Västlänken
The West Link (Swedish: Västlänken) is a railway tunnel under construction under central Gothenburg. The purpose of the project is to increase capacity and reduce travel times on the Gothenburg network by changing the Gothenburg Central Station from a terminus to an underground transit station. Two new underground stations, Haga and Korsvägen, will also be built.
Of the 1.02 million people (2018) who live in Greater Gothenburg (1.7 million in Västra Götaland County), 450,000 people live outside the Gothenburg municipality. Approximately 175,000 people in the region commute to or from Gothenburg Municipality daily. The majority of these people use cars for transportation and the roads in the region are overloaded. Better rail communications to different parts of Greater Gothenburg and better connections to current public transport networks would improve the situation. There is a political wish to reduce car dependency and increase public transport usage. Significant sums of money have been – and are being – invested in rail infrastructure in the other Swedish urban areas such as the Stockholm and Malmö regions (over 40 bn SEK each during 1990–2010). Rail investment in the greater Gothenburg area has not kept up with these other urban areas.
The largest improvement according to the proposed plan would be for commuters from places along the railways from Kungsbacka/Borås and who work or study near Haga station, where a large part of the University of Gothenburg is located. 15 minutes could be saved per journey. Time would be also saved on other journeys, for example around 5 minutes from Alingsås to Sahlgrenska or Chalmers. Travellers from the south to the Central Station would have a ten-minute longer journey than at present.
The main reason to build the tunnel is to increase capacity. The Gothenburg Central Station has no capacity for more trains in rush hours, which obstructs the wish to increase train traffic and build a new railway to Borås, the second largest city in the province, which has dense bus traffic to Gothenburg.
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