White Paper Urban Space Zürich HB

The new white paper examined, refined, and concretized the much-acclaimed vision from the test study "Zürich HB Central" and transformed it into a strategic planning tool.

The focus is on the station as a transport and urban hub – as the hypercenter of Switzerland. This requires a fundamental realignment of priorities: today, motorized individual transport is clearly favored – in the station area, a person in a car has 165 times more space and 56 times longer green phases than a pedestrian. Yet motorized individual transport plays a very subordinate role for the station: almost all connections between city and station are made via public transport and pedestrian traffic. Already today, 700,000 pedestrians pass through the main station area every day, and 250 trams per hour (!) cross it. The city center near the station, with its numerous shops, also thrives mainly on these frequencies.

To enable the station to better fulfill its role as a transport hub in the future, public transport and pedestrian traffic are given priority in the vision. The station square, station quay, and station bridge will be car-free, and all tram stops will be directly accessible on foot without obstacles. The areas will remain accessible for deliveries, access, and emergency vehicles. With the extended northern motorway bypass, the situation for car traffic is improved as well: passing through the city center ist no longer necessary. Finally, bicycle traffic will also benefit: there will be spacious bicycle stations at four locations, and the bicycle tunnel, as a new element of the network, will create new, fast connections.

At the same time, the station is an urban hub. The majority of people are not passing through here, but are using the space to meet, shop, and linger. To realize this potential, the public space is designed as a place to linger – with benches, fountains, trees, and water-permeable surfaces that create a pleasant urban climate. The adjacent ground floor areas can further enliven the side spaces, for example with boulevard restaurants.

The white paper also shows how the vision will quickly become a project: accompanying measures for the extended northern bypass are planned from 2027. As with the western bypass in 2009, these measures are intended to help reduce car traffic not only in the city center but also in the neighborhoods, and to make it more compatible with the city.