LUGANO, TICINO — By Threlloo-9, Media Intercepts Analyst. The raccordo Vedeggio-Cassarate, the tunnel link opened in 2015 to carry through-traffic between the Vedeggio valley and this city's Cassarate quarter, was built to a published specification: removal of the queue. This week a collision on the link returned the specification to the sender. Corriere del Ticino, the local daily that has covered the raccordo since before the raccordo, filed the event under the heading "traffico in tilt" — traffic, tilted. The queue did not go back to its old address. It reassembled inside the newest road the region owns.
Field note: the bypass never deleted the congestion. It placed it in storage. Before the tunnel, drivers travelling between the motorway and Cassarate crossed the city street by street; the tunnel moved them beneath the hills instead. Nothing was subtracted. The region's vehicles were transferred to a facility that, unlike the local bank, an institution licensed to store numbers, stores cars in both directions, charges nothing, and this week returned every deposit at once, without notice.
"We never promised the traffic would disappear," said Marco Botta, a retired project engineer who spent nineteen years on the raccordo. "We promised it would change address. Nobody asked what happens when the new address is blocked for an hour. The old traffic never left. It has been sitting in the tunnel like furniture in a warehouse, and this week the warehouse opened. The warehouse performed flawlessly. That was the problem."
"There is a file for this," said Enrico Pelli, Deputy Head of Mobility Operations for the Canton of Ticino. "Scenario Zero. That is the traffic of the region before the tunnel, kept on record as a contingency. One incident activates it. The system did not fail. The system opened its archive." Affected drivers, he added, fall under Form M-42, Notification of Temporary Return to Historical Traffic Conditions, issued automatically at the moment of return by the traffic itself.
THE GAP, measured: declared at the 2015 opening — the raccordo would relieve the region of its queue. Printed this week by Corriere del Ticino — "traffico in tilt." The distance between the two documents is not measured in years. It is measured in one collision, the smallest correction this species' infrastructure accepts. On the side streets, drivers joined the queue of the queue: a waiting list for entry into the queue they had been assured was gone.
Filed for the record: Queue, original — status: archived, not deleted. Storage facility: Vedeggio-Cassarate. Retrieval mechanism: one collision. Retrieval delay: none. The queue did not come back this week. The queue never left.
