Completing the City Highway Tunnel – Cities: Skylines – Altengrad 93

Completing the city’s first urban highway tunnel. Talking about the 1990s road tunnel projects to catch up with western infrastructure trends in the former eastern bloc.

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Altengrad is a time-progression Cities: Skylines series where I build a Central European city, located until 1989 in the Eastern Bloc, taking inspiration from Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. The series starts around the year 1920 and slowly advances forward in time, which means the city will naturally evolve all the way to modern times. The city is not a recreation of any one real-life city or country, but it takes inspiration from them.

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Pictures used:
(1) A71-Tunnel-Behringen-Sued by Störfix / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(2) Behringer Tunnel Sept 2008 by Thuringius / Wikimedia Commons / CC0
(3) A71-Tunnel-Behringen-Südeinfahrt-CTH by CTHOE / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(4) Tunnel Königshainer Berge A4 by Michiel1972 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(5) Rennsteintunnel by Peter Segaert / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
(6) Tunnelportal Rennsteigtunnel by Jener13 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(7) 2018-05-26 Luftaustauschzentrale Floßgraben-9483 by Olaf Kosinsky / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 DE, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de
(8) ESA Hörschelbergtunnel 01 by Metilsteiner / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(9) VEB Automobilwerk Eisenach (3585518895) by Rene Schwietzke / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
(10) Bundesarchiv Bild 183-1990-0525-19, Opel “Vectra” by Ludwig / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(11) Dresden Wiener Platz 1997 by LogoX / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(12) Korytné, Západné portál tunela Branisko by Rauenstein / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(13) Slovakia15D1Highway105 by Doko / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
(14) Pisárky Tunnel (2) by Pavel Ševela / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(15) Brno-Husovický-tunel2019 by Ben Skála, Benfoto / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
(16) Hřebeč tunnel by Radek Bartoš / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
(17) T. Šikula, T. Libosvár

#citiesskylines #altengrad

tunnels again plenty of big road projects were started before 1989 in Central Europe to include tunnels as we talked about it before not that many were actually built with some tunnels remaining unfinished plans for all this infrastructure ideas for urban and Inter City highways remained though and on the contrary received much more attention now since countries needed to catch up with infrastructure projects so tunnels were continued and many more designed cities also started to plan various new project bypass roads Highway City Rings great separations of big Junctions and so on let’s talk about the 90s tunnel projects around here since I’m going to finish our City Tunnel here in Alton gr connecting two opposite parts of the city together compared to Western Europe and of course North America the highway systems or generally big roads inside cities were lacking in the former Eastern block although as we explored before the plants were certainly there some being really brutal American 1950s Style on the otherand what wasn’t there was money to build all of that and actually there wasn’t even a pressing need for that because car ownership even in 1989 was a fraction of the western numbers that started to change in the ’90s many more cars arrived many more trucks domestic and international to supply the new Commerce some emerging smaller Industries outside of Railway connections together with decline of Railway cargo transport overall many extensive Highway projects were already existing from long before countries and cities only needed to work out the details get money and start building some plans changed a bit to include the emerging Trends in areas like noise or air pollution or even Wildlife safety as we will see let’s start in Poland because that’s going to be very easy no new tunnels built there in the ’90s so Moving on but seriously looking at overall slow polish infrastructure building of the 80s and ’90s it’s no surprise however that will all change in the coming decades as we will see Hungary was similar with no new tunnels and also not many new highway sections opened in the ’90s already former East Germany was different Germans as we talked about it already had plenty of old highways but not all exactly fitting the new requirements so a lot had to be refurbished or just reworked completely a lot of tunnels in former East Germany started to appear and be planned on highways of the so-called German Unity projects highways intended to cross the newly dismantled Iron Curtain that was exactly the new highway number 71 and the baringan tunnel south of airort from 19 98 which was actually the very first Highway tunnel outside of a city in East Germany it seems It’s a properly modern tunnel like we see today is just a simple structure on the outside purely utilitarian interestingly the nearby railway tunnel was built at the same time it looks the same but it then took 20 years before rails were added into it just one year later another Highway tunnel opened near guets near the PO border this one was over 3.2 km long something like 2 mies which was the longest in East Germany but it would be overtaken by a huge margin in 2003 by yet another East German Highway tunnel this time the longest in all Germany still today the renik tunnel measuring almost 8 kilm or 5 miles it was built also on Highway 71 just south of the first tunnel we have seen today one interesting tunnel opened near eisenach city in 1998 the herel tunnel interesting because of motivations to build it and its location because just a little west of here was the Iron Curtain border between East and West Germany this highway highway 4 actually used to be here back in the day already with a border crossing between the two countries today the crossing is just a simple truck parking lot the buildings have been been dismantled back East there is the city of ainak and its car factory right in the city center this used to be the factory making the famous vburg cars name taken after the vburg castle just above the city right there the factory signed a cooperation deal with West German opal company in 1990 vorg cars were hopelessly obsolete in the90s so the company went under as most other East German companies the factory in the city center was mostly demolished apart from a couple of buildings one of which is a museum today the car industry though just moved outside of the city into this new industrial Zone to the new opal Factory which is there to this day but this Factory now needed access to a big road you cannot exactly move all the trucks through the city center so a highway connection would be ideal it was decided to upgrade this Road number 1021 but there was a bottleneck near the town of herel so the only way to go through was to build a rose Tunnel right there Germans also started working on a good number of City tunnels and underpasses one such great separation was built in magdor to divert through traffic on this Major Avenue with TRS magdor is a relatively small City with some quarter million people magdor was cut in half half by a proper North South Urban highway but also with a major East West Avenue bypass highways were eventually built or upgraded around the city but the city roads remained once a major Avenue is established it’s almost impossible to get rid of it despite alternative roads existing you know induced demand and all of that so cities decided on some great separations to at least alleviate the surface problems pedestrian Crossings or allow bicycle infrastructure which we can clearly see in this case it’s a logical idea in the short term but it has some long-term consequences in some future video I have a good example of that from Prague anyways this intersection was upgraded in 1998 and others followed in the 2000s Theon was very similar due to its almost full destruction around the old town in the second world war it was in for modernist rework which included all the major Avenues cutting across traffic kept increasing and something had to be done to increase capacity not only for cars but also tramps pedestrians and bicycles already in the mid 1980s the inner city bypass was planned as it became obvious that traffic must be diverted from the city core although this bypass is not exactly bypassing the center as much as some other project because it’s not really that far from the center anyways a high capacity Junction was needed at the main train station in the 1980s plans were made but money was tight so nothing was built and in the early ’90s it was decided for a tunnel solution interestingly the tunnel started to be built without fully knowing how it’s going to continue so only a short section was built and this main road was refurbished straightened but only to be reworked again just a couple of years later this picture from 1997 shows this Main Avenue but uh we can see that perhaps it was not planned to be as big because indeed it was planned to divert traffic to the bypass road the sort of inner city Ring Road but after the tunnel project was complete in 2000 the road returned to be a major direction through the center of the city despite the bypass road receiving more Lanes the bypassed Road was kept the same somewhat once again showing that if major roads are ever built they practically cannot be removed later although here in front of the main train station this project did lead to creating a major pedestrian Zone which certainly benefits the area in the late ’90s another urban road tunnel was started in Dresden to go under a residential neighborhood right here this road was perhaps planned to demolish the residential blocks the road certainly aimed that way but it was probably too late to do that and in the ’90s things were already approached differently in Slovakia there were no new Urban tunnels although Inter City Highway project started or rather continued from the Communist times the Brisco tunnel project began in 1996 to cut through almost 5 kilm over 3 mil becoming the longest road tunnel in Slovakia to this day it’s a double tube tunnel like all the other Highway tunnels but there is this tiny bit of a problem which is the second tube is actually still not finished today together with the second half of the highway on the western end so traffic just uses one tube with one lane in each Direction the tunnel project is also connected to some shady stuff its initial construction is somewhat typical wild 9s project with company and the state financially struggling and people in charge diverting a little extra money into their own Pockets uh just on a side note in Czech and Slovak languages the verb to Tunnel also means to steal specifically to illegally or borderline illegally divert money from either a public project or a company so in the languag is you can tunnel a tunnel which unfortunately became a very fitting joke when talking about the these projects moving on to CIA which is basically an urban tunnel superpower of the entire Central Europe I already introduced a few tunnels that were built in the previous ERA with one project in particular that was started then and continued in the ’90s the prag stof tunnel the city did not have much money in the early ’90s so financing of the project went slowly and the tunnel was finally opened in 1997 it did not exactly help traffic much because despite the tunnel being some 2 km or 1.2 Mi long it was only a small part of the planned inner city bypass ring largely planned to be underground so it basically went from nowhere to Nowhere until the rest of the tunnels around where built perhaps it’s lack of funding also originated from the popular discontent with the project uh it kind of sort of became little remnant of the megalomaniac communist planning in the minds of people the southern continuation with tunnel marzofka started just two years later in 1999 somewhat completing the southern part of the bypass which then continues on the surface the Northern end was continued with a gigantic Blanca tunnel project starting in 2007 so we will leave that for a different time although that topic will be a good example of all kinds of traffic and politics related issues so we absolutely must return to it moving on a city that I probably didn’t talk about yet in the series but I certainly will in the future is liberates it’s a small City with some 100,000 people but it received its own Urban Highway actually in my opinion it’s kind of going to sound weird but in my opinion this is one Urban Highway that is not not done badly at all it mostly follows a railway corridor already established which already cut the city in half but it is built on a lot of bridges it cuts through mostly industrial places it doesn’t have any major residential areas nearby or at least not many it just sort of Blends well with the terrain and with the city of course in the last 50 years the city somewhat grew around the road but still you kind of sort a can ignore it like it’s not even there while it does provide a straight connection through the city sure liberates is a tiny City at the end of the day so it’s not really that difficult for it however there was one place in particular where the highway touched a difficult more high density part of the city so in the usual fashion of the late ‘ 80s the corridor was completely destroyed for IT project then continued into the ’90s to build the tunnel refurbish that at perpendicular Avenue Road on the top and built a big new bus terminal which is a little clunky when it comes to connections to the railway station and the tram stops but it’s there paradoxically the railway cuts the city significantly more than the highway as there are many Highway Bridges but uh if you go below them you are then stopped by The Rail Yards and rail embankments unless you want to take the occasional Melly under pass anyways we are going to return to liberat to talk about some ’90s architecture there are some interesting examples and we also must talk about the densifying of City centers but in some later later episodes now let’s move to berno berno is roughly as large as Dresden it’s smaller but not by much that is where the similarities end because berno is quite hilly so it’s not easy to plan infrastructure around it or through it and also berno was practically untouched during the second world war so it did not receive a modernist makeover with major Avenues still the city massively grew postwar with panel blocks districts appearing literally all around the old Parts the city is also almost in the middle between Prague and Bratislava therefore it’s next to the first czechoslovak Highway connecting these two cities the highway however bypasses berno it doesn’t just go into the city center like in Prague where the huge Avenue just goes right in so bernos planners had to figure out how to connect into the highway and at the same time do some sort of directions to distribute traffic around the heart to build in older areas of the city so an urban Highway rank was the only logical and probably the easiest solution to that but there is the problem terrain solution to that tunnels of course many many more tunnels which means a lot of money so despite parts of the surface rank being finished before 1989 already tunos had to wait the first tunnel opened in 1997 opening up the ring towards the main Prague Highway Direction It Was Then followed in 1998 by another tunnel this time on the other side of the Ring bypassing a residential area on top of it but still the Rings were not connected with each other so in the ’90s design work started on another longest tunnel to tie the Northern Ring together underneath once again a residential area but uh that started to be built much later CIA also continued and started building the inter city highways but also city bypasses of major uh the so-called first class roads bypass doesn’t need to be around the city or town it might also be below it so that’s exactly this this case of the tunnel opened in 1997 and now for the last example of a slightly different tunnel a wildlife Crossing this was the very first of its kind built in the entire region a wildlife Crossing is basically an artificial Ridge built to connect two forests usually that were cut by the highway to prevent dangerous wildlife collisions and overall to give back the natural connection it somewhat illustrates the p push towards more eco-friendly thinking after the terrible state of the environment of the 1980s this Crossing is apparently doing all right animals are using it but others in the country are not placed very well so that was that for tunnels in Central Europe of the 1990s two major driving factors behind tunnel projects inter city highways and big Urban bypasses lots of plants simply continueed to the EST established ideas and principles but countries struggled to finance these projects and some of their backgrounds were wild just like the ’90s overall but as we saw in the end there were quite a lot of tunnels opened in the ’90s probably even more compared to all the road tunnels opened before so the trend was clear and it would continue into the future mostly for simply just adding more Lanes but much later some Qui questioning of need of all the Lanes on the surface would surface as well but not yet anyways let’s now go see the project here in alter grat all right so this is the alter grat City Tunnel it originated right here that’s actually a good timing in the time lapse here right now I’m just removing the construction site the original construction site on the what is this the Eastern side I’m just going to with intersection marking tools finish this main row that goes inside the tunnel and then I’m just going to plant some trees around this place and it’s going to be done by the way I’m also going to grow the trees the rest of the trees in that uh like a trench area on that side of the city now we are going to return in the time laabs here to this most important area and that is the place just behind the Exhibition Center which is where the second what is this kind of like a Eastern or more like Southeastern tunnel exit is and it’s just going to continue into well it’s going to continue into like a road off the city and eventually that’s going to reach some sort of a highway ring I already somewhat introduced the highway rings that cities started to build them bigger cities that is so alterr is going to have exactly the same and these sort of uh radial roads are just going to be like a preparation of connect connections into those kinds of systems that we are going to do later I’m going to I’m going to start building some of those U uh initial highways of the Ring system in the ’90s already because we have seen that that’s kind of realistic and it’s also going to be a great opportunity to like I said uh do some sort of an episode where I’m going to focus on the highways more specifically so we’re going to take a look at the kilometers of Highways opened in the ’90s in the in the specific countries going to talk about just the trends what was built you know what was planned what was started what were the issues and all those kinds of things anyways let’s now return to the city to more introduce this project so uh what exactly is it going to do who is it going to benefit that’s the most important question well it’s as you can see it’s also going to tie together for example this Entrance Road into that new residential distri strict from the’ 70s so there was already a road aiming in general direction of this tunnel entrance so now we are finally going to complete it it’s going to receive its own underpass here below these uh train tracks so it’s going to be completed separated with high capacity smooth flow and it’s also going to have this little intersection here towards uh it’s kind of like a replacement of the road that used to be here so this road is going to receive some you know nice nice amounts of traffic I say nice because it’s looking nice in the city but obviously in real life the motivations for infrastructure are a little different than in City Skylands in City Skylands of course we just want to just see the cars move you know because it’s nice well anyways I’m just going to quickly do this one with intersection marking tools I’m heavily using intersection marking tools by away with this project to do these kinds of retaining walls and all sorts of details that uh are just copying the shape of the road because you know why not use intersection marking tools if the geometry is already the same it’s just so much easier it’s uh once you get used to it it’s just uh much faster as well to do it and you are saving on the Node limits by the way I’m not really sure if we reached that part of the time lapse yet but you’re going to see like a little panel on the right side which is indicating that I did install the mod uh watch it I think I only installed it for like one session and then I got rid of it because I don’t need it but I only got it because I’m going to see the limits you know the object limits of the game because I was a little bit worried that we might be running into uh some of the limits already because I am not exactly uh building uh like low amounts of networks especially so I just wanted to see and uh good news it’s absolutely fine we are something like 60% in uh into the limits so that that’s great because if I remember right towards the 1930s of this entire series I was uh somewhere close to like 40 45% so you know this entire expansion over the couple of decades we did uh it’s just it just cost us uh just you know a fraction of the limit so it’s absolutely fine and I can just keep building alt andrad for years to come so that is very very good news so yeah I’m just going to detail with networks a lot more as you can see but like I said they are part of intersection marketing tools so I’m actually not really uh cutting into the limits that much these kinds of tunnel portals were a little bit of a headache because the vanilla game or even the custom networks that you download from the workshop that do have some sort of tunnel entrances they always have them huge and especially tall so if you want to do these kinds of nicer more realistic looking tunnel entrances you either have to be lucky and download a network from the workshop that already has them nice which is for example the highway over wall pack I’m going to use that for the highway ring because I kind of don’t want to bother with these uh custom networks of mine where I just need to do all the rail links and everything uh by hand all the time so I’m just going to make my life easier and I’m only going to use these super custom networks on the super custom project but the highway rank with more or less standard interchanges I’m just going to use Highway over wall and I’m going to need that because of the tunnel entrances there will be a couple of tunnel entrances or tunnels around the city kind of similarly to berno as we have seen because alr’s terrain around the city is also quite hilly so we will have to cut through these Hills a little bit now if you’ve been watching the live streams by the way you have seen that I was doing a lot of planning and that’s that’s really no statement I was doing a lot of planning with this area so uh that was related to the railways tram networks obviously roads and even some like office parks and residential expansions uh I was planning something to do with that uh panel Factory you know lots of planning went into this area so right now it’s not really visible but it is prepared for some really cool projects in the future all right but no spoilers of course but uh but it’s going to be nice it’s going to be related to infrastructure uh by the way I’m really looking forward to the modern times in alter grat like 2000s 2020s even because I have I have uh some crazy projects for infrastructure plants let’s leave it at that well anyways uh this project here in the time lapse it looks like it was put together quite easily but you can imagine that doing all these markings and U you know all these details by hand uh took some time obviously I had to plan everything at first it’s uh not exactly a super complicated Junction but as you can see some thought went into it so there are all these great separations and some sort of intersections with like careful Lane planning where some Lanes go and where they don’t So eventually it’s kind of a minimalistic thing as you can see with this before and after picture is just a couple of Roads you can barely even see the tunnel entrance it doesn’t even have some sort of of crazy Loops or anything like that but um well it’s there and as you can tell by the traffic um gameplay-wise it was very much needed so there is a nice flow all around it uh we have some trucks just transporting cargo to the other end of the city uh this city entrance by the way from this direction of the map it was very busy oh yeah you can tell that from uh all the cars just waiting to enter the city on that main intersection I of course had to refurbish this Railway Bridge I did not want to destroy it because like I said I have some plans with Railways going into the future as well but we obviously had to widen this bridge a lot a trust bridge is U kind of looking old for the ’90s but there were some uh new new trust bridges built in this time period And even in the 2000s and later so it’s perfectly fine I did not really have anything uh better to be completely honest uh apart from of course doing it completely manually just like the roads below but I did not really want to bother maybe I’m going to rebuild it once we get to it also off camera I was just going around the city uh mostly like uh repairing some uh old parking lots like the one next to the Exhibition Center I was uh growing all the trees especially in this area this place right now uh I really like how it looks with the greenery and the roads and everything um I almost wish that I did not I I’m not going to refurbish it in the modern times but uh keep it like this so that the contrast is uh still visible there but we will see we will see uh on the on the top of this on top of this tunnel entrance there is still that dirt road but I was actually given suggestions on the streams to turn it into a parking lot uh below the castle you know some kind of tourist parking lot that makes a lot of sense so I’m probably going to do that as as well as part of these little changes that I’m just doing off camera uh all around the city but anyways that is going to be all in the next episode we are going to do a big episode about the ’90s architecture so that’s obviously going to heavily focus on postmodernism and specifically on the very specific kind of postmodernism in Central Europe so stay tuned for that um I’m going to be actually really looking forward to making that one I have so many buildings that I would like to show you and um well hopefully it’s going to be a good one anyways that’s all for this one thank you for watching it if you liked it then please you know the drill do all the clicking writing subscribing below the video huge thanks to the channel members who directly support this Channel and me in what I’m doing here big thanks again guys take care goodbye