How tunnels under the Alps are helping Switzerland fight climate threats

Most people picture Switzerland's mountain tunnels as an engineering flex, a way to shrink travel time between cities. But the real story behind this vast underground network is less about convenience and more about climate. Since the 1990s, Switzerland has been quietly pulling truck traffic off its fragile Alpine roads and pushing it underground onto rail lines instead, a decision Swiss voters actually made themselves through a public vote. What started as a response to smog and traffic jams choking mountain valleys has turned into one of the clearest examples anywhere of a country restructuring its infrastructure specifically to cut emissions and protect a landscape under real environmental pressure.Why Switzerland decided to move freight off Alpine roadsThrough most of the 20th century, trucks carrying goods across Europe had no real choice but to grind over Alpine mountain passes, and by the 1980s, this had turned into a genuine problem for…