Just a few minutes on the Brenner motorway are enough to understand what’s at stake: queues of trucks, noise, exhaust fumes. An Alpine infrastructure that for decades has borne traffic it was not designed for, and no patch has yet truly managed to fix. Over the weekend, it seemed the limit had been reached: Tyrolean residents blocked both the motorway and the parallel state road for hours, turning the protest into a voluntary traffic jam. The message was simple and direct: this cannot go on.
THE CROSSING THAT CAN’T BREATHE
After all, the solution already exists, at least on paper and partly underground: the Brenner base tunnel, a railway tunnel under construction between Fortezza in South Tyrol and Innsbruck, should be ready by 2032. Estimated cost: 10.5 billion euros. The idea is to divert a significant portion of both passenger and freight traffic from the Alpine ridges, running it through the tunnel at speeds far higher than the current crossing. Trains like the Austrian Railjet that already run this route, and soon also Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa, should no longer struggle on high-altitude hairpin bends but glide beneath the mountain.
But the major railway infrastructure meant to ease the heart of the Alps faces an unexpected obstacle: not rock, not funding, but bureaucracy and local resistance in southern Bavaria. Berlin watches, delays, and the project for the northern Brenner connection risks becoming yet another unfinished piece of the German infrastructure system.
THE BAVARIAN PLUG
Just beyond the German border, near Kiefersfelden, the scenario risks changing radically. Those fast trains would find themselves stuck on the same tracks used by regional trains stopping at every station and heavy freight convoys. The northern Brenner connection, the link that should allow the new line to realize its true potential on German soil, will not be operational before the 2040s, if all goes well. In 2012 Berlin had committed to Vienna to jointly plan its construction. The Austrians have already laid two additional tracks in the lower Inn valley; on the other side of the border, construction sites have never even started.
In 2019 Deutsche Bahn put forward five possible routes: two new tracks east of Munich, oriented south through the Rosenheim district towards Tyrol. Two years later, the railway company and the federal government chose the preferred variant, about fifty kilometers long with two-thirds in tunnels, a choice aimed at limiting the impact on inhabited areas. Costs, however, were already far from contained: at least seven billion euros just for this section, an estimate that has probably doubled since then, bringing the total to figures exceeding those of the entire base tunnel.
PROTESTS AND COMMITTEES
Yet the costly underground route has appeased no one. More than a dozen local committees have united in the “Brennerdialog Rosenheimer Land” and, alongside the “Bund Naturschutz in Bayern,” they demand the new tracks be scrapped altogether. According to them, they are unnecessary: it would be enough to modernize the existing tracks along the Inn valley, add some connections at critical points, and install adequate noise barriers. Those defending the original project respond that this solution might have handled yesterday’s traffic, not today’s, let alone tomorrow’s, especially if transalpine rail freight were to grow as expected.
Meanwhile, the contradiction becomes paradoxical: in the very communities opposing the new line, many families living near the current tracks are precisely waiting for that line to free themselves from the nighttime roar of freight trains. A short circuit that, at least in its underlying logic, recalls the long battles of the Susa Valley.
THE LESSON OF THE SUSA VALLEY
Tyrolean governor Anton Mattle, a member of the ÖVP conservatives, in office since 2022, has so far chosen a relatively low profile, even as Rome challenged some Austrian restrictions on truck transit. His predecessor Günther Platter, from the same party, had been more explicit, admitting without beating around the bush that certain road traffic limits were also meant to keep pressure on Berlin to move on the rails.
Now it’s up to the Bundestag. The German parliament should address the issue by the end of the year, after the last legislature stopped at a hearing in the transport committee. The risk is real: that Rosenheim becomes the new Susa Valley, a bottleneck in the heart of the north-south European axis. The irony is not lost: Italy, which for twenty years suffered from its own No Tav damage on the Lyon-Turin corridor, is this time watching from the outside and waiting. There too the official deadline is 2032, but those familiar with the dossier do not bet on full operation by that date. Now, while Vienna and Rome are moving swiftly and in unison on the joint project, the bottleneck is in Berlin. And especially in Munich.
