Finally underground: Merano has its tunnel

Somehow, all of us in Merano (locals and guests alike) suffered from the same plague: the traffic! No wonder, since everything coming from Hafling, Schenna, Tirol and the Passeier Valley – or heading there – rolled straight through town. For the traffic of the last two, though, that's now over! At the end of November the long-awaited Küchelberg Tunnel finally opens.

The clever part: the tunnel is linked directly to the MeBo expressway! If you come from Bolzano or Naturns on the expressway, you go through the tunnel of the first section (past the station) and dive straight into the new Küchelberg Tunnel, without having to battle through the city-centre traffic even once.

So goodbye to the never-ending jams from the Tiroler Brücke and beyond, all the way to the exits out of town; hopefully the same goes for the queues on rainy days, when everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted to drive from the surrounding villages into Merano's old town. Goodbye too to the thunder of the many hundreds of blasts, which cost us residents quite a few nerves.

On top of that comes a completely new traffic plan for many streets and squares: new pedestrian zones are being created, whole streets are getting traffic calming, normal streets are turning into one-way streets, and some existing one-way streets will run in the opposite direction in future.

Let's see how that works out until the sat-navs have been updated :-)

And just so you can see what we're actually talking about – a few hard facts about the structure:

• The link: a direct connection between the MeBo (via the first section) and the valleys to the north (Tirol / Passeier Valley).
• The length: the Küchelberg Tunnel is a good 2.2 kilometres long and cuts straight through the rock and partly through loose debris under Goethestraße.
• The timeline: after the official start of construction in October 2020 and the much-celebrated breakthrough in April 2025, traffic flows from the end of November 2026.
• The parking monster: the integrated six-storey cavern garage inside the mountain has room for around 600 cars, catching traffic looking for parking right away.
• The scale of the project: the whole second section costs well over 200 million euros – one of the biggest projects in South Tyrol in recent decades.

What remains after all the construction noise is hopefully the memory of the endless queues of cars on Via Cavour in front of the Terme tunnel – and, for quite a while yet, the huge piles of debris at the entrance to the Passeier Valley. But above all, what remains are the new open spaces and the new cavern garage, which make getting into town quick and easy – without the old tin-can chaos.