alt Hacker NewsBeing in Switzerland it looks to me like this is a really tough referendum.
Both sides have very good arguments and from the side it looks like either way the Switzerland has to give up some asoects of its high quality of life.
If the initiative succeeds, Switzerland will get a large hit from the cancelation of a lot of bilateral agreements with the EU.
If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
I have already been on a train which refused to move due overload. And it would only depart if enough people have disembarked. The autobahn are already having hours long traffic jams at peak hours and with extra million people it will multiply.
And it's almost impossible to significantly improve the throughput of rail and autobahn without extreme projects.
It looks like a lose / lose situation is a sense and a people are going to decide which hit to take.
Replies
Capping a population is a short term solution creating huge issues for the following generations. Examples: lots of places this happened.
ETCS level 2 can increase rail capacity by orders of magnitude without laying any new track. You can have multiple trains following each other separated by stopping distance instead of having to separate trains between trackside signals.
Are they counting “frontalieri” towards that cap?
No? Funny how that works, isn’t?
> If the population exceeds 10M then the current rail and road infrastructure will not handle it well.
Actually it will do just fine. Maybe if the very party who is proposing this wouldn't have spent 20 years preventing infrastructure improvements it would handle it even better. Maybe if this very same party wouldn't continue to fight sensible transportation choices at every turn. Maybe if this party wouldn't spend endless time and energy trying to put as much money as possible in unpopular and irrational highway expansion projects.
There are lots of easy upgrades we can do to our transportation infrastructure. For example, Zimmerbergtunnel 2. This was known to be needed since the early 90s, and was planned. But was not done and is now in planning. We did it in 2 stages, making it much, much more expensive. But in the same period we spend as much as we did on Zimmerbergtunnel 2 on highway expansions that have lesser returns.
> And it's almost impossible to significantly improve the throughput of rail and autobahn without extreme projects.
Well we should get moving on some extreme projects then, or maybe not have the party that proposing this constantly stand in the way of sensible polices.
Anybody who seriously thinks about this will realize having new high speed line across the country would be great. But they would never let that happen.
NEAT was an extreme project, and it will provide benefits for centuries.
Can you explain how adding frequency to the train network will not work to compensate higher ridership?