Jaime Barceló, Josep Perarnau
Dept. of Statistics and Operations Research, Technical University of Catalonia

Jordi Casas, Jaime L. Ferrer
TSS-Transport Simulation Systems

Transportation Research Board 2003 Annual Meeting, January 2003

ABSTRACT

The recent occurrence, in a relatively short time period, of the terrible accidents in the Mont Blanc and in the Saint Gothard tunnels in the Alps, has raised a big concern in Europe on the safety conditions in long mountain tunnels. One of the most simple but possibly effective ways of ensuring safety conditions is trying to avoid that platoons of trucks traveling in opposite directions cross the tunnel at the same time, to avoid collisions like the ones that caused the mentioned accidents. An audit of the mountain tunnels in Europe, conducted on behalf of the European Commission after the Saint Gothard�s accident, identified the Vielha tunnel as the tunnel in Europe with the highest index of potential accidentability. This led the authorities of the Government of Catalonia, the region to which belongs this part of the Pyrenees, to take two decisions: open a new tunnel parallel to the existing one, and improve the traffic management system in the original tunnel during the construction of the new tunnel. Several alternative control and management strategies have been proposed to achieve this objective. This paper reports on the simulation study conducted on behalf of the Catalan authorities to identify the best one of those alternatives.

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