request to the Federal Council demanding urgent investments in rail services and infrastructure to deal with an overloaded network.
+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
“Every day tens of thousands of people commute for work and freight traffic continues to increase. Already today the network is overloaded,” the cantons declare in a joint statement. The cantons fear that the situation will get even worse if no measures are taken.
Ministers from the cantons responsible for construction, infrastructure and transport signed the document at the recent third national railway congress, Bahn26, held in Basel.
+ Read more: Swiss are keenest rail users in Europe
The ministers have made three demands: planning must be supply-oriented, CHF24 billion must be set aside for the expansion of the rail network, and the east-west and north-south axes must be expanded, with regional traffic strengthened and international rail connections promoted.
Each canton has also presented specific project requests. For canton Ticino, the priority is to strengthen the north-south axis and to improve capacity and journey times to Milan. The low operating speed and bottlenecks, particularly in the Bellinzona, Lugano and Mendrisio areas, as well as on the Italian side, reduce the efficiency of the Gotthard Base Tunnel, the document states.
In order to ensure stable growth in passenger and freight traffic and the achievement of national modal shift and climate targets, an increase in capacity on the axis to Locarno is also deemed essential.
More
More
EU rail expansion bypassing Switzerland
Other priorities are in northern Switzerland, where a through line with an underground station in Basel is considered essential. Important work is needed in the Lake Geneva region: an increase in capacity at Geneva Airport station, an additional connection between Lausanne and Geneva, and the strengthening of the Geneva-Lyon line (France). In canton Valais, the expansion of international rail traffic on the Lötschberg-Simplon axis is required.
Adapted from Italian by AI/sb
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch
