Beam-me-up teleportation contradicts so many fundamental laws of nature that it would only be sensible and at least fine if transfer between two places without crossing space would still exist at some point. This is the point in time when the once-in-a-century project of the Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT) under the Brenner Motorway will become so obsolete that in the distant future, in view of the longest tunnel in the world becoming pointless, the Stonehenge question will arise: What is it for? actually built?
Perhaps the best answer – an espresso after a short train ride between Innsbruck, Tyrol, and Franzensfeste, South Tyrol for planning chief Andrea Lussu – is provided by Patrick Zeilhofer’s worth-watching documentary about the tunnel, which has been under construction for 16 years in the belief in technological progress. It costs ten billion euros and should be completed in 2028. This has become 2032 – and Bavaria will manage to sabotage the superlative Austrian-Italian transport project even further by repeatedly delaying the necessary feeder routes.
Less road, more rail, less traffic jams, more eco-friendly
Until then, it’s worth watching the half-hour film Re: The longest tunnel in the world – relief for the Brenner Pass as a documentation of the wondrous adventure “Infrastructure”. The good thing about the calm film, which follows the work of the tunnel boring machine “Ida”, which is as long as a nuclear submarine, is the people around a building that can be called controversial. The film comes close to these in laconic sequences.
Lussu, the engineer from Vipiteno, is of course one of the supporters of the BBT, which will one day be the longest underground railway connection in the world and, as the largest European infrastructure project, will also serve as an emblematic beacon of the transport transition: less roads, more rail, less traffic jams, more eco-friendly.
It also becomes clear that such a construction also causes distress, apart from the dusty rubble that piles up in previously idyllic valleys. The concerns of the pizza baker who could be expropriated: the film takes them seriously. Maybe it’s because of the South Tyrolean dialect that people enjoy listening to both the visionaries and the realists. The film gets by without project developer drones and angry citizen howls. It is quiet and deep. Like a good tunnel. In this case: like a rather short tunnel.
Re: The longest tunnel in the world – relief for the Brenner Pass, Arte, Wednesday at 7.40 p.m. and in the media library.