Despite the recent negative headlines, the project Swissmetro continues. On November 20, 2009 Swissmetro AG held an extraordinary general assembly and decided to enter into liquidation. Swissmetro AG ran out of funds and was unable to find new funding to continue its existence in the current business environment. Because of this lack of funds Swissmetro AG has not been operating actively in the last couple of years. The project Swissmetro will be handed over to the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Pro Swissmetro is looking forward to cooperating with the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and will establish the first contacts in early 2010.

Swissmetro has a new website: http://www.swissmetro.ch/. Full translations into English and French will follow shortly.

Over the last couple of months Switzerland has seen a number of news articles discussing the need for better rolling stock to increase rail capacity (German), the question of wether to increase train speeds or transport capacity (German), the rising maintenance costs due to heavier and more frequent trains (German), and network optimization measures to gain a couple of seconds in a timetable (German). The existing rail infrastructure clearly has reached its limits. Yet how do we plan to deal with the rising demand for transportation 20 or 30 years from now?

The problem is that nobody seems to have a plan. The SBB do have a couple of infrastructure projects in the pipeline, but those will not be enough to meet the increasing demand. The example of Bahn 2000 has shown that an impoved rail infrastructure quickly increases the strain on the rail system and leads to new bottlenecks. Cost is one major obstacle for the new infrastructure projects until 2030, because building new tracks in a densely populated country like Switzerland is no easy feat and requires many civil engineering works like tunnels or bridges. The railway stations also need to improve their capacity and more and more they need to expand underground.

Tweaking the existing system will clearly not be enough because the marginal cost of squeazing more capacity out of the rail infrastructure is rising. What is needed is technological alternative that surpasses some of the limitations of the rail system but most of all creates additional transport capacity. A direct service with Swissmetro between the major cities would free capacities on the exisiting rail system that could be used for improved local and regional connections. With a speed of 500 km/h and a much better energy efficiency Swissmetro means a leap in transport technology. Unfortunately, Switzerland doesn’t seem to realize the need for this innovation yet.

The online edition of the NZZ recently published an article about the project Swiss-Rapide-Express. The idea is to connect Bern and Zurich with a maglev train based on the Transrapid. The similarity with Swissmetro is striking, to the extent that even the title of the article sounds almost like Swissmetro’s catch-phrase “Zurich – Bern in 12 minutes”. However, the arrticle mentions Swissmetro only in passing. A brief comparison seems therefore appropriate.

Both projects benefit from the advantages of maglev technology: speeds up to 500 km/h, quick acceleration and high frequency as well as low wear operation. Compared to Swissmetro the project Swiss-Rapide-Express has the advantage that the technology has already been developed and connects Shanghai – Pudong International Airport since 2004. Moreover, building the track above ground seems to be less costly than boring the tunnels for Swissmetro.

Swissmetro has the complete underground track in its favor. Above ground the aerodynamic drag increases with the square of the speed. Tripling the speed to 500 km/h requires an input of 9 times the normal amount of energy, in order to overcome the aerodynamic drag. This creates a lot of noise, which carries quite far because the track is elevated on pillars. The Swissmetro tunnel, by contrast, is under a partial vacuum so it only needs to overcome about 10% of the normal air pressure. This is why the energy consumptions of Swissmetro is very low and it does not create any noise. The Transrapid also requires tunnel sections, because there is no other way to get to the city centers due to the high noise level and the costs for the land required for the tracks. Even in Shanghai the Transrapid is unable to run as far as the city center and the project of a Transrapid connection between Munich airport and the city center had to be given up because of the expensive tunnel sections.

If tunnels are unavoidable, we should make full use of their advantages. The Swissmetro tunnels lower the energy consumption, avoid scarring the landscape, save the cost of buying land, eliminate all noise emissions, thus avoiding resistance of the residents and a protracted approval process. Today, the only way a new highspeed connection can be built in a densely populated country like Switzerland is to go underground like Swissmetro.

At the end of May federal councillor Moritz Leuenberger spoke at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig. He warned against cutting back on investments in transportation infrastructure projects because of the current financial crisis. According to Leuenberger, transportation policy must find sustainable ways to satisfy the increasing demand for mobility in the future. We wholeheartedly agree.

The Swissmetro main study also looked into cost, financing options and profitability of the project. The total cost for the west-east-axis Geneva to St.Gallen and the leg Basel – Zurich was estimated to cost about 25 billion Swiss francs. These figures are from 1997, unfortunately, more recent figures are not available.

The project Swiss Cargo Tube (German) was presented to the public last week. This project is similar to Swissmetro in that it is based on an underground tunnel on the east-west axis. Other than that, the two projects are not related.

Climate change, the financial crisis and now the economic downturn show the shortcoming of short-term oriented thinking. Green technologies are the key to the future. They enable us to act in a sustainable manner without having to drastically lower our standard of living. Instead of trying to maximize profits in the short-term, let us focus on what really matters: investments in research and development of sustainable technologies for the future which cause no indirect costs and are profitable in the long run.

The Swiss Federal Railways announced an invitiation to tender on 59 new double-deck passenger trains this week. The passenger volume has increased by 30 percent since the end of 2004 and is projected to increase by another 50 percent by 2030.

Given that Swissmetro will run entirely underground, many people wonder about the safety of the system in case of an earthquake. Generally speaking, the planned Swissmetro lines in Switzerland run through regions with low seismic activity.