Dear Readers,

as promised in my previous post “Gotthard tunnel…again!“, here the English version.

I am Italian and I have been living for 15 years in Canton Argovia.
Therefore, especially on public holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, Whitsunday, summer weekends, I have been dependent on the scandalous (not to say disgustingly managed) Gotthard tunnel for 15 years.
Just for the few who might not know, the Gotthard tunnel is a 17 km long, 2 lane (one for each direction) tunnel separating the Italian from the German part of Switzerland and it is located on the main highway connecting Southern and Northern Europe through Switzerland!

As examples, my second last horror journey in the third world of Gotthard and surroundings: the return journey from Milan on Monday after Easter, on 28th March, and my last one: the return journey from Milan on Sunday, 8th May, at the end of the long weekend for the Ascension Day.
First of all, some tunnels before Gotthard, everything starts with a nice red traffic light lasting almost two hours!
What for?
Then the traffic light blinks and becomes orange (green would be too adventurous: attention! on the highway there are a lot of cars: danger! danger!) and finally, at the third attempt (the orange lasts only a couple of minutes without considering the inertia needed to restart the engines!), I succeed in passing the barrier.
After few kilometres (10 km before Gotthard tunnel) there is again a semi-still queue which is moving very slowly: some 10 metres every 5 minutes!
What is this?
A showdown to frustrate the drivers not to drive through the Gotthard tunnel?
It is obvious and easy to understand even for a child that, if you concentrate all the cars stopping them and blocking them with red traffic lights, you create useless and artificial queues!!!
If you let the traffic flow, the queues would dissolve by themselves or would be much shorter.
And who is deciding the timer for the traffic lights? Someone who perhaps does not even have a driving license? (Which would not be so unusual in Switzerland).
The green light in front of Gotthard is so short that the first cars with caravans cannot even start, slowing down all the group and making even the very traffic lights quite disputable!
Despite the meticulous and scientific traffic light timer which all the drivers have to undergo before entering the mouth of Gotthard, the dangers and risks in the tunnel are for sure absolutely not diminished, on the contrary!
In the tunnel you can still have queues which are moving very slow, or even stop, and all the cars, buses, trucks are willingly grouped one after the other within a very short (too short) distance!

Therefore I would like to know the main reasons of this fallacious and retrograde “access rule” to Gotthard.
There are even mathematical disciplines studying the theory of queues.
In case these were the background for such traffic regulation, for sure they would have found the biggest exception to their real applicability here near Gotthard!

Finally some data:
The journey “Argovia”-Milan normally takes a little less that three and half hours for about 300 km. With the Gotthard crisis, this journey becomes an odyssey of at least 6 hours (in the best cases…) or even seven!
These figures should make the responsible persons think, the people responsible of encumbering the connection between Northern Europe and a wide part of Southern Europe.

In order to grant the best possible safety at Gotthard tunnel, the first red traffic lights should perhaps be installed even at the border with Italy, at Chiasso!