Current proposals to refit the Mont Blanc tunnel will improve the security for light vehicles when it eventually reopens, but they do nothing to solve the problems presented by tractor-trailers. It would be suicide to allow these big rigs to resume their passage under Mont Blanc. But to avoid that we must address all the problems of crossing the Alps, in order to find a realistic, long-term solution that can be put to immediate effect.
The numbers are daunting. In 1998, 160.5 million tons of merchandise crossed the Alps, two thirds of it by road. A study carried out by the EU predicts that this traffic will increase by 75 percent before 2010. But for the people who live in the Alpine valleys, even the 1998 levels were intolerable. Led by activists like the mayor of Chamonix, Michel Charlet, and Andreas Weissen of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, they are fighting to regain their quality of life and health. A petition against the reopening of the tunnel to heavy vehicles, supported by four local governments in the Chamonix valley and 60 local, national and international associations, garnered 120,000 signatures in six months. But the protagonists on the ground don’t make the decisions.
What is needed is a regional and European policy that would replace road traffic with rail traffic through the Alps. This is something the Swiss already understand. They transport 71 percent of their heavy goods in trains. The French, by contrast, send only 19 percent by rail. The simple difference in the resulting air pollution ought to be incentive enough. According to a 1990 study by the OECD, shipping merchandise through the Alps by road produced 1.62 million tons of carbon dioxide. Rail transport, by contrast, produced just 48,000 tons. If the present policy is not changed, carbon dioxide emissions caused by road traffic will reach 2.5 million tons by 2010, as against 72,000 tons by rail transport. The Alps are enormous and inspiring, but also enormously fragile, and the effects of all this noxious air already are evident. By polluting and weakening the forests and multiplying the number of roads, human activity is partly responsible for setting off avalanches, rock slides and landslides, which are becoming increasingly frequent.
The Mont Blanc tunnel symbolizes the lack of environmental foresight that has characterized road traffic through the Alps. The single two-way tunnel opened in 1965 is 11.6 kilometers long, with two narrow lanes squeezed into a roadway just seven meters wide. The trucks that use it are sometimes 2.6 meters wide. In 1998, 2 million vehicles passed through the tunnel, including 800,000 carrying 13 million tons of goods. Yet existing rail lines, which could offer an alternative, are running at less than 50 percent capacity even now. The reason is price. Rail transport appears, at first, to be more expensive. But that is because the true cost of social and environmental damage from the road traffic are not counted.
By opposing the return of heavy trucks to the Mont Blanc tunnel, we wish to preserve the Alps in their essential European role: the Continental water tower, the habitat of innumerable plants and animals, a place of leisure and rest. We wish to promote the manufacture and consumption of the region’s products, to help people discover the magnificent scenery, natural spaces and cultures that exist today, and to leave them intact for future generations. What we do not want to see the Alps become–what they must never become–is just another truck stop on the Continental highway.
