Gotthard tunnel see traffic logjam at end of Easter break

Long return journey jam in front of the Gotthard road tunnel Keystone-SDA

The northbound return journey through the Gotthard road tunnel in Switzerland caused a long traffic jam on Easter Monday.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

In the early afternoon, vehicles were jammed for nine kilometres between Faido and Airolo.

As a result, travellers needed around 1 hour and 30 minutes more for the section of the A2 motorway than under normal traffic conditions, the Touring Club Switzerland (TCS) wrote on the X platform.

Travellers also need patience in the opposite direction. Traffic going to Ticino and Italy was backed up for seven kilometres between Erstfeld and Göschenen. The time lost was more than an hour.

The Easter traffic jam reached its peak on Good Friday afternoon, when the column in the southbound direction grew to 21 kilometres. According to TCS, this corresponded to a waiting time of up to three hours and 30 minutes.

Travellers heading south had already needed patience on Maundy Thursday: The traffic jam at the Gotthard reached its peak of 15 kilometres at 2.20pm and then eased back to 13 kilometres by 6.10pm.

There were also occasional traffic jams in front of the two tunnel portals on Saturday and Sunday, albeit to a lesser extent.

Adapted from German by AI/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].