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The A7 north of the Hamburg Elbe Tunnel will be a major construction site for eight years.
The actual construction of the 2.2-kilometer-long noise protection tunnel in Altona will begin on March 12 with the groundbreaking ceremony, said the Senator for Transport and Mobility, Anjes Tjarks (Greens) on Thursday.
The six-lane traffic on the A7 will be maintained during the entire construction period.
However, the motorway between the Hamburg-Nordwest triangle and the Hamburg-Heimfeld junction will be completely closed from March 18 to 23.
During the 79-hour closure, three bridges are to be demolished on one side.
"A city repair of historic proportions"
The completion of the first tunnel tube is planned for the end of 2025.
From then on, all motorway traffic should disappear under the concrete cover.
For the residents, the traffic noise will have almost completely disappeared by then, explained the division manager of the Federal Planning Company Deges, Bernd Rothe.
The construction costs for the project amount to 790 million euros.
Hamburg will take over 291 million euros, said Tjarks.
The costs for the greening of the 19 hectare cover are not included.
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The core of the project is the expansion of the motorway from six to eight lanes.
The motorway section is used by a good 130,000 vehicles every day, explained Rothe.
The congestion often led to traffic jams in front of the Elbe tunnel.
A traffic volume of 145,000 vehicles is expected by 2030.
Above all, freight traffic should increase.
Tjarks emphasized the importance of the project in terms of urban development: "The Altona motorway cover enables Hamburg to carry out city repairs on a historic scale: it will bring entire districts together and it will massively protect the health of the people living nearby."
The covering of the motorway section creates space for the construction of 3800 apartments, 3000 of them in Altona.
However, they should not arise directly above the tunnel.
The plan is to move allotment gardens onto the concrete cover and to use the vacated areas as building land.
At the end of 2019, the first noise protection tunnel was completed on the A7 in Hamburg-Schnelsen.
The structure is around 550 meters long and covers six lanes.
A second, around 900 meter long tunnel in Hamburg-Schnelsen has already officially been put into operation, although another full closure of the A7 is pending at the end of the month to establish the final traffic management.
The A7 is also currently a construction site south of the Elbe tunnel.
The approximately four kilometers on stilts motorway will also be widened to eight lanes there.