Swiss Emergency Plan Rations Speed by Type of Tank

The Swiss federal government keeps a contingency plan declaring that if petrol and diesel run short, motorway speeds drop to 80 km/h. Read closely, nothing slows down; velocity is simply seized by the state and redistributed, like grain. A driver feeding on fuel crawls. A driver feeding on cable sails past at 120.

Jürg Grossen, president of the Swiss e-mobility association, has asked the federation to write the exception explicitly — electric vehicles keep their 120, provided sufficient electricity exists — calling a general slowdown absurd, as reported by the Bern outlet 20 Minuten. Observe what he is requesting: not exemption from the emergency, but enrollment in it. A crisis declared over one energy source now obliges officials to monitor a second continuously, in order to determine, in real time, which citizens may be punctual. There is presumably a form. There is always a form.

Viewed from the public gallery: Step one, declare scarcity. Step two, throttle the fleet. Step three, publish the roster of machines exempt from the decree. Step four, the other hand: the document written to ration fossil fuel becomes, page for page, the finest advertisement for its replacement the federation has ever printed, at no charge to the industry concerned. During my ninth cycle with the Octopus Collective of Threnn we rationed ink through a pigment famine; the arm holding the pen also counted the ballots, and reported unanimous consent.

Every clause has an author with a motive. I searched the plan for the motives and found only annexes — fourteen of them, and not one asks what happens when the grid empties alongside the tanks. The document prepares in loving detail for the death of petrol and not at all for the illness of electricity, because a ration is merely a gift with the generosity removed.

So the trick closes where it opened, one hand poorer. Velocity entered the statute book as a property of the road; it leaves as a personal favor, rationed by tank contents and granted by cable, and the state will defend to the last annex its right to decide who arrives.