Because the road towards Löffingen often has to be rehabilitated, Bonndorf’s mayor would like a bridge over the Wutach Gorge.
Bonndorf’s mayor Michael Scharf has “had enough of patchwork”. The Freiburg Regional Council (RP) has just approved renovation work with an estimated cost of around 1.3 million euros to eliminate the consequences of several landslides on the L 170 – the road from Bonndorf through the Wutach Valley to Löffingen. “The Wutach Gorge is one of the youngest gorges in Europe, it will continue to slide, we won’t get any rest,” Scharf suspects. “At some point it will be time to check whether a bridge would not be cheaper in the long run than hanging a lot of money in patchwork,” he concluded.
“Of course we can understand the city’s endeavors, in the interests of its citizens and local companies, to exhaust all possibilities for optimal transport connections,” says Heike Spannagel, press spokeswoman for the regional council, understanding. “However, both the Ministry of Transport and the Freiburg Regional Council currently see no need for such a bridge.”
With his concern, he has the local council behind him, assures Scharf. Several companies such as Adler Schinken or Hectronic, each with several hundred employees, would suffer from the current situation, the closures are a problem especially in summer when the gorge is also frequented by many hiking tourists. The L 170 and L 171 are able to cope with traffic despite landslides in recent years, the regional council countered. With 1403 vehicles per day on the L 170, the traffic corresponds to only about 25 percent of the average daily traffic load on state roads in Baden Württemberg.
“It is important to me to get a smart connection from the Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald in the direction of Waldshut,” adds Scharf, referring to the connection to the B 315 in Bonndorf. “Considered a little more spaciously, a new Zurich-Freiburg axis would arise here,” he says. And such a bridge, the placement of which he sees west of the Schattenmühle at the height of the Lotenbachklamm, is also a construction for him in terms of nature conservation. Because you get the traffic “out of the gorge”. For the regional council, however, such a structure in this sensitive area represents a foreign body that has a strong impact on the landscape and is visible from afar Supports are spanned.
According to the RP, building costs in the three-digit million range would be expected for a bridge solution. Planning, approval process and construction would take many years. Because of this considerable effort and the well below-average traffic figures, there are no long-term prospects for such a project to be realized.
However, the decision on this is not up to the RP. It would require a fundamental political decision at state level – and if the project should be planned in the course of the B 315, even at federal level.
–
