State of Salzburg wants block handling on the Walserberg
Bad Reichenhall – In Tyrol there is already block processing for the Inntal motorway, but only for trucks on certain days, in Salzburg there could now be block processing for cars on the Walserberg on the summer weekends, at least if it is according to the ideas of Transport Minister Stefan Schnöll.
The background was a massive increase in the holiday caravan last summer, especially the country roads were congested, ALTHOUGH THE exit barriers were checked and celebrated as a success. The ÖAMTC warns of a relocation, but reminds you that there was already a kind of block clearance due to the Corona entry controls in the summer.
The summer was a special summer of travel in terms of traffic: after the Corona summer 2020 with de facto closed borders and hardly any air travel, many rediscovered vacationing by car in Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. At the St. Michael toll station, up to 128,000 were counted on the weekends, but in total that was only around 10,000 more than in 2019 before Corona.
Despite the departure blocks introduced in 2019, which were also more closely monitored by private security services in 2021, traffic on the state roads away from the motorways increased drastically in the summer, State Transport Authority Stefan Schnöll speaks of 60 percent more, there are no concrete figures.
But where does this increase come from when the exit barriers work? “Many holidaymakers from Bavaria are already driving straight across the Kleine Walserberg on the state road,” believes a spokesman for the State Transport Council, the two summer construction sites on the Tauern motorway also contributed to the fact that many did not even drive on the motorway. “They rolled over us this year, we can no longer take that on the country roads,” said the spokesman. His suggestion: Already at the Walserberg, the holiday caravan would have to be dosed – also a block processing. The state’s transport department cannot say how many vehicles are allowed to enter the country per hour or per day, “that is a matter for the federal government and Asfinag, they should think about it.”
Stefan Schnöll is particularly afraid of the next two seasons because Asfinag is renovating several tunnels in the Werfen area and then only single-lane traffic is possible through the remaining, open tunnel.
The ÖAMTC sees the idea of block processing on the Walserberg in many ways. “There was an unwanted block clearance at Walserberg this summer because of the Corona entry controls, when the traffic jam reached back to Anger on the German A8, so a certain metering function was recognizable,” says Aloisia Gurtner, but Also at the Hiefler Tunnel there was repeated block handling due to overload. There were always block clearances before the construction of the second tube in front of the Tauern tunnel, and later often when there was an overload in front of St. Michael. The fact that the country now wants block clearance in front of the Walserberg shows that the exit barriers are obviously not working.
“This year was also an exceptional year, because of not traveling in Corona summer 2020, this year an extremely large number of people went on vacation by car, many of them twice or even more,” said the ÖAMTC spokeswoman. That will relax again in the next few years. In general, the autobahns have been dying for passages, but the ÖAMTC also suspects that because of the planned tunnel renovations at Werfen there will be two more heavy summer jams. hud