Claudio shared a post on his blog yesterday about the Überlandpark in Zurich, which opened a few days ago. The “above ground park” is a massive construction project which removes traffic from the Schwamendingen district of the city. The work has taken five years to complete and the final results are inspiring.
There are blessedly few regular traffic hotspots in Switzerland, thanks in part to the exceptional public transport network, but major cities and the ever-increasing level of traffic, in particular the hugely busy area around Zurich, have been blackspots for years. This latest construction took the problem of 120,000 vehicles passing along the dual carriageway through Schwamendingen and solved it with a novel approach.
The level of traffic and the surrounding infrastructure made it impossible to consider tunnelling—a key feature of the Swiss road and rail networks—so an alternative idea was implemented: wrap the road in a new above-ground “box” tunnel and convert the area around the new tunnel into a much greener environment. This alleviates the environmental and noise pollution to a huge degree and the “Einhausung Schwamendingen” (“Schwamendingen Enclosure”) is restoring a much more natural environment.
Full details of the project are on the city website (in German).
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