Cargo Sous Terrain faces “traffic jams” and local opposition
Keystone
A Swiss underground freight project is floundering as the initial version of the plan shows weaknesses, and opposition grows louder.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
Cargo Sous Terrain (Underground Cargo, CST) aims to build an underground tunnel system for transporting goods around Switzerland.
+ Future freight project gathers steam
The project was launched in 2013 by the Swiss Confederation and private stakeholders. The idea is to develop automated electric vehicles that transport goods underground 24 hours a day, from Geneva to St Gallen. The goal is environmentally friendly, but also to reduce heavy goods vehicle traffic by 40% in Switzerland.
Traffic jam risk
But today, the new boss of Cargo Sous Terrain, who has been in office for six months, is abandoning the initial project: “Simulations have shown that the planned system risks traffic jams in the tunnel, just as on a busy road,” Christian Späth told Swiss public broadcaster RTS.
“Furthermore, we are concerned that inductive charging of vehicles will generate too much heat. We would then have had to build cooling systems that are very expensive to build and operate,” he adds.
To address these problems, a new project has been developed. Cable-drawn wagons will replace electric vehicles, a cheaper technology. According to Cargo Sous Terrain, the cost has dropped from CHF35 billion to CHF25 billion.
However, some of the shareholders, including Migros, Coop, Swisscom and La Poste, will no longer invest while others are rethinking their strategy, reports SRF Schweiz Aktuell.
Growing opposition
Opposition is also emerging in the municipalities where the first section of Cargo Sous Terrain is to be built. “We believe that the planned plots are too small to accommodate all the necessary logistics,” says Markus Mötteli, president of the municipality of Spreitenbach, in canton Aargau.
The new Cargo Sous Terrain project with cable vehicles appears to be the last chance to see – perhaps – a large number of trucks disappear from Swiss roads.
More
More
Futuristic underground cargo project moves a step closer to reality
Adapted from French by DeepL/mga
How we work
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate them into English. A journalist then briefly 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.
Did you find this explanation helpful? Please fill out the short survey below to help us understand your needs.
