Stuttgart Citizens Spend £30 Million On Tram Tunnels

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30482, 2 July 1964, Page 13

Stuttgart Citizens Spend £30 Million On Tram Tunnels

[By

ITO ULRICH]

STUTTGART.

The metropolis of Stuttgart has thought up a new traffic system, designed to meet present and future communication problems and bringing the out-dated tramways into renewed prominence.

Stuttgart is about to put its trams underground.

Already, the huge excavations in the centre of town have become much-discussed objects of study by experts from home and abroad. All the experts In trafficrich Western countries have long been forecasting that a large part of big-city traffic Will have to go underground, but a decision on which public subterranean communication is best has not, so far, been arrived at. The south-west German metropolis has now come out a trail-blazer among cities with 500,000 to a million inhabitants, proving that for them the underground tramways are the best solution.

The reason: continued use of the available rolling-stock and equipment and continuance of street-car service during the entire change-over period. The total estimated cost of the Stuttgart project Is more than £3O million. Needless to say that the south-west German state capital lacks the means to tackle all stages of construction at once, hence the city tramways are to be put underground in 12 stages. Work on a complicated tunnel-section, a three-storey cross-roads, has already begun and tunnelling has been completed. The first streetcars are expected to be using the tunnel in two years’ time More than 70,000 ’ motor vehicles pass through the Charlottenplatz (see model photo) each 24 hours, this being the cross-roads of two busy federal highways. The Swablaps, generally known as a thoughtful and economy-minded kind of people, have proved with this daring project that they can be very progressive when communal problems are at stake, and that they are not averse to revolutionary innovations, once they are convinced they are on the right track.

No fewer than eight other West German cities intend to soon follow the Stuttgart example and several town planners from neighbouring European countries have let it be known that they, too, are playing with the idea of copying the Swabians* unorthodox ideas. (German Features).