My hometown! Cool to see it on HN.<p>Maastricht uses to be the only traffic lights on route from Amsterdam to Paris. Yes. Traffic lights on a highway, in the middle of a city. As if the highway in the middle of a city wasn't annoyinh enough the traffic lights added some extra noise, fumes and pollution.<p>The new tunnel has been the most magnificent change I've ever seen. And IIRC the entire project was within budget and time.
Just 850 million euros of public money to build a mile and a half long tunnel under downtown! (Under a billion euros total.) A bi-level tunnel, with separate express and local levels, and four lanes on each level.<p>By contrast, the SR99 tunnel in Seattle was about 1/3 longer, cost $3-4 billion, depending on how lawsuits shake out, and has half the capacity (two levels with two lanes each). The Big Dig in Boston was the same length, and cost <i>22 times</i> as much.<p>In timely news (another post on the front page), the A2 tunnel cost only modestly more than it’s costing San Francisco to simply reconfigure Market Street to shut down through traffic.
Similar problem in my home town, where the only major east/west highway across the black forest cuts the city in two [0] (they actually demolished parts of the old town which survived the WW2 bombings to build this road in the 60ies, which I just cannot wrap my head around). Seeing what they have done in Maastricht makes me very jealous! They already moved half of the highway here into a tunnel in the 90ies [1] and there are plans to start extending this tunnel in the next 5 years [2], but as the original plans already date back to the 80ies, it will most likely take another 20 years until the project is finished.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.stadttunnel-freiburg.de/sites/default/files/styles/dz-node-detail/public/content-images/content/tunnel14.jpg?itok=Dfs2VQD9" rel="nofollow">https://www.stadttunnel-freiburg.de/sites/default/files/styl...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.daub-ita.de/fileadmin/images/daub/TunnelDB/UBD2000316-01.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.daub-ita.de/fileadmin/images/daub/TunnelDB/UBD200...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburger_Stadttunnel" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiburger_Stadttunnel</a>
There is a similar project going on in the city of Hamburg for quite some years now[1], covering the Autobahn A7, which goes from southern Germany all the way up to the Danish border, thus being a pretty important route and Germany's longest Autobahn.<p>Roughly 140,000 cars are crossing the city through the Autobahn per day.<p>[1]: (PDF, english) <a href="https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/7896702/27d2e4d96831a306f95b6429e0bd6eb9/data/2016-08-faltblatt-ueberdeckelung-a7-engl.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/7896702/27d2e4d96831a306f...</a>
Los Angeles is going to build a wildlife overpass:<p><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-largest-highway-overpass-for-wildlife-on-track-in-california/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbsnews.com/news/worlds-largest-highway-overpass...</a><p>Pedestrians and nature need to be given a higher priority.
There were (mostly dead) plans for a while to do something similar with I-35 in Austin, Texas.<p><a href="https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/04/the-idea-to-bury-i-35-has-risen-from-the-dead/" rel="nofollow">https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2019/04/the-idea-to-bu...</a><p>I very much doubt it will come to fruition any time soon given the political climate.
Similar to Klyde Warren Park in Dallas.<p><a href="https://www.klydewarrenpark.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.klydewarrenpark.org/</a>