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AUSTRIAN TUNNEL SAFETY INITIATIVE –

STATUS AND OUTLOOK

Dipl. Ing. Alois Schedl

ASFINAG

ABSTRACT
ASFINAG plans, builds, maintains and collects toll charges on the entire Austrian motorways
and expressway network, which extends over 2.172 km. 1997 ASFINAG was granted
usufruct rights on land and facilities. Since then ASFINAG has not received any money from
the federal budget. Building and planning of new roads partly has to be financed by loans
from the capital market. All other activities are completely funded by toll income.

1. INTRODUCTION
Since the tragic events in 1999, people in Austria have attached great importance to the issue
of tunnel safety. With the help of both, technical developments and organisational measures,
tunnel safety has been significantly improved, which comprises minimizing the risk of an
accident happening as well as ensuring maximum safety for tunnel users in case of an
incident.

Status Tunnel Safety

ASFINAG currently operates a network comprising approximately 2,200 km of high level
roads. This network includes approximately 140 km of special toll roads, such as the Bosruck
tunnel, the Gleinalm tunnel, the Arlberg tunnel, the Karawanken tunnel, the Katschberg
tunnel and the Tauern tunnel. 350 km of motorways and expressways are currently either at
the planning stage or under construction.
A total of 140 tunnel facilities with a total length of approximately 324 km are currently in
operation on the ASFINAG network. This adds up to the distance from Vienna to Salzburg on
the A1 West motorway. Approximately 135 km of tunnel facilities are either at the planning
stage or under construction. This adds up to a journey from Salzburg to Villach on the A10
Tauern motorway.
Bearing in mind this large number and aggregated length of tunnels on the network, ensuring
the highest possible level of safety and economic efficiency in motorway and expressway
tunnels has to be one of ASFINAG’s main objectives.

Tunnel databases
In order to meet the provisions of the Road Tunnel Safety Act, several tools were developed,
including a tunnel safety database. This database has been in operation since 01.01.2006. All
accidents, fires and cases of property damage relating to tunnel operation have been recorded
in the database in order to allow improvements to be made as quickly as possible.
In the database were collected in total 1541 events up to 25.02.2010.

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Figure 1: Tunnel database

A simple analysis of these 1541 database records shows

• 377 cases of personal injury (26 of which casualties)
• 1080 cases of damage to property
• 46 cases of fires
• 38 other events

In addition ASFINAG has been operating a tunnel closure database since 01.01.2009.
Closures are separated into three categories: planned (=scheduled) closures, events (e.g.
accidents, fires) and incidents (e.g. tunnel lighting failure, vehicle height control)
• Number of all closures: 8473 (01.01.2009 to 25.02.2010)
• Number of planned closures: 1281
• Number of closures due to events: 6576
• Number of closures due to incidents:616
• Total time of closure: 175 days, 1 hour, 56 min
• Average duration of closure: 30 min
Tunnel database and tunnel closure database provide us a tool to quickly identify black spots
and derive measures of mitigation. For more details on tunnel databases and safety provision
please refer to Mr. Rattei’s presentation on the conference.

Training our Personnel

Apart from technical improvements tunnel well trained employees are a prerequisite for
maximizing tunnel safety. That is why RVS 14.02.15 „Qualifikation und Schulung für das
Betriebspersonal von Tunneln und Einhausungen“ describes requirements for skills and
training for personnel involved with tunnel operation. Based on this ASFINAG has developed
and started a detailed training program for all concerned employees.
The main objective of this program is to provide all needed knowledge to cope with the
demanded duties, including periodic refreshing, updating and consolidation. This proves to be
more and more important due to the increasing duties and responsibilities.

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This program consists of a Basic training and periodic follow-up trainings. Training success is
monitored in a standardized way by written exams. These results as well serve for
documentation purposes. Every employee, who passes the examination receives a written
document approving his skills to cope with the respective function. So far 145 employees in
the area of tunnel operation have been trained and examined. The exam was designed in a
very demanding way. The nevertheless very good results point out the high level of skills and
knowledge of the employees assigned to tunnel operation. This notion is confirmed by in
depth analysis of events and incidents, which were all handled in a very professional way.

Outlook Tunnel Safety

In order to comply with effective EU legislation (Road Tunnel Safety Directives) several
measures need to be implemented by 2019 depending on expected traffic levels. This includes
additional second tunnel tubes, optimized escape and emergency routes as well as intensified
fire protection and prevention.
ASFINAG plans an awareness campaign for tunnel safety for 2010. Information will be
provided at resting areas and on roadside posters. A dedicated brochure aims at teaching how
to react in specific situations in a tunnel. Furthermore information will be available on the
ASFINAG web site, including a movie clip.
ASFINAG fosters and initiates innovative Research- and Development Projects (not only) in
the field of tunnel safety. Recent ones are: Tunnel Help and AKUT.
Tunnel Help aims at identifying emergeny calls from cell phones in a tunnel. Currently
emergency calls are connected to provincial emergeny call centers without the instrinsic
information that is included with an emergency call from a dedicated phone booth; but
normally there is no information on location transmitted when using a cell phone. Drivers in
the situation and stress of an emergency often are not capable of delievering precise
information. All involved emergency forces would benefit from reliable information
concerning location and direction. Measures could be started earlier.
Another innovative project being realised is AKUT (acoustic tunnel monitoring). This system
aims at identifying critical events and incidents by using automatic sound detection. After
filtering out ambient noise potentially dangerous situations are recognized automatically.
Alerts can be triggered consequently. For detailded information on this topic please refer to
the dedicated presentation on the conference by Mr. Gruber and Mr. Ruhdorfer.
In close cooperation between ASFINAG, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport,
Innovation and Technology, the Austrian Provinces, Austrian Federal Economic Chamber,
the fire brigade and other involved institutions a bulletin was worked out on how to assess the
risk of transport of hazardous goods in road tunnels. Concrete assessments will be carried out
within the next months.

2. SUMMARY
Currently the risk to get involved in an accident in a motorway or expressway tunnel is lower
than in a non-tunnel section. Due to more severe accidents in tunnels the risk to perish in a
tunnel is twice as high than on non-tunnel motorway sections (and thus is on the same level as
Austrian expressways). Looking at the decreasing numbers of fatalities in the entire
ASFINAG network (2008: 81 compared to 2001: 179 fatalities) we notice that motorways and
expressways have become even safer roads. Results and experience of the last years clearly
show, that significant improvements in tunnel safety and road safety in general still are
possible when using a wide mixture of ambitious measures and this is what we are going for.
The ASFINAG Road Safety Program 2010-2020 clearly shows 13 fields of activities, 32

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focus activities and 130 concrete measures to further improve road safety. Our aim is to cut
the number of fatalities per billion km driven in our network by another 50%. One of the most
important fields of activities clearly is tunnel safety. This is not going to change in the next
ten years.

5thInternational Conference ‘Tunnel Safety and Ventilation’ 2010, Graz