The claustrophobics' guide to Europe
Like, I imagine, most of us, I was unaware of the work of EuroTAP, the European Tunnel Assessment programme. My lack of awareness notwithstanding, they have been busy, erm, assessing tunnels, and the results are in.
And nervous travellers should shun Italy, which is bottom of the league for tunnels tested :
"Tunnels with a "very poor" rating were found in five countries only, mostly in Italy (10 out of 15 tunnels) and Norway (4 out of 9 tunnels). The most positive results were found in Croatia (98.3%) followed by Slovenia (95.9%) and Austria (91.1%)".
And what makes for a bad tunnel? The Segesta and Paci 2 tunnels show how not to do it:
"[They] were rated "very poor"...Although these two tunnels had two separate tubes with unidirectional traffic, apart from the lighting system, there was no other form of traffic or operating safety equipment that could enable the detection of incidents, help people to rescue themselves, or help rescue services to fight fires".
Not enough of our tunnels were tested for Blighty to be included in the rankings, but here are the individual scores for tunnels tested:
Medway - Very poor
Mersey Kingsway - Good
Mersey Queensway - Acceptable
The TAP site is filled with tunnel-related goodness, including video, the audit report quoted above and an exciting tunnel driving test.
And nervous travellers should shun Italy, which is bottom of the league for tunnels tested :
"Tunnels with a "very poor" rating were found in five countries only, mostly in Italy (10 out of 15 tunnels) and Norway (4 out of 9 tunnels). The most positive results were found in Croatia (98.3%) followed by Slovenia (95.9%) and Austria (91.1%)".
And what makes for a bad tunnel? The Segesta and Paci 2 tunnels show how not to do it:
"[They] were rated "very poor"...Although these two tunnels had two separate tubes with unidirectional traffic, apart from the lighting system, there was no other form of traffic or operating safety equipment that could enable the detection of incidents, help people to rescue themselves, or help rescue services to fight fires".
Not enough of our tunnels were tested for Blighty to be included in the rankings, but here are the individual scores for tunnels tested:
Medway - Very poor
Mersey Kingsway - Good
Mersey Queensway - Acceptable
The TAP site is filled with tunnel-related goodness, including video, the audit report quoted above and an exciting tunnel driving test.
Labels: fun with statistics, Odd press releases
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 6:33 am.
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Where do you find this stuff, he enviously sighs?
Now I am not going to give away too much, but any promising international survey picked up by a paper in one country probably has further detail available elsewhere, findable by the wonder that is Google.....
More tunnels under London, please.
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