The inauguration of the Monte Ceneri base tunnel is approaching - CdT interview Professor Remigio Ratti

Friday the 4th September 2020 will be another historic date for railway mobility in Ticino. In fact, the Monte Ceneri base tunnel will be inaugurated the third longest railway tunnel in Switzerland (15.4 km) after those of the Gotthard and Lötschberg. What does this work mean for our canton? We talked about it with Professor Remigio Ratti, an expert in transport policy.

It has always been stated that the real transport revolution with the launch of the Ticino underground, is the Monte Ceneri base railway tunnel more than the Gotthard one. What are your thoughts?

I think it is an important moment for a different internal mobility and a new territorial development plot. At the same time, I must remember that a transport infrastructure generally constitutes only a premise, a necessary but not sufficient condition, if not accompanied by a collective imagination, a strategic design and accompanying measures. Halving the travel times between Bellinzona and Lugano (15 minutes) and between Locarno and Lugano (30 minutes) means being decidedly competitive with the road; in addition, the Canton, in agreement with the Municipalities and various regional and local carriers, has strengthened the premises by preparing a considerable effort (461 million for the next four years) for an enhanced and integrated public service.

And the effects of the Gotthard Base Tunnel?

We are on another scale. The time savings - up to an hour on paper - have for the moment been partly affected by operating restrictions and the upgrading of the Arth-Goldau-Zug section. However, the recovery of passengers (8,000 before opening) is already evident and will double in five years. The structuring effects will partially combine with those of Ceneri. There are anticipatory effects, as in the case of Visp and the Lötschberg base tunnel opened in 2007. Thus Bellinzona has already known important real estate investments, initially designed according to the effects from the north of the opening of the San base tunnel. Gotthard, then followed by anticipatory effects from the south, depending on the Ceneri. Over the past two years Bellinzona has gained inhabitants, while Lugano and Locarno have lost. Other important accompanying effects concern the stations and the valuable areas connected therewith, subject to total investments by SBB of the order of one hundred million.

Are the combined effects of the two galleries those hoped for for the Ticino City?

In the medium and long term a lot will be played around this concept, no longer just some visionaries, but now inserted, also thanks to the AlpTransit Ticino project of the early 90s (Galfetti group) as an alternative for territorial development to the strictly railway projects of SBB. The three agglomerations mentioned in the city of Ticino now constitute half of the resident population in the canton, also hosting two thirds of the jobs. The Canton, by investing in a direct link between Locarno and Lugano, has created the conditions for making them interact and create a system as potentially complementary cities. A real challenge for planning and the ability to invest, made even more difficult in a period of great changes and uncertainties.

How will this new mobility really favour a cultural change in the way of experiencing the territory and conceiving its development?

That of infrastructures and the transport revolution is an endless discourse that runs through the entire history of the canton since its establishment; both to give it internal cohesion and to overcome its double peripherality towards the outside. Let’s think of the priority given to roads when the Ticino of the nineteenth century was so fragmented that for three quarters of a century it had an itinerant capital between Bellinzona, Locarno and Lugano. The advent of the Gotthardbahn in 1882, endowing Ticino with a backbone from Airolo to Chiasso and discovering the potential of the centres, will determine an epochal leap in the plot of the territory, but not the economic revolution that linked it to that matured beyond the Alps. The Gotthard motorway tunnel also made us think of new impulses from the north. Arrived late in 1980, the economic effects were recorded rather from the south with the Milan-Lugano motorway which arrived fifteen years earlier together with the overwhelming cross-border permeability of private motor vehicles. Now we are five minutes at midnight to restore the territory and the environment.

This historical recall does not appear entirely reassuring. What are the elements that need to worry us most?

The aforementioned phase of great changes in which we find ourselves risks leading public opinion and politicians towards positions of expectation or marked by a defensive regionalism. After all, not everything that glitters is gold. The Gotthard Base Tunnel also has ambivalent draining effects compared to the poles in Zurich, Zug or Lucerne and still difficult to read. More opportunities for young people, but also escape of the best forces. Better integration in the Swiss context, but also greater dependence on decision-making powers from beyond the Alps. In the regional context, will the City of Ticino be born as complementary and balanced as we would like it to be? And the demand is similar in relations with the valleys and peripheral areas. For this reason it is important that the plans set up for the Masterplans of the new agglomerations of Mendrisio.

We now have the base tunnels of the Gotthard and Monte Ceneri, but AlpTransit is not complete, the problem of the extension south of Lugano in particular remains. On the timing, the Federal Council has reversed the initial intentions and announced that studies on the route will be ready in 2025. Are you confident?

First of all, I would like to recall how the Ticino city also includes the cities of Mendrisio and Chiasso. Hence also the reference to the cross-border urban pole of the Como-Chiasso / Mendrisio-Varese triangle, whose demographic consistency is, strictly speaking, double that considered for the Ceneri tunnel. And here we have the reference to the other urban metro wanted with the Mendrisio-Varese (Malpensa) railway connection which came into operation with some success in 2018. We need a crucial area for our balance in respect of the centripetal reality of Milan, but politics and not only that, it seems to ignore it in a hibernation of regressive regionalism. If we had it better in mind, the bottleneck between the two urban triangulations of Ticino’s territoriality would be evident, even in the eyes of the federal Bern: the Mendrisio-Chiasso segment. To speed up the timing of the completion of AlpTransit to the south, the ProGottardo railway association of Europe was formed; his petition with over ten thousand signatures saw the Grand Council invite the executive to be more vindictive at the Federal Office of Transport. Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga and the federal chambers will take stock in 2022. However, promising only the studies for 2025 means at best seeing a commissioning, as per the current plans, in 2054.

Sottoceneri also claims the third motorway lane between Lugano and Mendrisio, an artery that is objectively collapsing. Is it possible and coherent to carry out this project together with that of the completion of AlpTransit?

At the academic level, it is denounced how anachronistic it is to keep planning and investments separate for the road and the railway. A negative popular vote of fifty years ago, the lobbies of the two sides and the recent federal votes on the establishment of two separate funding funds have so far made all attempts at an integrated discourse in terms of mobility, territory and environment useless. The case cited is among the most evident even at a national level. Now a petition from the Municipality of Melano and supported, among others, by ProGottardo and EspaceSuisse, asks for a revision in the sense mentioned. We are in the Cesarini area. But when it wants - if it is a must - we know that Ticino knows how to obtain what appears to be well founded and credible.

In the insert that Corriere del Ticino had dedicated in 2016 to the opening of the Gotthard base tunnel, you wrote that AlpTransit is just a piece of a larger drawing, to be included in strategic visions that interact with the whole, but not to see these strategic visions on a continental scale. Four years later what is your opinion?

I maintain this thesis, noting how much it still remains open. However, although it is precisely in a pandemic period, this plan is relaunched. The objectives of the new EU presidency concerning the “European green deal” and the 750 billion euro recovery plan are creating new scenarios, with a strong relaunch of the train in response to the plane on routes even longer than five hundred kilometers. Will we review the Gotthard railway axis which way of the people? We know what must be done.