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The problem isn't congestion in Stockholm per-se among its inhabitants; introducing more public transport would help with that. The problem is that Stockholm, as is mentioned, is built on a number of islands, between the Mälaren lake and the Baltic Sea, the former of which serves as ~150 km wide barrier. As a result, Stockholm serves as the only land bridge along the east coast. In addition to the inhabitants of Stockholm, there is a lot of traffic that needs to go from other parts of Sweden north and south of Stockholm. Because there are massive waterways they need to pass through the city, and there are currently essentially only two proper highways. One goes through the very center of the city - past the historical old town - and the other, Essingeleden, passes slightly to the west of it. (There are two smaller bridges but those are really just intended for city busses, vans, few passenger cars, bicyclists, etc - not long-haul trucks carrying containers) We've had incidents in the past where a long-haul truck crashed and blocked several lanes of traffic on the Essingeleden and it was catastrophic for not just the city's inhabitants but all other logistics passing through the city. The Stockholm bypass is meant to offer one additional route bypassing the center completely. While some Stockholmers might use it to cut their driving commute travels, and it will off-load the highways in the center, in practice the really big beneficiaries will be long-haul truck drivers.
If you get fewer people in Stockholm on the existing roads with public transit that would open up more road capacity for long distance transport. Or, if you really need to bypass the city entirely (say, when transporting hazardous goods or something) then rail is better for long distance cargo and build a rail tunnel.
I think this is something a lot of commenters are missing, too many people have this knee-jerk anti-car response whenever there is any new road construction. It's same idea for the road tunnel in Antwerp, route lorries around the city (in that case to get to the docks). Even if it doesn't help with congestion that much, fewer lorries in urban areas that don't need to be there is always a good thing for both air quality and safety.
@@fernbedek6302 Sweden is fairly sparsely populated outside of a few major cities, the rail network isn't extensive enough and mills and factories are too spread out to make a large amount of rail freight economic.
@@Croz89 I'm Canadian. We're even more sparsely populated. We're still able to make rail the main way we move freight. If anything, low densities are good for freight rail because there's less stopping and starting and more benefit from saving on driver-hours over the long distances you're having to transport things.
@@fernbedek6302 Canada has the US freight rail network to connect to, plus it has ports on both coasts and a lot of low value bulk goods to move. Sweden's railway doesn't really connect much to much outside Sweden, only Copenhagen via the Oresund and a couple of connections to Norway (Finland is a break of gauge). Sweden's rail network isn't much less extensive really, it's just more passenger focused. Unless you're dealing with containers off ships, higher value lower volume goods are generally going to be moved by road, it just doesn't make sense to build a railway spur to every factory, mill or refinery, or even a loading station in the local area.
Damn, I didnt expect to see this here. I spent 5 years working on this project on one of the sections. We had about 4 kilometers of main tunnels + all small connection tunnels and ramps, which added up to about 20 kilometers of tunnel. It was very interesting work.
I worked on it in 2020 for 6 months. Quite interesting, but things were still moving slowly Honestly I have some doubts it's gonna be finished by 2030, but let's see.
FYI this is not only about congestion. The focus is to mainly shift away throughrunning traffic from the city center and also to reduce vulnerability of the road system in Stockholm.
Exactly and what is why this is such a bad solution. This ring will both be extremely expensive but not actually solve the problem as the ring is simply to close to Stockholm. There is typically often congestion all the way from Södertälje in south on the E4 and also congestion north of Sollentuna. This ring road will not fix that at all. It amazes me that the politician doesn't realize that a huge part of the problem is through-traffic that have no destination or departure anywhere close to Stockholm. Significantly updating road 55 had made so much more sense and be a more economically sound investment.
@@dataandcoloursFast är det verkligen så mycket trafik redan från Södertälje? Det brukar börja i höjd med Botkyrka (såvida inte något trafikhinder uppstår) om man ska norr ut, så på så vis är den ju rätt så bra planerad
@@Idkwhothisiss8 Nja om man hade haft en avstickare på förbifarten som avlastar bron över södertäljekanalen hade det vart toppen. Den är också en huvudled över en vattenbarriär som faktiskt ställer till med många, många problem.
Everyone knows what you really need for Ikea is a highway through the shop itself so you can go straight to the thing you need to see and not all the way around it. :D
All the stock footage was actually of Stockholm, the description of the project as well as the history of traffic in Stockholm was accurate. Impressive!
To everyone who are against this project saying this is "just another lane". You are wrong. This isnt Houston where they increase to infinite lanes. This project is to divert the traffic from the city center. There is no reason for a highway to cut right through city centers like in stupid american cities. European cities have less traffic because our highways tend to be build around our cities, not straight through. This is exactly what this project is about.
@@UnbeltedSundew I checked the map and yeah you are right. However, there are also often hundreds of meters wide roads in the middle of the cities aswell. For example, Road 70 runs right through Columbus and Indianapolis, Kansas City, city centers.
@@MrGunnar69 The E4 was built in the 60s, inspired by the US model. That's exactly what the city is now trying to rectify. Everyone agrees that it was a stupid idea, but they thought otherwise back then.
Stupid American cities huh? A little jelly of the good ole USA are we now? Just come on over, i swear you'll like it here, just don't say Stupid American anything around the people here or you'll end up gettin swatted by whoever hears ya 🤣😂
Seeing a lot of weird takes from people who presumably do not understand the situation. A bypass is needed. The E4 is one of if not the most trafficked highway in Sweden, running along the entire country and going through Stockholm. There are countless journeys being taken going north or south and they all have to pass THROUGH the capital on the current E4. A bypass can divert all those cars and semi-trucks so that the traffic that you see in the city is basically only city traffic, no one just passing through. If you're going from Sundsvall to Jönköping, why would you need to drive through the capital and add to the traffic there?. It's like if every journey going along the east coast of the United States HAD to go through Washington D.C
@tobias_dahlberg Exactly. It would have made so much more sense to simply spend all this insane amount of money on updating road 55 Norrköping-Katrineholm-Strängnäs-Enköping-Uppsala. It's such a no brainer for people NOT living in or close to Stockholm. The insane amount traffic that is forced do drive through or close to Stockholm unnecessary seems to have been completely forgotten. And it's not like this rather short ring road will fix that. A lot of the congestion starts close to Nyköping even in the south-east and there are often congestion significantly further north than Sollentuna. This project will not fix that at all, but probably even increase it even more as fewer will consider road 55 when this project is completed as now at least they will not drive more or less into Stockholm.
@@jake9764 probably too sharp elevation changes. Trains need to have very gradual elevation changes to operate (except for like Swiss alpine trains). Therefor trains would probably need their own separate project.
@@jake9764 They should be doing both, really, but more emphasis on the latter. Trains also take up less space and offer much more capacity, most of it could be built on the surface too.
I have been waiting a long time for this video! As it's such a big project i Thought it would pop up here sooner or later. And i'm not disappointed by it either! Would be cool if you made a video about the extension of the subway system in stockholm as well as they are building the deepest subway station in the world as well as having had some big chalanges of a very different kind to what you normaly hear about!
Besides this project they are also building out the metro network a lot. What I still don’t understand is with so much tunneling being done that the whole klarastrandsleden to centralbron is not being tunneled. Mind boggling how a major road like that can just pass through the middle of the city.
There was a Reddit thread on Swedish Reddit a while back asking people from Stockholm who drive why they don't use public transportation, and they all basically said the same thing: Taking public transportation takes too long, in part because you often need to switch between different trains and busses several times to get to and from work, and every switch can have you waiting at a bus stop/train station for up to 20 minutes. Many said that a 20 minute drive can take an hour on public transportation.
Stockholm has a very high use of public transit, like twice as many trips are done by public transit than by driving each day. And Stockholm is in the middle of expanding its metro system building 11 new stations.
It's even worse if you live outside a large city like Stockholm and aren't going into the city center. Businesses are all over the Stockholm area and it's difficult for there to be enough routes to cover everywhere that people need to go. If you're going to Stockholm to do something on the weekend like a concert or sporting event, it can work really well to take public transportation. For daily commutes to work, it doesn't unless you specific get a new apartment along public transportation routes every time you change jobs. It's not that there aren't people who use public transportation, but it's not practical for some Swedes to use public transportation for their daily commutes.
Trains aren't that far apart unless you're traveling near midnight. Also the best mode for transport in Stockholm around that time is by those rentable scooters. There are no cars on the street and the city is small.
'Public transport takes too long'. They always say that. New roads or lanes always produces induced demand, never solves the problem. I voluntarily stopped driving motor vehicles in 1981 (in the UK and then the Netherlands) and have saved a fortune. Forget about parking problems. I walk to the supermarket, pull the shopping home using a shopping trolley. Some days I take a bus to the bar and a late bus back home. It only takes a little organisation.
I like that at 0:45, when he says "officials are looking for another solution", the trains are right in sight. The video just derailed a bit after that.
I get what you are saying, but the purpose of this tunnel is to lead traffic away that would have otherwise passed through the city. Through Stockholm passes one of the main highways in Sweden, and this tunnel would provide an alternative for people passing through
So, when are you gonna cover the rail tunnel project Västlänken in Gothenburg? It would be a really good case study on contruction project controversy.
Something on the upgrades on the west coast main line would be interesting too. Last time I was visiting a friend I saw the massive box they were building for the new station at Varberg and tunnel that would mean it no longer had to go through the middle of town with the level crossing.
There is another bypass route as well, much longer but also cheaper and has local benefits along the way. Road 50 from Mjölby to Motala has been upgrade a lot in recent year, allowing a connection from E4 to E20/E18 to Enköping. From there Road 50 again from Enköping to Uppsala and we have a serious contender for bypassing the Stockholm choke point. It does bypass Sörmland and most of östergötland as well, so it is not for all traffic, but it should help solve some of the problems.
And if you ask people who study traffic patterns, the bypass will barely have any effect, since there is almost no through traffic; nearly all vehicles are going to or from Stockholm itself. Meanwhile, the Citybana, which *doubled* rail capacity in the city, got less than half the budget of the bypass...
Precisely. One government agency concluded that about 204 cars per day would see clear benefits from the project. Since this was a prestige project from powerful politicians, the agency was made redundant soon after. Stockholm clearly needs a bypass highway, but since they tried to placate every single citizen with a complaint, the highway was pushed farther and farther out (making it less and less useful) and more and more sections were put under ground (ballooning the cost). For the same cost, they could have built a four lane highway from Stockholm to the Finish border.
Hopefully this will reduce public transit ridership and help convert sweden to a more US-highway centric transportation and urban development model. There are millions of acres in sweden that could support tract housing and big box retail development.
I worked on this scheme over 10 years ago as a strutural engineer through GGJV (Grontmij / Golders) and it was fun... one thing about the Swedes that i remember was regular meetings to plan the next series of meetings, all within a multi-disciplinary design envirnment... lol
Sounds like classic bureaucracy. Governments love such things. You'll have a meeting to discuss a time for another meeting to decide on when next to have a meeting about moving on to the next phase, then a meeting to discuss the options for the next phase then a meeting to discuss which phase was chosen, to then meet to discuss how to proceed. A lot of fruitful work of course, involving all stakeholders at every turn so everyone is in the loop.
As a Swede living in stockholm myself i think this project is really stupid. This road(questionable if even needed) could have been built above ground for a third of its price.
It’s fairly simple. You can absolutely build wide enough anywhere to tackle congestion. Demand is not infinite. The problem is how destructive and expensive it would be. Much smarter to build dense public transit in the middle of the city. But building outside the city where demand is lower but still justified, particularly for long haulers, is an impressive move on Sweden’s part. It’ll be up to them how land use nearby is managed to avoid significant sprawl.
To be fair the 4B budget doesn't bother me at all - here in Lund it took 1B just to build a street car line stretching a few kilometers. 4B for a massive tunnel network? These guys are alot better at their job.
Was Amzing to hear about the BM1 on the radio 5! Construction in the future will be 4D printed and A.I. will build our city's in mega factories and then transport them to the sites!
So the long haul truckers and people driving from all over northern Sweden to southern Sweden and down to the continent (and vice-versa) without stopping in Stockholm should just take the train instead? The bypass is built to lead non-Stockholm bound traffic around the city and make a alternative route possible, especially when the Essingeleden highway (that essentially is the ONLY highway connecting north and South through a tight choke point ) is extremely vulnerable if accidents happen and usually have insane queues. I don’t like car centric cities, but in order to keep the city center clean and walkable - ring roads are nessicary to lead traffic around the city, which most cities in Europe that are more walkable than Stockholm have.
A lot of people are saying that Stockholm doesn’t have enough public transport, but the problem is that the highway network aren’t designed as thruways, but as a commuter option.
I live in Stockholm and I can tell you that this new bypass is sorely needed. Currently the E4 which is a major highway which runs north-south through the entire country, goes right through the city center. A major highway running through a city center is just absurd.
@@einar8019 If you honestly think the route that the E4 (actually E20) takes around Stockholm constitutes the centre, then I'm guessing you must work for Ryanair and are the person who called Skavsta airfield, 'Stockholm Airport'
@@usefulcommunication4516 The E4 literally goes through Kungsholmen or norrmalm depending on which road you take. It definitely goes through the city centre.
@@ErikTheAndroid You're talking about Centralbron. If you travelling on "the E4 which is a major highway which runs north-south through the entire country" you wouldn't go anywhere near that. Unless you're a mental case and want to take a major diversion/scenic route.
My big pet peeve with this project is that they made the Lovö island exit so complex and in such a silly location, traffic channeling to smack dab middle of a nature reserve. What they should've done is swing the tunnel curves around a bit and build a junction before (underneath Kungshatt, for traffic towards Ekerö) and a junction after (around Nockeby).
London has the M25 Berlin has the A10 Paris has the Périph Copenhagen has the O4 Stockholm got nothing. Skärholmen - Häggvik is a 25min (28.8km) drive through Stockholm. Avoiding Stockholm turns it into 1 hour 54 minutes trip (165 km). A ringway or bypass has been a wet dream for any driver north or south of stockholm for decades.
Coming from Sweden and driving through Norway to Bergen, we passed through 60 tunnels, the longest being 45 Kilometers. Granted, Norway dig tunnels to avoid driving around/over mountains, but the result is the same with tunnels being safer than icy roads ... and Norway still has lots of those.
Dear Fred, Stockholm's underground construction is booming, it's going to expand for 20% for the upcoming years, can you please cover that topic as well? Love everything you do, can't wait for another video
Driving in Stockholm is one of the worst experiences in my life. I live in Örebro, about 2 hours away, and had to go to the embassy. The parking is expensive, every street has a million rules, and the traffic was just ridiculous.
That's why people in this city generally don't drive. Contrary to what the video said, most people does not take the car. In the city center, metro ridership is almost 3 times higher than car ridership and car ownership has been declining for years.
Sounds horrible! Have you considered taking the Mälartåg? I haven't personally taken it on this leg (only the Nyköping route), seems to be slightly faster than driving without traffic on the website (and costs slightly less than just the fuel)
A huge part of the traffic is traffic that is just going through Stockholm due to lack of any good alternative for longer transportation! It's not just caused by traffic that has somewhere close to Stockholm as destination. E4 is by far the most important road in Sweden and what is needed is a very, very wide ring road alternative that completely avoids having passing traffic getting anywhere near Stockholm. This rather intermediate ring will not really fix that much of the problem. It can absolutely been argued that it would have made much more sense to update road 55 Norrköping-Katrineholm-Strängnäs-Enköping-Uppsala to a high capacity highway that they also change paths at some places like a relatively cheap updated road that avoids going into Flen. Because even when this extremely expensive project is completed the video is talking about, it will not stop a lot of traffic that has no business driving close to Stockholm to still congest parts close to Stockholm. A lot of the congestion is on the E4 itself for instance between Nyköping and Stockholm (especially Södertälje-Stockholm that is both E4 and E20 combined). This problem will not be fixed at all by this project as this bypass simply isn't far enough from the city. There is a trend in Sweden of politicians and decision makers having a far to strong "Stockholm perspective" on things and this project seems to be yet another example of that. Them seem completely negligent of the fact that a huge part of the traffic on the E4 close to Stockholm actually have no interest in visiting Stockholm at all, but are just interested in getting from one side of Mälaren to the other in an efficient way... Updating road 55 would have made so much more sense and be a much better investment per krona spent. "Förbifart Stockholm" (the project discussed in this video) will be very expensive and only solve a small part of the actual problem.
It really wouldn't have been. Road 55 is 10 times longer and goes through the middle of several small towns that would have to be partially or completely demolished to make way for the upgraded road. It would not be significantly cheaper nor would it provide much more benefit than Förbifart Stockholm.
I wonder if, in the spirit of encouraging inner city mass transit, the Essingeleden could be narrowed in the future. That's a lot of land that could be repurposed to building, other forms of transport etc. I don't know what you could do with the bridges.
Pretty incredible that we haven't advanced to this before now, we had subways so early it's surprising that we didn't level up and just create all of our highways underground considering the vast space and structure we can provide with modern engineering.
7:47 What, no mention of a second use for the tunnels? There must be. Sweden's famous for it: nuclear shelters, emergency rain storage tanks, public sports halls and swimming pools. Guess we'll have to wait to find out.
Can someone send the design engineers and construction company to Melbourne, Australia? We are getting a 6km tunnel that is projected to cost at least €16 billion! 🤦♂️
@@magnushem8734don’t know but it wouldn’t be a factor in the cost, on projects like this in Melbourne it’s all unions and money changing from one department to the next. a worker holding up a stop sign earns over $200k a year. Would Sweden pay similarly?
@@petronic1234 Labor unions are very strong here in Sweden, but I guess the salary+tax per employee is half of that. Ground conditions are critical. My sister is a geotechnical engineer. Most of Stockholm has excellent granite rock, except for a few regions with lots of cracks. Göteborg was built on mud along the river, and they are constructing a tunnel get very expensive and the city has been partly demolished. The most infamous tunnel in Sweden is Hallandsåsen, which is a mountain of gravel on the west coast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel
1:35 - I'm confused, how does an increase of 43% end up at 3.5 million? 43% of (almost) 1 million would be 430,000? Which would end up at around 1,430,000? Am I missing something?
What do you mean by "strained"? If you commute by car, you will experience congestion on every major road leading in to the city in the mornings, and out in the afternoon. If you look up a route on Google Maps, most of the inner city is marked with red, =way more traffic than usual, for most of the time during rush hours. Essingeleden, the current bypass, is severely congested during rush hours. A drive through the city that takes fifteen minutes on a sunday morning will take one and a half hour on a weekday afternoon.
Can you talk about the Super collider ? They invested billions into it back 20 years ago I believe but they stopped. A video from a professor like you would be awesome
The Stockholm by-pass is 30 years late. Most cities of that size have two or three "ring highways", Stockholm has a 3/4 of a ring highway, so not even 1 full ring which means there will be traffic issues no matter how much public transportation is built. Stockholm already ranks in the top 5 of all the world's cities when it comes to public tranaportation, so the issue isn't that there needs to be more public transportation to solve the congestion. Stockholm is right now building or planning for 18 new metro stations, they will cost twice as much as the by-pass but the new metro stations won't still be able to solve the traffic congestion in Stockholm. So to sum it up; the public transportation system in Stockholm is one of the best in the world and its urban highways are among the worst in the world, comparatively.
>so not even 1 full ring which means there will be traffic issues no matter how much public transportation is built This is such a dogmatic view of traffic and capacity, I wouldn't even know where to start with this comment honestly
@@ludvigholst4767 You don't seem to have any argument, that's why you don't know where to start. Ring roads are a very efficient way to divert the traffic from the city centre and it's custom to build ring roads at various distances from the center to ease congestion in bigger cities.
@@ludvigholst4767 The E4, widely considered the backbone of Swedish road infrastructure currently funnel traffic straight through Stockholm. If you type in directions from Kiruna (northernmost town in Sweden) to Malmö (3rd largest city in Sweden right next to Copenhagen) it will direct you through Stockholm.
@@ludvigholst4767 I don't know, I would also think that routing it either east or west of Södertälje, over Ekerö Municipality, Southeast of Bålsta and joining back with the E4 South of Uppsala would be better but I'm not an expert. The city I live, Umeå doesn't really make sense in how they plan their roads either so maybe it's a Sweden problem.
@@konskift TBMs can be used for solid rock. A TBM is currently being used to borr a tunnel under stockholm. Its called AST or Anneberg-Skanstull-Tunnel and its for power lines from the north to the south of Stockholm.
80% from E4 congestion tolls, 20% from "the state". So in other words, 100% financed from tax payers in one way or the other. The tunnel itself "won't have any tolls", but they also promised that the 4,2% (now 25%) VAT tax introduced in 1960 was temporary so yeah. Of course the tunnel will have tolls eventually, it's just a matter of time.
That's only one part of the new underground freeway network, like the last 1/3 of it. Even our new central train terminal is deep underground and it's HUGE!
Agree, but remember, we're only talking about at most 3 lanes in each direction. And given the amount of on-ramps and Y-junctions and lane shifts, effectively those 3 lanes are more like 2 lanes due to all the bobbing and weaving you have to do. If you're traveling on the E4 through Stockholm expecting to just cruise steadily in one lane, you're gonna be disappointed. You can only pull that off in the very early mornings when there's less traffic.
Interesting that they went with drill & blast instead of a TBM. Googling, it's seems TBMs are better suited for tunneling through stable rock, so I guess Stockholm is lacking that..?
Since there is no tradition of building TBM tunnels in Sweden’s hard rock, the cost of planning and design is higher compared to alternative methods like “drill and blast.” Also a road with multiple traffic intersections is not favorable for TBM. Sure TBMs are better suited for tunneling through stable rock, but many times Stockholm’s geological conditions does not favor this method.
@@brigadgeneralvoid2508 Rock is not to hard. A TBM is currently being used to borr a tunnel under Stockholm. Its called AST or Anneberg-Skanstull-Tunnel. The main issue with a TBM for the bypass is that the bypass is very big and its more wide and less tall. You would en up excavating a bunch or rock that you dont need to do.
Such a disgrace. The tunnel won't solve anything, just make things worse. There's very little traffic going through the whole of Stockholm, more than 90% of the traffic on the E4 has its starting point or destination within the city. People who commute between the north and south of the city use public transport. Instead of wasting all this money on a useless road, use it to lower fares instead!
Says someone who of course did _not_ spent years measuring traffic patterns in and around Stockholm and then suggested a massively expensive building project to solve the situation.
Yep, that's another nightmare that has to be solved. Any pressure being relieved by the Förbifart tunnel will show up as additional pressure on Södertäljebron. And again it's gonna have to be solved by a tunnel. Tunnel is probably cheaper too. There's no room to operate above ground, because you've got critical railroads 20 meters to the east and the Scania complex 30 meters to the west. The canal is only 8 meters deep so no need to go as deep as the Förbifart. My bet is the north tunnel entrance will be at Moraberg, and the south entrance at Pershagen. Lots of room to operate there.
this is still a big and impressive project, but we've seen a lot of those here on this channel. the switch to right side traffic mentioned in the intro sounds a lot more interesting, though. why they did it is pretty clear, but it would be nice to know how they did that without causing tons of traffic accidents.
Sweden switching to right-hand driving didn't cause many accidents at all (except one case of drunk-driving on the left-hand side the day of the switch). Overall, the switch also reduced accidents, because 90% of the cars in Sweden already had their steering wheel on the left, so when Sweden switched, we got left-hand steering in right-hand traffic. Left-hand steering in left-hand traffic is as dangerous as right-hand steering in right-hand traffic because your field of view is being both offset and reduced.
here is an idea for reducing carbon emmisions in the air with tunnels,since tunnels need intakes andd exhausts for air on the underground,you put carbon capture machines right at the air filtering system.That way all the emmisions from cars on the tunnel get trapped and stored in underground rocks before ever coming on the surface,that way you get the best of both worlds,less trafic in the city ,more space for construction and parks,as well as better air quality
It looks like it will be a fantastic project once completed. We need a new highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast as the current highway is almost at capacity and is around 25 years old. Increased traffic and commuting between the 2 cities over the years has seen a lack of infrastructure investment for this busy corridor from both our state and federal governments. Hopefully we see some progress in the near future rather than just talk from our politicians.
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no lol
Reality roll by design...haha
The problem isn't congestion in Stockholm per-se among its inhabitants; introducing more public transport would help with that. The problem is that Stockholm, as is mentioned, is built on a number of islands, between the Mälaren lake and the Baltic Sea, the former of which serves as ~150 km wide barrier. As a result, Stockholm serves as the only land bridge along the east coast.
In addition to the inhabitants of Stockholm, there is a lot of traffic that needs to go from other parts of Sweden north and south of Stockholm. Because there are massive waterways they need to pass through the city, and there are currently essentially only two proper highways. One goes through the very center of the city - past the historical old town - and the other, Essingeleden, passes slightly to the west of it. (There are two smaller bridges but those are really just intended for city busses, vans, few passenger cars, bicyclists, etc - not long-haul trucks carrying containers)
We've had incidents in the past where a long-haul truck crashed and blocked several lanes of traffic on the Essingeleden and it was catastrophic for not just the city's inhabitants but all other logistics passing through the city.
The Stockholm bypass is meant to offer one additional route bypassing the center completely. While some Stockholmers might use it to cut their driving commute travels, and it will off-load the highways in the center, in practice the really big beneficiaries will be long-haul truck drivers.
If you get fewer people in Stockholm on the existing roads with public transit that would open up more road capacity for long distance transport. Or, if you really need to bypass the city entirely (say, when transporting hazardous goods or something) then rail is better for long distance cargo and build a rail tunnel.
I think this is something a lot of commenters are missing, too many people have this knee-jerk anti-car response whenever there is any new road construction. It's same idea for the road tunnel in Antwerp, route lorries around the city (in that case to get to the docks). Even if it doesn't help with congestion that much, fewer lorries in urban areas that don't need to be there is always a good thing for both air quality and safety.
@@fernbedek6302 Sweden is fairly sparsely populated outside of a few major cities, the rail network isn't extensive enough and mills and factories are too spread out to make a large amount of rail freight economic.
@@Croz89 I'm Canadian. We're even more sparsely populated. We're still able to make rail the main way we move freight. If anything, low densities are good for freight rail because there's less stopping and starting and more benefit from saving on driver-hours over the long distances you're having to transport things.
@@fernbedek6302 Canada has the US freight rail network to connect to, plus it has ports on both coasts and a lot of low value bulk goods to move. Sweden's railway doesn't really connect much to much outside Sweden, only Copenhagen via the Oresund and a couple of connections to Norway (Finland is a break of gauge). Sweden's rail network isn't much less extensive really, it's just more passenger focused.
Unless you're dealing with containers off ships, higher value lower volume goods are generally going to be moved by road, it just doesn't make sense to build a railway spur to every factory, mill or refinery, or even a loading station in the local area.
Damn, I didnt expect to see this here. I spent 5 years working on this project on one of the sections. We had about 4 kilometers of main tunnels + all small connection tunnels and ramps, which added up to about 20 kilometers of tunnel. It was very interesting work.
I worked on it in 2020 for 6 months. Quite interesting, but things were still moving slowly Honestly I have some doubts it's gonna be finished by 2030, but let's see.
"More lanes have been added but it's not enough" yeah bro just one more lane bro we'll fix it bro one more lane
Volvo has bought most swedish politicians
They changed from 2 lanes to 3
Not some crazy texas thing were they ha e like 8
@@fdssd1736volvo is owned by china and no they have not
Yep, all I could think about was induced demand.
You get to a safe and functional number of lanes then you stop.
Usually this is 2-3
FYI this is not only about congestion. The focus is to mainly shift away throughrunning traffic from the city center and also to reduce vulnerability of the road system in Stockholm.
Exactly and what is why this is such a bad solution. This ring will both be extremely expensive but not actually solve the problem as the ring is simply to close to Stockholm. There is typically often congestion all the way from Södertälje in south on the E4 and also congestion north of Sollentuna. This ring road will not fix that at all. It amazes me that the politician doesn't realize that a huge part of the problem is through-traffic that have no destination or departure anywhere close to Stockholm. Significantly updating road 55 had made so much more sense and be a more economically sound investment.
@@dataandcoloursFast är det verkligen så mycket trafik redan från Södertälje? Det brukar börja i höjd med Botkyrka (såvida inte något trafikhinder uppstår) om man ska norr ut, så på så vis är den ju rätt så bra planerad
@@Idkwhothisiss8 Nja om man hade haft en avstickare på förbifarten som avlastar bron över södertäljekanalen hade det vart toppen. Den är också en huvudled över en vattenbarriär som faktiskt ställer till med många, många problem.
The IKEA highway, connecting the two stores north and south of the city.
Damn, I'm suddenly craving meatballs.
I bet that was taken in consideration when they started this.
Everyone knows what you really need for Ikea is a highway through the shop itself so you can go straight to the thing you need to see and not all the way around it. :D
Funny thing is that the bypass startpoint is next to the biggest IKEA in the world
@@lars-akechesburg9911 It's no longer the biggest one, maybe it was when you heard that fact but things change...
Who the hell provided that b-roll at 6:15 ?!? 💀
"Fill up your car like someone that has never pumped gas before"
@@daricora must be someone from new jersey
Gas is nowadays so cheap in Sweden so we can afford this ;)
I don't even need to check, I know exactly what happens then
Derek Zoolander!
2:44 Fred: This enormous project isn't built in a day
Me: *he's going to talk about the sponsor*
6:14 Someone teach that guy how to use a petrol pump!!!
The petrol pumps are green in the Philippines as well. Practically shit in my pants every time I fill up my motorbike!
And I don't try to spill half of my weekly 4 liters all over the pavement, either!
Yes, he should be imprisoned for our safety. Sheesh.
Bro spilled like 5€ worth of gas for no reason lmao
He dunno he a Swedish #borg #borg #borg
It would be cool for you to look back at some of your older episodes and check back on the status of those construction projects today!
All the stock footage was actually of Stockholm, the description of the project as well as the history of traffic in Stockholm was accurate. Impressive!
That's true, even the stock footage at 6:14 is from Sweden, I know because I'm the guy in the video.
@@GackFinder Lär dig tanka för i helvete
Yeah that's impressive, I like his attention to detail, though that does come with the territory of this channel's given subject matter
I admire your self restraint with not including even a single “Förbifart” joke.
Passing by my hometown.. We been waiting long rime for this tunnel..
To everyone who are against this project saying this is "just another lane". You are wrong. This isnt Houston where they increase to infinite lanes. This project is to divert the traffic from the city center. There is no reason for a highway to cut right through city centers like in stupid american cities. European cities have less traffic because our highways tend to be build around our cities, not straight through. This is exactly what this project is about.
You know that almost every major American city has an interstate ring road to by pass it, right?
@@UnbeltedSundew I checked the map and yeah you are right. However, there are also often hundreds of meters wide roads in the middle of the cities aswell. For example, Road 70 runs right through Columbus and Indianapolis, Kansas City, city centers.
@@isaks7042 Like the E4 that goes straight through Stockholm, is Stockholm an American city?
@@MrGunnar69 The E4 was built in the 60s, inspired by the US model. That's exactly what the city is now trying to rectify. Everyone agrees that it was a stupid idea, but they thought otherwise back then.
Stupid American cities huh? A little jelly of the good ole USA are we now? Just come on over, i swear you'll like it here, just don't say Stupid American anything around the people here or you'll end up gettin swatted by whoever hears ya 🤣😂
Seeing a lot of weird takes from people who presumably do not understand the situation. A bypass is needed. The E4 is one of if not the most trafficked highway in Sweden, running along the entire country and going through Stockholm. There are countless journeys being taken going north or south and they all have to pass THROUGH the capital on the current E4. A bypass can divert all those cars and semi-trucks so that the traffic that you see in the city is basically only city traffic, no one just passing through. If you're going from Sundsvall to Jönköping, why would you need to drive through the capital and add to the traffic there?. It's like if every journey going along the east coast of the United States HAD to go through Washington D.C
@tobias_dahlberg Exactly. It would have made so much more sense to simply spend all this insane amount of money on updating road 55 Norrköping-Katrineholm-Strängnäs-Enköping-Uppsala. It's such a no brainer for people NOT living in or close to Stockholm. The insane amount traffic that is forced do drive through or close to Stockholm unnecessary seems to have been completely forgotten.
And it's not like this rather short ring road will fix that. A lot of the congestion starts close to Nyköping even in the south-east and there are often congestion significantly further north than Sollentuna. This project will not fix that at all, but probably even increase it even more as fewer will consider road 55 when this project is completed as now at least they will not drive more or less into Stockholm.
@@dataandcolours I think it might be step 2, step 3 Motala, Örebro, Gävle, no one cares about west of Vettern.😆
buckle up everyone. B1M is here
The tunnel goes from where I live to where my grandmother lives. She's 85. It won't be completed before we both pass away from old age. I'm 34.
I do love me generational infrastructure projects, however I’m not sure why this is for vehicles only and not trains.
cut down on your smoking. At least you'll be healthy, even if the tunnel isn't done.
@@jake9764 probably too sharp elevation changes. Trains need to have very gradual elevation changes to operate (except for like Swiss alpine trains). Therefor trains would probably need their own separate project.
@@jake9764 They should be doing both, really, but more emphasis on the latter. Trains also take up less space and offer much more capacity, most of it could be built on the surface too.
I have been waiting a long time for this video! As it's such a big project i Thought it would pop up here sooner or later. And i'm not disappointed by it either!
Would be cool if you made a video about the extension of the subway system in stockholm as well as they are building the deepest subway station in the world as well as having had some big chalanges of a very different kind to what you normaly hear about!
Besides this project they are also building out the metro network a lot. What I still don’t understand is with so much tunneling being done that the whole klarastrandsleden to centralbron is not being tunneled. Mind boggling how a major road like that can just pass through the middle of the city.
hopefully it will be closed to private motor traffic instead
Mind boggling not just passing right through the city centre, but doing it on some of the most phenomenal plots of land available.
@@magnushultgrenhtc*United States intensifies*
@@counterfit5 like/dislike
Damn, imagine having a Walmart supercenter there! But at least we got a highway❤
There was a Reddit thread on Swedish Reddit a while back asking people from Stockholm who drive why they don't use public transportation, and they all basically said the same thing: Taking public transportation takes too long, in part because you often need to switch between different trains and busses several times to get to and from work, and every switch can have you waiting at a bus stop/train station for up to 20 minutes. Many said that a 20 minute drive can take an hour on public transportation.
Stockholm has a very high use of public transit, like twice as many trips are done by public transit than by driving each day. And Stockholm is in the middle of expanding its metro system building 11 new stations.
sounds like they need to remain sesual wit it
It's even worse if you live outside a large city like Stockholm and aren't going into the city center. Businesses are all over the Stockholm area and it's difficult for there to be enough routes to cover everywhere that people need to go. If you're going to Stockholm to do something on the weekend like a concert or sporting event, it can work really well to take public transportation. For daily commutes to work, it doesn't unless you specific get a new apartment along public transportation routes every time you change jobs. It's not that there aren't people who use public transportation, but it's not practical for some Swedes to use public transportation for their daily commutes.
Trains aren't that far apart unless you're traveling near midnight.
Also the best mode for transport in Stockholm around that time is by those rentable scooters. There are no cars on the street and the city is small.
'Public transport takes too long'. They always say that. New roads or lanes always produces induced demand, never solves the problem. I voluntarily stopped driving motor vehicles in 1981 (in the UK and then the Netherlands) and have saved a fortune. Forget about parking problems. I walk to the supermarket, pull the shopping home using a shopping trolley. Some days I take a bus to the bar and a late bus back home. It only takes a little organisation.
I like that at 0:45, when he says "officials are looking for another solution", the trains are right in sight. The video just derailed a bit after that.
I get what you are saying, but the purpose of this tunnel is to lead traffic away that would have otherwise passed through the city. Through Stockholm passes one of the main highways in Sweden, and this tunnel would provide an alternative for people passing through
@@PrayerOrb4 Would of been nice to get a rail line from Skärholmen to Northern stockholm. Would cut down on transit going through stockholm.
You sir are absolutely braindead
@@PrayerOrb4Sure, it will divert some of the traffic, but isn’t the current highway just gonna fill up the freed capacity right away?
@@WaffleAbuser Long term plan is to remove that inner city highway.
So, when are you gonna cover the rail tunnel project Västlänken in Gothenburg? It would be a really good case study on contruction project controversy.
I also want to watch that. Love from Norway
A worthless project driven by clueless politicians. Gravy train for consultants and contractors, just like the British HS2.
Something on the upgrades on the west coast main line would be interesting too. Last time I was visiting a friend I saw the massive box they were building for the new station at Varberg and tunnel that would mean it no longer had to go through the middle of town with the level crossing.
We have a tunnel going through Hallandsåsen that cost around 11,9BN to build
That's in kronor not dollars
There is another bypass route as well, much longer but also cheaper and has local benefits along the way.
Road 50 from Mjölby to Motala has been upgrade a lot in recent year, allowing a connection from E4 to E20/E18 to Enköping.
From there Road 50 again from Enköping to Uppsala and we have a serious contender for bypassing the Stockholm choke point. It does bypass Sörmland and most of östergötland as well, so it is not for all traffic, but it should help solve some of the problems.
4 Billion dollars for the worlds most expensive "another lane" expansion, lol. Ridiculous.
And if you ask people who study traffic patterns, the bypass will barely have any effect, since there is almost no through traffic; nearly all vehicles are going to or from Stockholm itself.
Meanwhile, the Citybana, which *doubled* rail capacity in the city, got less than half the budget of the bypass...
Honestly it seems more like a way to help the values so highway system.
Precisely. One government agency concluded that about 204 cars per day would see clear benefits from the project. Since this was a prestige project from powerful politicians, the agency was made redundant soon after.
Stockholm clearly needs a bypass highway, but since they tried to placate every single citizen with a complaint, the highway was pushed farther and farther out (making it less and less useful) and more and more sections were put under ground (ballooning the cost). For the same cost, they could have built a four lane highway from Stockholm to the Finish border.
Hopefully this will reduce public transit ridership and help convert sweden to a more US-highway centric transportation and urban development model. There are millions of acres in sweden that could support tract housing and big box retail development.
@@zilfondellol good one. Made me chuckle. But seriously there’s no way we will go for the US model, that be horrible.
Käft sosse
I worked on this scheme over 10 years ago as a strutural engineer through GGJV (Grontmij / Golders) and it was fun... one thing about the Swedes that i remember was regular meetings to plan the next series of meetings, all within a multi-disciplinary design envirnment... lol
I heard that a few of those who plan the meetings actually like them!
Sounds like classic bureaucracy. Governments love such things. You'll have a meeting to discuss a time for another meeting to decide on when next to have a meeting about moving on to the next phase, then a meeting to discuss the options for the next phase then a meeting to discuss which phase was chosen, to then meet to discuss how to proceed. A lot of fruitful work of course, involving all stakeholders at every turn so everyone is in the loop.
Have you done videos on Slussen or the new Tunnelbanestations? Would be fun to see
The title update is so on-point!
As a Swede living in stockholm myself i think this project is really stupid. This road(questionable if even needed) could have been built above ground for a third of its price.
"More lanes have been added but it's not enough" Hmm it's almost like that's not how that works
It’s fairly simple. You can absolutely build wide enough anywhere to tackle congestion. Demand is not infinite. The problem is how destructive and expensive it would be. Much smarter to build dense public transit in the middle of the city. But building outside the city where demand is lower but still justified, particularly for long haulers, is an impressive move on Sweden’s part. It’ll be up to them how land use nearby is managed to avoid significant sprawl.
adding lanes on the essingeleden would just be dumb, its much smarter to finnish the ringroad and the bypass
Using slogans without studying the specific case? That's dumb.
I remember passing the entrance in hägggvik plenty of times as a kid. I forgot about it completely.
To be fair the 4B budget doesn't bother me at all - here in Lund it took 1B just to build a street car line stretching a few kilometers. 4B for a massive tunnel network? These guys are alot better at their job.
Different currencies. The ~1B SEK should be compared to ~40B SEK and counting.
As someone who live very, very near to Häggvik, and have family at Ekerö, this bypass will save me atleast an hour of driving once it's done
Been down in that tunnel a few times over the past years while they been working on it an it always amazes me how deep it is
It's probably time to check out the infrastructure projects in gothenburg! That video about gothenburg a while back didn't really cover them
Was Amzing to hear about the BM1 on the radio 5! Construction in the future will be 4D printed and A.I. will build our city's in mega factories and then transport them to the sites!
Build more roads to feed the cars to build more roads to feed the cars... doesn't solve traffic congestion it increases it...
They can convert them to subway tunnels later on. 😉
This project is to shift away throughrunning traffic from the city center and also to reduce vulnerability of the road system in Stockholm.
So the long haul truckers and people driving from all over northern Sweden to southern Sweden and down to the continent (and vice-versa) without stopping in Stockholm should just take the train instead?
The bypass is built to lead non-Stockholm bound traffic around the city and make a alternative route possible, especially when the Essingeleden highway (that essentially is the ONLY highway connecting north and South through a tight choke point ) is extremely vulnerable if accidents happen and usually have insane queues. I don’t like car centric cities, but in order to keep the city center clean and walkable - ring roads are nessicary to lead traffic around the city, which most cities in Europe that are more walkable than Stockholm have.
@@Fluxwux Glad you could explain it better than me.
but this is more about diversion than increasing capacity. Could eventually free up some of the existing highway for other transit.
This is what Toronto needs for the gardeniar; an express bypass while there is still room for the option
I hate that thing so much.
A lot of people are saying that Stockholm doesn’t have enough public transport, but the problem is that the highway network aren’t designed as thruways, but as a commuter option.
I live in Stockholm and I can tell you that this new bypass is sorely needed. Currently the E4 which is a major highway which runs north-south through the entire country, goes right through the city center. A major highway running through a city center is just absurd.
Except it doesn't run through the city centre
@@usefulcommunication4516 thats just semantics, you can see the almost entire city hall from the highway
@@einar8019 If you honestly think the route that the E4 (actually E20) takes around Stockholm constitutes the centre, then I'm guessing you must work for Ryanair and are the person who called Skavsta airfield, 'Stockholm Airport'
@@usefulcommunication4516 The E4 literally goes through Kungsholmen or norrmalm depending on which road you take. It definitely goes through the city centre.
@@ErikTheAndroid You're talking about Centralbron. If you travelling on "the E4 which is a major highway which runs north-south through the entire country" you wouldn't go anywhere near that. Unless you're a mental case and want to take a major diversion/scenic route.
Eastern part of sweden lacks a bypass as well. Extra lanes need to use as busway lane and rail lines.
Side note, when Sweden had left-hand traffic, we still had left-hand driven cars. Which made for exiting overtaking.
My big pet peeve with this project is that they made the Lovö island exit so complex and in such a silly location, traffic channeling to smack dab middle of a nature reserve. What they should've done is swing the tunnel curves around a bit and build a junction before (underneath Kungshatt, for traffic towards Ekerö) and a junction after (around Nockeby).
Actually around 30 000 islands in Stockholm :)
"Just one more lane...!"
Just 43% more people.
London has the M25
Berlin has the A10
Paris has the Périph
Copenhagen has the O4
Stockholm got nothing.
Skärholmen - Häggvik is a 25min (28.8km) drive through Stockholm.
Avoiding Stockholm turns it into 1 hour 54 minutes trip (165 km). A ringway or bypass has been a wet dream for any driver north or south of stockholm for decades.
I have pondered many times how beneficial it would be to have underground highways in landscapes with extreme winters.
Coming from Sweden and driving through Norway to Bergen, we passed through 60 tunnels, the longest being 45 Kilometers. Granted, Norway dig tunnels to avoid driving around/over mountains, but the result is the same with tunnels being safer than icy roads ... and Norway still has lots of those.
Dear Fred, Stockholm's underground construction is booming, it's going to expand for 20% for the upcoming years, can you please cover that topic as well? Love everything you do, can't wait for another video
YESSSS DO THE BIG DIG!!! DO THE BIG DIG A SECOND TIME!!! IT WORKED OUT SOOOO WELL FOR BOSTON!!!
The BM1 is starting by asking if it is a pointless project.
Then ending by welcoming it!?
7:29 Yeah the traffic is always like that, I know because I live close to that part your showing
Driving in Stockholm is one of the worst experiences in my life. I live in Örebro, about 2 hours away, and had to go to the embassy. The parking is expensive, every street has a million rules, and the traffic was just ridiculous.
That's why people in this city generally don't drive. Contrary to what the video said, most people does not take the car. In the city center, metro ridership is almost 3 times higher than car ridership and car ownership has been declining for years.
@@victorcapel2755 Yea this video is pretty bad, it makes Stockholm seem like Houston.
man ska inte köra i innerstaden
Sounds horrible! Have you considered taking the Mälartåg? I haven't personally taken it on this leg (only the Nyköping route), seems to be slightly faster than driving without traffic on the website (and costs slightly less than just the fuel)
@@Tom_Johnsen
All of Stockholm inner city, as well as the E4 through the city, are tolled.
A huge part of the traffic is traffic that is just going through Stockholm due to lack of any good alternative for longer transportation! It's not just caused by traffic that has somewhere close to Stockholm as destination. E4 is by far the most important road in Sweden and what is needed is a very, very wide ring road alternative that completely avoids having passing traffic getting anywhere near Stockholm. This rather intermediate ring will not really fix that much of the problem.
It can absolutely been argued that it would have made much more sense to update road 55 Norrköping-Katrineholm-Strängnäs-Enköping-Uppsala to a high capacity highway that they also change paths at some places like a relatively cheap updated road that avoids going into Flen. Because even when this extremely expensive project is completed the video is talking about, it will not stop a lot of traffic that has no business driving close to Stockholm to still congest parts close to Stockholm. A lot of the congestion is on the E4 itself for instance between Nyköping and Stockholm (especially Södertälje-Stockholm that is both E4 and E20 combined). This problem will not be fixed at all by this project as this bypass simply isn't far enough from the city.
There is a trend in Sweden of politicians and decision makers having a far to strong "Stockholm perspective" on things and this project seems to be yet another example of that. Them seem completely negligent of the fact that a huge part of the traffic on the E4 close to Stockholm actually have no interest in visiting Stockholm at all, but are just interested in getting from one side of Mälaren to the other in an efficient way...
Updating road 55 would have made so much more sense and be a much better investment per krona spent. "Förbifart Stockholm" (the project discussed in this video) will be very expensive and only solve a small part of the actual problem.
It really wouldn't have been. Road 55 is 10 times longer and goes through the middle of several small towns that would have to be partially or completely demolished to make way for the upgraded road.
It would not be significantly cheaper nor would it provide much more benefit than Förbifart Stockholm.
I wonder if, in the spirit of encouraging inner city mass transit, the Essingeleden could be narrowed in the future. That's a lot of land that could be repurposed to building, other forms of transport etc. I don't know what you could do with the bridges.
I think there is a long term plan to phase it out and turn it into a Highline Park situation.
The *Boston Big Dig* of SWEDEN 🇸🇪.
The Big Wet Dig
Let’s just hope it doesn’t suck funding away from metro rail like it did in Boston…
@@kaitlyn__L it already has, i'm afraid :_)
That should be the one who signed the contract approved the contracts with his team members telling everyone if the project is pointless or not.
Stunning shot 🏆 🏆 🏆
Pretty incredible that we haven't advanced to this before now, we had subways so early it's surprising that we didn't level up and just create all of our highways underground considering the vast space and structure we can provide with modern engineering.
It's not
I live right next to this, I used to hear the regular explosion signals.
I wonder why they're not using those new boring machines
we make boom we use boom
@@CastorRabbit Rock is too hard and there's a lot of water
"cold winters" You should see our "summers"... :D
Good video, maybe revisit this project again in the future if possible
7:47 What, no mention of a second use for the tunnels?
There must be. Sweden's famous for it: nuclear shelters, emergency rain storage tanks, public sports halls and swimming pools.
Guess we'll have to wait to find out.
Can someone send the design engineers and construction company to Melbourne, Australia?
We are getting a 6km tunnel that is projected to cost at least €16 billion! 🤦♂️
Does Melbourne have the same geological conditions, i.e. hard rock like granite?
@@magnushem8734don’t know but it wouldn’t be a factor in the cost, on projects like this in Melbourne it’s all unions and money changing from one department to the next. a worker holding up a stop sign earns over $200k a year. Would Sweden pay similarly?
@@petronic1234 Labor unions are very strong here in Sweden, but I guess the salary+tax per employee is half of that.
Ground conditions are critical. My sister is a geotechnical engineer.
Most of Stockholm has excellent granite rock, except for a few regions with lots of cracks.
Göteborg was built on mud along the river, and they are constructing a tunnel get very expensive and the city has been partly demolished.
The most infamous tunnel in Sweden is Hallandsåsen, which is a mountain of gravel on the west coast. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallands%C3%A5s_Tunnel
Nice film! I have also worked on the project! Buildning electrical infrastructure, several years ago!
1:35 - I'm confused, how does an increase of 43% end up at 3.5 million?
43% of (almost) 1 million would be 430,000? Which would end up at around 1,430,000?
Am I missing something?
The region currently has a population of 2.45 million. 2.45 x 1.43 = 3.5
Hey man, love the videos, please do more videos of projects that you think are bad. would love to have your negative take on some projects
Very enjoyable as always 👍
Are you guys going to do a video on the Rogfast tunnel, would be interesting to see the logistics of digging sutch a deep tunnel
God damn, it's pleasure to observe such a mega project
I live in stockholm, Ive never seen strained traffic in the city centre.
What do you mean by "strained"?
If you commute by car, you will experience congestion on every major road leading in to the city in the mornings, and out in the afternoon.
If you look up a route on Google Maps, most of the inner city is marked with red, =way more traffic than usual, for most of the time during rush hours.
Essingeleden, the current bypass, is severely congested during rush hours.
A drive through the city that takes fifteen minutes on a sunday morning will take one and a half hour on a weekday afternoon.
You should take a look at Västlänken while you are doing some digging, the huge tunnel building in Gothenburg.
Speaking of Sweden, when will you be covering Västlänken and Karlatornet?
Our 'Miljö partiet' (The green party) wanted this to be one lane tunnel to restrict traffic 🤦🏾♂️
I can’t help think of Boston’s Big Dig. Not the same scale, but on the American side, their biggest.
Can you talk about the Super collider ? They invested billions into it back 20 years ago I believe but they stopped. A video from a professor like you would be awesome
The Stockholm by-pass is 30 years late. Most cities of that size have two or three "ring highways", Stockholm has a 3/4 of a ring highway, so not even 1 full ring which means there will be traffic issues no matter how much public transportation is built. Stockholm already ranks in the top 5 of all the world's cities when it comes to public tranaportation, so the issue isn't that there needs to be more public transportation to solve the congestion. Stockholm is right now building or planning for 18 new metro stations, they will cost twice as much as the by-pass but the new metro stations won't still be able to solve the traffic congestion in Stockholm.
So to sum it up; the public transportation system in Stockholm is one of the best in the world and its urban highways are among the worst in the world, comparatively.
>so not even 1 full ring which means there will be traffic issues no matter how much public transportation is built
This is such a dogmatic view of traffic and capacity, I wouldn't even know where to start with this comment honestly
@@ludvigholst4767 You don't seem to have any argument, that's why you don't know where to start. Ring roads are a very efficient way to divert the traffic from the city centre and it's custom to build ring roads at various distances from the center to ease congestion in bigger cities.
@@ludvigholst4767 The E4, widely considered the backbone of Swedish road infrastructure currently funnel traffic straight through Stockholm. If you type in directions from Kiruna (northernmost town in Sweden) to Malmö (3rd largest city in Sweden right next to Copenhagen) it will direct you through Stockholm.
@@roevhaal578 So why build the bypass in Stockholm and not further out west where it would be cheaper, faster, and more beneficial regionally?
@@ludvigholst4767 I don't know, I would also think that routing it either east or west of Södertälje, over Ekerö Municipality, Southeast of Bålsta and joining back with the E4 South of Uppsala would be better but I'm not an expert.
The city I live, Umeå doesn't really make sense in how they plan their roads either so maybe it's a Sweden problem.
I wonder why they decided to use traditional blasting rather than a TBM? Was it just the need to pre grout the route to seal out water?
It's solid rock-shield. TBM is for clay/soil/mud/loose rock.
@@konskift TBMs can be used for solid rock. A TBM is currently being used to borr a tunnel under stockholm. Its called AST or Anneberg-Skanstull-Tunnel and its for power lines from the north to the south of Stockholm.
And everything is financed without the use of toll roads. We really have something to learn in Norway!
Except 80% of the project will be financed from tolls on other roads
@@Gfynbcyiokbg8710 Do you mean the money from the city toll roads around Stockholm and Gothenburg?
@@TheJensss only Stockholm
@@Gfynbcyiokbg8710 Okay, but compaird to Norway that is the same as not having toll roads at all.
80% from E4 congestion tolls, 20% from "the state". So in other words, 100% financed from tax payers in one way or the other. The tunnel itself "won't have any tolls", but they also promised that the 4,2% (now 25%) VAT tax introduced in 1960 was temporary so yeah. Of course the tunnel will have tolls eventually, it's just a matter of time.
Rio de Janeiro has been building its "metropolitan arc" (beltway) for 14 years, so this construction work seems fast to me.
That's only one part of the new underground freeway network, like the last 1/3 of it. Even our new central train terminal is deep underground and it's HUGE!
This will also connect with a similarly scaled south side bypass (Tvärförbindelse Södertörn), spaghetti junction go brrrr!
Building a bypass or ring road should be combined with reducing the road through the city
Agree, but remember, we're only talking about at most 3 lanes in each direction. And given the amount of on-ramps and Y-junctions and lane shifts, effectively those 3 lanes are more like 2 lanes due to all the bobbing and weaving you have to do. If you're traveling on the E4 through Stockholm expecting to just cruise steadily in one lane, you're gonna be disappointed. You can only pull that off in the very early mornings when there's less traffic.
That's exactly what's planned
there is already 3/4ths of a ringroad but it never to finished
Interesting that they went with drill & blast instead of a TBM. Googling, it's seems TBMs are better suited for tunneling through stable rock, so I guess Stockholm is lacking that..?
Since there is no tradition of building TBM tunnels in Sweden’s hard rock, the cost of planning and design is higher compared to alternative methods like “drill and blast.” Also a road with multiple traffic intersections is not favorable for TBM. Sure TBMs are better suited for tunneling through stable rock, but many times Stockholm’s geological conditions does not favor this method.
Rock is too hard, there's a lot of water, and we already use drill and blast extensively
@@brigadgeneralvoid2508 Rock is not to hard. A TBM is currently being used to borr a tunnel under Stockholm. Its called AST or Anneberg-Skanstull-Tunnel. The main issue with a TBM for the bypass is that the bypass is very big and its more wide and less tall. You would en up excavating a bunch or rock that you dont need to do.
Such a disgrace. The tunnel won't solve anything, just make things worse. There's very little traffic going through the whole of Stockholm, more than 90% of the traffic on the E4 has its starting point or destination within the city. People who commute between the north and south of the city use public transport. Instead of wasting all this money on a useless road, use it to lower fares instead!
Says someone who of course did _not_ spent years measuring traffic patterns in and around Stockholm and then suggested a massively expensive building project to solve the situation.
I guess you want to use the money to build bike lanes instead 😂
So we’re going to to pass Stockholm faster but eventually get stuck at the bridge in Sodertalje 😂
Yep, that's another nightmare that has to be solved. Any pressure being relieved by the Förbifart tunnel will show up as additional pressure on Södertäljebron. And again it's gonna have to be solved by a tunnel. Tunnel is probably cheaper too. There's no room to operate above ground, because you've got critical railroads 20 meters to the east and the Scania complex 30 meters to the west. The canal is only 8 meters deep so no need to go as deep as the Förbifart. My bet is the north tunnel entrance will be at Moraberg, and the south entrance at Pershagen. Lots of room to operate there.
@@GackFinder they are already woring on widening the bridge
@@einar8019 No, the project to widen the bridge is cancelled. It's not part of the national transport infrastructure plan for the years 2022-2033.
Accidents will be a nightmare.
One more lane, bro. One more lane will fix traffic
Bro got stuck on a tiny part of the video.
Nice to live in a Town 200 miles vest of Stockholm, Örebro if you wonder.
The far less than 1km train tunnel between New York and New Jersey is costing 16 billion. Something doesn’t add up.
this is still a big and impressive project, but we've seen a lot of those here on this channel.
the switch to right side traffic mentioned in the intro sounds a lot more interesting, though. why they did it is pretty clear, but it would be nice to know how they did that without causing tons of traffic accidents.
Sweden switching to right-hand driving didn't cause many accidents at all (except one case of drunk-driving on the left-hand side the day of the switch). Overall, the switch also reduced accidents, because 90% of the cars in Sweden already had their steering wheel on the left, so when Sweden switched, we got left-hand steering in right-hand traffic. Left-hand steering in left-hand traffic is as dangerous as right-hand steering in right-hand traffic because your field of view is being both offset and reduced.
Its gonna be so awesome when its done! M
Gonna do great things for my city!
here is an idea for reducing carbon emmisions in the air with tunnels,since tunnels need intakes andd exhausts for air on the underground,you put carbon capture machines right at the air filtering system.That way all the emmisions from cars on the tunnel get trapped and stored in underground rocks before ever coming on the surface,that way you get the best of both worlds,less trafic in the city ,more space for construction and parks,as well as better air quality
You should do a video on Västlänken. You could probably do a series to be honest.
Stockholm and Tirana is told to be the only capitals in Europe without a road around it.
All these people talking crap about highway, they are essential.
What's the name of the song at the end of the video, please?
Do they ever find crazy shit like dinosaurs or gold or something during these huge digs?
Do archeology & ancient biome fossils get destroyed?
Not sure those are natural persevered in these types of rocks.
The granite bedrock is very old, older than any complex organisms.
It's all granite
It looks like it will be a fantastic project once completed. We need a new highway between Brisbane and the Gold Coast as the current highway is almost at capacity and is around 25 years old. Increased traffic and commuting between the 2 cities over the years has seen a lack of infrastructure investment for this busy corridor from both our state and federal governments. Hopefully we see some progress in the near future rather than just talk from our politicians.
Unbelievable size of a job!!, going far enough outside the city too 🤔 a fair few link roads back into city will be added??
Are we SURE building another huge highway is actually a good idea?