The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht (opens in new tab)

After decades the road work has been finished and the missing link between Autobahn 2 and Autobahn 30 is finally in place.

It leads you around the town and it saves at least 20 minutes.

Reminds me of Luik/Liege in Belgium just across the border form Maastricht. It's far worse there especially when you look at how poor the construction is there and how high the pollution seems to be. You can see that city has suffered immensely economically.

The journey through Maastricht over the highway generally wasn't all that bad, traffic would generally flow remarkably well. I think the primary concerns to put a tunnel in was pollution, noise and congestation.

Oh, I was so happy this year that the highway around was finally opened. I thought I'd forever have to go through that town and pass Hans Wurst.

Wow, that brings back memories. I travelled that road twice a week, most weeks, for about 2 years. I had almost blocked this from my memory!

That said, I think there was a KFC and a McDonalds there pretty much just off the road that you can stop at which was just about the right time when my bladder ran out of mileage.

It was nice to slow down and stop somewhere other than a motorway service station!

>Bad Oeynhausen

Town name checks out?

In Google satellite view, there appears to be a railway about 400 meters west which similarly divides the city. Will that be buried as well?

According to Google Maps it's only 30 minutes longer to go through Maastricht, so it's not that far of a stretch to imagine that some people use it.

True. I tend to take either Brussels or Ghent. Maastricht is more appropriate if you want to go to Lyon rather than Paris.

I think this is a causality problem, not anything out of malice or bureaucratic foolishness.

Roads connect people. Towns are groups of people. Bigger roads connect larger groups of people. Bigger roads are the reasonable choice to convert to highways. People like/find utility in highways and roads, so they live near them.

It's an unfortunate extension of this logical process that results in 18-wheeler jake brakes thundering to a stop at the one red light in downtown Podunk, Nowhere at 3AM, on their way between Megatropolis and Port Industry, which leads to complaining at the town hall that they need "no engine braking" local ordinances and proposals that the 5-lane road speed limit should be reduced from 35 to 25. Nevermind that Podunk was established as a town because it was a convenient distance to stop at in horse-drawn buggies passing through 200 years ago between Megatropolis and Port Industry, and that every business in the town survives only because travelers stop there and inject money into the local economy...

Maybe at some point in the past, the major road should have been diverted around downtown by a half mile. But the local optimum the town currently sits at is far below the peak desirable state not because people love noise and pollution but because it's a straightfoward hill climb to the present state and it's hard to avoid that.

In small town america, the towns usually grew on the side of the highway. That's where you put the businesses, because that's where the customers are. Then, that's where you put the houses, because it's close to everything. Small towns exist away from the highway, but you're unlikely to see them, and they're more likely to be on the decline, because they're hard to get to. See also towns that die when the highway is moved.

There is still a motorway with traffic lights: the A59 is interrupted for a few hundred metres so it can have traffic lights at Knooppunt Hooipolder where there is an interchange with the (more important) A27. A major source of traffic jams. It is not signposted as having a different road number, although I guess administratively can't have an A number for that stretch.

That's only for finishing the park on top, and the new parks in the vicinity that are being build in one big project but that don't really have anything to do with the tunnel per se. The tunnels and all the connector roads are done now.

Any tunnel of appreciable size will have designed ventilation and other auxiliary systems(life support/escape, maintenance, power, etc). It isn't just a tube in the ground.

Cars come with HEPA filters. Most (non-Asian) pedestrians don't.

Well before the end of this tunnel's lifetime most cars will be electric.

The TBM in the SR99 tunnel is also the largest TBM in the world. It was a bit of a gamble, and it didn't pay off. Another huge problem was that it ran into a huge metal caisson that had been placed while surveying the area to build the tunnel... The contractors operating the machine "knew" about it, but still ran into it, which broke the machine for a long time. (They were given information that it was there, but they overlooked it.)

Boring tunnels is also hard in the muddy Dutch soil. It was used in Amsterdam for the new Noord-Zuid-lijn, which had tons of complications and went way over deadline and budget by an enormous amount.

Although if there's a part of the country that is suitable for boring, it's probably Maastricht, which is in the tiny part of the country that has actual hills.

The SF Market St plan doesn't have that and the Central Subway has got to be cut and cover since they just shut down the road.

Cut and cover is just so much cheaper.

The "Noord-Zuid-Lijn" new metro line in Amsterdam was a classic disaster like so many others.

I guess the answer is "we have fuckups too but not all the time". Could it be the case though that the same holds for the US? I mean usually if something is on time and within budget it doesn't make the news just as much :D

It’s different legal and contracting culture. Britain is also a common law legal system and our projects are typically way less efficient than mainland Europe. E.g the most expensive TGV the french have built was about 5-10 times cheaper than HS2. It’s not land acquisition costs that are causing the difference as these only account for about 3bn of the 80bn budget. It’s not difficult terrain either as the french TGV med has more bridges and tunnels. It’s not labour costs as we share the same labour pool as the french so we could attract loads of french digger drivers if we paid 5x more. My theory is that UK politicians and managers are more risk averse so the cost of the risk gets pushed down the chain of subcontractors and every time it jumps down a level it multiplies. I also suspect that the french will have a government department for building high speed lines with a continuous culture and body of knowledge stretching back to the 1960’s with engineers on staff. Whereas in the U.K. the team will be assembled from various consulting engineering companies and everything that is learnt on the job gets lost when the team disbands at the end.

In broad strokes there are more environmental and labor protections in Canada, Japan, and the U.K., but at the same time, US law has some unique features that have been weaponized. For example, while the US is sometimes relatively more lax on environmental issues in the private sector, it’s very strict for environmental issues in the public sector. Nobody has the equivalent of NEPA, which requires every significant public project to undergo years (4-5 on average) of environmental review and litigation before even getting started. See: https://legal-planet.org/2012/05/13/comparing-canadian-and-u...

> US environmental law is much more generous in allowing for judicial review of decisionmaking by government agencies that is alleged to violate relevant environmental laws. It is also much more generous in allowing private parties to enforce environmental laws against other private parties who are alleged to have committed violations.

The US is unusual in the degree to which it allows private interests (environmentalists, landowners, etc.) to litigate and hold up projects that the government has already approved.

I mean I don't think saying that the unions in the US inflate costs is too out there..

Perhaps this is just my perception, but I would say the difference is that European unions (at least northern European, can't speak to the rest of Europe) seem less inclined to engage in dodgy behaviour than their US counterparts. I'm specifically thinking about construction, ports, etc.

I mean the fact that there are people employed to literally do nothing, "because that job used to exist and must never go away" is one example of this. It's not something I've heard of happening in Europe to the same extent it seems to in the US.

We just had a farmers revolt in the Netherlands because of environmentalists groups pushing very restrictive laws which would result in both the amount of cattle in NL being halved and a lot of construction stopping. One major reason they protested was the news reporting that nitrogen kills trees.

It can go both ways, depending on how well things are thought out and executed. We have a lot of people who don't have realistic expectations and don't seem to realize that the Netherlands is largely made up out of artificially build nature which needs to be maintained and kept in check instead of left alone.

Salaries are one variable.

One of those ecoducts [0] has a millitary shooting range on one side, which I always found quite funny. It is of-course quite safe since shooting exercises are rare. (Ignoring the fact that for some time, our soldiers would practice by shouting 'pang pang' ('bang bang' translated) [1] because ammo was too expensive)

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1051185,5.3619931,3a,75y,296...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/dutch-soldie...

More remarkable than ecopassages are the underpasses built specifically for canals or major rivers. There are a few of these on the way from Den Haag to Utrecht that are pretty mind-boggling. It's also interesting to see cargo shipping going OVER the highway.

It was very noticeable to me in Dutch cities that there is wildlife.

Love that illustration. Do you have a source? I'd like to pay attribution when I share it elsewhere.

Why would they still want to make toll roads? I makes no sense aside from someone wanting to profit from essential public needs. You'd think if a bunch of people designate a small group to do government stuff on their behalf to make life better they do those sensible things centrally.

Unfortunately they decided not to filter the air at the egress points. This has been the subject of much debate and several law suits by people living near the tunnel ends.