Bareggtunnel

The Baregg Tunnel is a 1.1 km long tunnel under the Baregg, a hill of Heitersberg - mountain range in the canton of Aargau. It is located south of Baden between Daettwil and Neuenhof and forms part of the A1, the Switzerland of the busiest motorway. The volume of traffic is particularly high at this point, since a few kilometers west A1 from Bern is merged with the A3 motorway from Basel.

Around 50 to 80 meters above and just north of the tunnel is the devil cellar, a prehistoric landslide area with striking rock towers.

History

In October 1970, two tunnels were opened with two lanes. These reached in the 1990s, their capacity limits, as the six-lane highway busy narrowed in the area of the tunnel on four strips and thus formed a bottleneck. On working days, long traffic jams towards Zurich formed regularly (morning ) or Bern / Basel (evening). With the construction of a third tunnel the traffic re-liquefied and the environment should be relieved of the increasingly frequent evasive driving.

The construction of the three-lane third tunnel began in March 2000 and was completed in June 2003. In the following months, the two old tubes were rehabilitated, so that in August 2004, the full capacity of seven strips was reached. The three newly built strip in the northern tunnels lead now from Zurich to Bern and Basel, the old tunnels serve the eastward -flowing traffic. The cost of buildings aimed at removing bottlenecks on Baregg totaled CHF 425 million, which accounted for 265 million on the new third tube.

After removing the traffic to grow within two years by more than 10 % to well over 100,000 vehicles per day. Thus, the surrounding streets were largely freed from the previous bypass traffic on certain days with traffic than 130,000 vehicles, however, the limits of capacity are now already reached.

On April 14, 2004, there was in the new tube to a serious traffic accident with fire truck and one dead and five wounded. Due to the rapid intervention of the base fire departments Baden and Wettingen, who already knew the tunnel of a large alarm exercise in January 2004, worse could be prevented.