Beating a bottleneck

Exercise 22. Read and translate the Supplementary text 2 (ST 2).

Exercise 21. Complete each sentence with a word from the list, which presents different traffic participants. Use each word once only.

chauffer, conductor, motorist, steward, mechanic, cyclist, traffic warden, driver, pedestrian

example:

The company chairman has a Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffer.

1. When my car broke down a passing ______ towed it to the garage.

2. Tony was given a parking ticket by a ______.

3. John works as a ______ in a local garage.

4. There isn’t a ______ on this bus, you pay the driver.

5. David is a keen ______ and rides his bike to work every day.

6. The police asked me to describe the ______ of the car.

7. The car mounted the pavement and injured a _______.

8. Before take-off, the ______ told me to fasten my seat belt.

3.

New highway project near the battered Lebanese capital will ease congestion and hopefully boost tourism

Since the end of the war in Lebanon in 1990, the country has started a massive redevelopment program. One of the priorities is the construction of infrastructure, particularly in and around the capital, Beirut, where about a third of the country’s three million people live and work. For the majority the car is the principle means of transport.

A key arterial road carries commuter and commercial traffic north from Beirut. The existing dual carriageway has three lanes in each direction, but a hindrance to smooth traffic flow is a 40-year-old narrow tunnel with two lanes either way. This short tunnel is the only route through a rock outcrop and is a serious bottleneck.

The volume of traffic along the route is estimated at over 200,000 vehicles per day. The project is for the construction of new carriageways and rehabilitation of existing lanes to provide a four-lane, dual carriageway, involving many bridges and underpasses, and four major intersections. When the new lanes are opened, traffic will be diverted from the existing carriageways which will be rehabilitated and upgraded. The new highway will eventually be extended a further 15 km.

Most of the bridges are founded on 800 mm diameter reinforced concrete piles. The bridges are precast girders, prestressed on the ground and lifted into position by mobile cranes. The deck is an 8 mm thick precast concrete slab forming part of the main deck poured above. This method was adapted to maximize on time and save on formwork. The total project has over 40,000 sqm of formed concrete structures.

Germany’s ‘site of the century’

The A81 Heilbronn to Stuttgart motorway runs through the oldest motorway tunnels in Germany, the Engelberg tunnel, built between 1935 and 1938. Increasing traffic flows have led to the tunnel becoming a permanent bottleneck, unable to cope with the 120,000 vpd using the motorway. A project currently underway, and described as Germany’s ‘site of the century’, will replace the existing tunnels with a new twin-tube structure running at a lower level – the Engelberg Base Tunnels.

The new tunnel is 25000 m long and has a longitudinal gradient of only 0.9 % – compared to the steep 6 % gradient in the existing tunnels. Excavation is proceeding using the New Austrian Tunnelling Method. Altogether the project involves the construction of 8.5 km of new sixlane motorway and six new bridges, with the requirement that four lanes are available for traffic at all times during construction.

Most of the spoil excavated from the tunnel is being re-used on site to form embankments and noise-reducing screens as well as backfill for temporary haul roads, ramps, and diversionary routes. But before being re-used, it has to be stabilized by the incorporation of lime.

The total construction value of the project is about DM 604 million (US $ 410 million).

Exercise 23. Complete the following table with the information from your text. Then ask your partner questions which will allow you to fill in the missing information about his/her text. Compare your tables.

Country	Volume of traffic	Cause of the traffic problem	Age of the tunnel	Solution to the problem
Lebanon
Germany

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