Sorry I couldn’t find an article on this in English, but to summarise: there was a bad crash on this rather dangerous road, and the response from the federal roads office, along with lowing the speed limit slightly and adding barriers, is to ban bikes from riding here.
For some context, this road is on the edge of a lake, with mountains on the other side. There is no reasonable alternative for cyclists. Whereas for drivers using this as a through-route (it is part of a major north-south access), there is a large tunnelled motorway on the other side of the lake that would be a minor detour for most. This is all while another road is being constructed to parallel this one at the cost of CHF 1.2 Billion, to be completed in 2033.
They are nice enough to offer an hourly shuttle for up to 16 cyclists at a time.
I think it’s absurd that cyclists again get the short end of the stick when one driver is unable to control their vehicle (with no cyclists involved). And the speed limit is kept as high as 60km/h when clearly the road should be for local use only where a much lower limit would make sense, and longer distance traffic rerouted to the other side of the lake (which is an extra 10km if you’re heading further south from Zurich for example).
maybe it’s just me but i really don’t understand the logic here. bikes had nothing to do with this incident, why was a bike ban even considered?
The road is too narrow and curvy for cars to overtake cyclists without too much danger.
ah, i guess that makes a little sense, although it sounds more like the road itself is the problem
And the speed limit is still higher than it should be.
60kmh is a really slow speed limit. It is especially slow for a highway that would be safe at double the speed other than a few corners.
It’s not a highway and it shouldn’t be treated like one. There’s a highway on the other side of the lake for those just passing through. This should be treated as a local road for access to places along it or at either end, for which a much lower speed limit would be fine and would make it much safer.
This road is definitely a problem, it is the only stretch of the main north/south highway that isn’t actually a highway, once they build that tunnel it can finally serve the purpose of a local alternative for vehicles that can’t go on the highway (bikes and tractors and other slow stuff).
The only way you could improve the current situation is by offering free bike-tickets on the trains running between the two closest stations instead of this weird shuttle.
There already is a highway on the other side of the lake. It’s only 10km extra if you’re doing Zurich -> Lugano for example. There’s no need for another road tunnel.
From Zurich yeah, but from the east of Zurich the deveation gets much longer. And there is a highway on both the north and the south of the Axenstrasse, so this tunnel makes sense and as you see is needed to use this road as a local connector.
And I don’t think this would lead to that many more cars on the road, because the limiting factor will still be the Gotthard.
There’s a lot more people to the west of Zurich than the east, and for many in the east it is faster to take the San Bernadino pass anyway.
Just because there’s already highways there, doesn’t mean we have to build more, we could just accept that it has already been overbuilt and stop.
The Gotthard is currently being doubled, and both should be open around the same time as this new stretch. These combined will lead to more traffic.
The Swiss do have a strong biking culture, but it’s less strong than the car one. Places with mountains tend to have narrow roads.
The Swiss also suffer from too many trucks and not enough trains used for cargo.
There was a referendum in 1994 for transporting freight through the alps by rail instead of road, and Switzerland does really well in this, but there’s still a lot of trucks and building more roads won’t help. There’s also a lot of people travelling on this axis and a lot more that could be done to encourage them to travel by rail.