If a tunnel must exist, why not make it beautiful? The folks responsible for Norway’s Fyllingsdalstunnelen – a tunnel connecting the Bergen city center to a popular residential neighborhood — took time and care to perfect the experience of biking or walking inside it. This tunnel only exists because rule dictate that any underground train requires a matching emergency exit tunnel in case of disaster on the tracks. It could just as easily have been a boring and empty tunnel exclusively for emergency vehicles and maintenance workers, but the city decided to make it something more. By filling the tunnel with colorful light, art pieces, rest stops, and vibrancy, as well as climate control, it has become a popular destination in itself, as well as a busy intra-city thoroughfare. The 1.8-mile tunnel already needed to be built in order to comply with statute, so the city chose to make it great, and it only cost an additional 29 million euros.
The city’s goal was to reduce the local population’s dependency on cars, promoting an “environmentally friendly, efficient and safe transport system,” according to a translation by Smithsonian Magazine. The tunnel features directional bike lanes and a path for walkers and joggers crafted from anti-fatigue blue rubber to help make walking the tunnel an even more comfortable experience. The tunnel takes about ten minutes by bike or 40 minutes walking. Google says that driving between Bergen and Fyllingsdal takes around 30 minutes, as you are required to take a longer route around the mountain that the tunnel cuts directly through. Even the train takes around 15 minutes from end to end, so why not hop on a bicycle and get there even faster?
Would you like to Fyllingsdalstunnelen?
When given the opportunity to make everyday travel cheaper and easier for its citizens, Norway chooses to go above and beyond by making the experience memorable and comfortable. Living in America, it seems unfathomable that we would ever spend any amount of money to make life easier for people who don’t have a car, or can’t afford one. Not only is the train an important part of daily travel between the suburbs and the city center, but the tunnel that it facilitated has become a part of daily life for countless more Norwegians. A project like this in the U.S. would be exclusively grey cement, farmed out to the cheapest contractor, and reserved only for cars. Norwegians are just built from stronger and more resilient stuff than we are, choosing to ride their bicycles in the winter or up steep hills in order to avoid the hefty cost of car ownership altogether. When government isn’t actively hostile to its citizens beautiful things can happen.
