On September 5, 1980, the Gotthard Road Tunnel opened in Switzerland, running 16.9 kilometres between Goschenen and Airolo under the Saint-Gotthard Massif. It was the longest road tunnel in the world at the time, and it turned the Gotthard Pass from a seasonal mountain route into a year-round motorway link.
The tunnel had been debated for twenty years before work began in 1970, because Switzerland's Alpine crossings were carrying more freight from the North Sea ports to Italy, and the alternatives were a mountain road that shut in winter or a shuttle train through the older railway tunnel. The federal government built it as part of the N2 motorway linking Basel and Chiasso.
The rock was hard. Crews drove through granite and hit water inflows and rock temperatures high enough to slow the work, and the tunnel was built with a ventilation shaft system and a parallel safety gallery running its whole length. Six workers died during construction.
The opening changed the volume of transalpine traffic, not only its speed. Trucks could cross in minutes. Road freight through the Alps grew sharply over the following decades. That growth produced the policy Switzerland has pursued since the 1990s, pushing freight onto rail, and led to the Gotthard Base Tunnel, a 57-kilometre rail tunnel opened in 2016.