On November 24, the Federal Expansion Step 2023 for Road was put up for a public vote. The Expansion Step 2023 is a project programme for national roads consisting of six major projects, including the widening of the A1 highway between Bern and Nyon, as well as three new tunnels in Basel, Schaffhausen, and St. Gallen. Professor of Infrastructure Management, Bryan Adey and researcher Arnór Elvarsson have studied the Swiss infrastructure planning process from early stages until the project completion.
Although the parliament passed the necessary legislation last year, the Expansion Step was rejected by 52.7% of the public votes cast, thus reversing the parliament’s decision and the projects cannot be executed.
According to the Federal council’s elaborations prior to the referendum, the projects were developed to reduce freight costs, delay costs for drivers and reduce the number of traffic accidents. Opponents pointed out that improved roads would lead to more traffic due to increased accessibility, take up more space that is already scarce, increase air and noise pollution and lead to more carbon emissions.
Prof. Adey, what motivates you and your group to look at infrastructure planning and the related processes?
Bryan Adey: Our transport infrastructure systems for road and rail are important building blocks to economic growth and societal welfare in the past 150 years or so. Their continual, timely expansion is important so that infrastructure continue to meet society’s needs, for example, to minimise travel delay. Meeting these needs can be challenging with growing population and new automated driving technologies being deployed as well as people reassessing what they think an infrastructure system should provide. One of the main things that motivated us to study infrastructure planning processes is that they can take a long time. That can be a good thing, because society wants to make sure that planners are doing all the right things. At the same time, society wants to make sure planners do the right things more quickly.
Arnór Elvarsson: If I may add: Regardless whether one agrees with the outcome of this referendum or not, it is a fact that this outcome will slow down the development of the highway infrastructure in the affected regions.
The recent referendum rejecting highway project financing was a close call. What reason do you see critical?
Bryan Adey: All planners want to improve their systems to better meet society’s needs. To achieve this, the expansion step is one of the major milestones in the national infrastructure planning process, because it allocates financial resources and a timeline to the projects that have been planned to meet the federal strategic objectives. Simply put, the expansion step was turned down because the votership was unhappy with the projects and felt that they did not meet their needs.
Arnór Elvarsson: I agree. There was critique related to the actual effectiveness of the projects, that is that the congestion would not be solved, and there were disagreements related to the environmental impact of the projects. In general, the projects that are a result of the planning process must comply with regulations, be able to provide a majority for funding the project in parliament and be able to strike a broad consensus among the affected stakeholders. In this vote, the expansion plans were not passed because the majority felt these projects did not fully meet these requirements.
Why are the planning processes not able to output projects that meet these requirements?
Bryan Adey: The consensus-building for accommodating needs is very difficult for planners when the societal needs constantly change over the long planning duration.
Arnór Elvarsson: In this case of the referendum for road infrastructure, the narratives of the public discourse indicate that people see road infrastructure as unsustainable solutions. This is not a new line of discourse, but it is new that this leads to a public majority interfering with planned projects. Like Bryan Adey says, although we may be shifting what we think is a right project, we also need to make sure that we can decide on the right project quickly. One can imagine that it may not be a suitable future where every infrastructure development has to be put up for a vote every four years.
Bryan Adey: And to be clear, referenda are fundamentally important, even necessary, when there is lack of public consensus on legislation. However, we think the planning processes can be adapted to better ensure consensus so that in future, calling referenda would not be necessary.
You called it out that the public seems to want different things that the process delivered in this case. So how do we ensure planning processes reflect that in future?
Arnór Elvarsson: In short, impactful early-stage coordination on a strategic level. Currently, there are multiple planning organisations involved in the planning process, for example the federal roads office for national roads, the federal office of transport for rail. They have a clear legal mandate to plan according to the strategic objectives in the sectoral plans. In the case of the expansion step 2023, the federal roads office was acting on its legal mandate, that is to plan, develop and construct the roads that it is tasked to.
“To further strengthen consensus about the tasks that the federal offices responsible for infrastructure are charged with, this would require coordination at an earlier stage to make sure that all infrastructure planning organisations are all in alignment with each other to meet federal objectives.”
(Arnór Elvarsson)
Bryan Adey: Yes, a federal organization like, for example, the federal office for spatial development could be further empowered to coordinate the infrastructure development and planning tasks across the different infrastructure types, road and rail. Such an organization could structure the strategic development of infrastructure through a federal mobility concept of some sort. This would include collaboration with cantons and communes to ensure that the necessary stakeholders agree with time dependencies of different infrastructure development to ensure that single projects are working towards objectives of an integrated strategy. If the Expansion step 2023 would have been presented as an Expansion step for mobility, considering road and rail and the interests of the different levels of government, this may have been more acceptable to the people.
Thank you very much for this interview and your insights to the infrastructure planning process.
Arnór B. Elvarsson is a doctoral researcher interested in the interactions between process governance and model-based support tools for decision making in infrastructure planning. Arnór is a researcher at the Singapore-ETH Centre and the Infrastructure Management Group of the Institute of Construction and Infrastructure Management, ETH Zürich.
Prof. Dr. Bryan T. Adey is the Head of the Infrastructure Management Group and PI of the Adaptive Mobility Infrastructure and Land-use Module at FCL Global.
Find out more
