Tampere Rantaväylä tunnel, Finland

Rantaväylä tunnel removes a bottleneck

The construction of the Rantatunnel improved traffic flow and safety and promotes the development of Tampere city centre. It freed up land on the shore of Lake Näsijärvi to create the Ranta-Tampella residential area for around 3 600 inhabitants, reduced the number of city residents exposed to noise and improved air quality.

Between Santalahti and Naistenlahti, we relocated the Rantaväylä motorway to the tunnel that is the longest in Finland, 2.3 km. It also runs underneath the Tammerkoski Rapids. In addition to the tunnel, the project included two graded interchanges with road and street arrangements. In the project, 4.2 kilometres of national road 12 were renovated.

According to the final financial statement of the project, the target cost of the project was undercut by € 4.1 million. The quality objectives were also met. The project has been praised in several project management and construction competitions.

Alliance shows the power of cooperation

The tunnel project was realised with an alliance model that in addition to us included the City of Tampere, Finnish Transport Agency, engineering agency Saanio & Riekkola Oy and A-Insinöörit Suunnittelu Oy. The alliance is a groundbreaking implementation model in Finland. In the alliance, the customer and the service providers plan and implement the project together, with a joint organisation and shared decisions. Everyone is a winner when the benefits and risks are shared.

With the innovations created in the alliance cooperation, we succeeded in decreasing the disturbances caused by the site, cut costs and expedited the work. One of the innovations of the alliance was changing the location of the planned access tunnel.

“We made an access tunnel to the middle of the site from the existing access tunnel of the Näsinkallio sports facilities. This way, it was possible for us to excavate two access tunnels eastwards and two access tunnels westwards. Without this innovation, we would have had to start the excavation right from the middle of the current Rantaväylä motorway, and a detour would have had to be constructed for current traffic right by Lake Näsijärvi,” says Esko Mulari, Project Manager of the tunnel alliance.

The development phase of the two-phased Rantatunneli project was in 2012–2013, and the implementation was initiated in October 2013. The tunnel was opened for traffic on November 15, 2016, six months ahead of schedule.

The project won the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers award in 2016. In autumn 2017, the tunnel was selected as the Project of the Year of 2017 by Project Management Association Finland. In addition, the Rantatunneli project’s management was awarded in the IPMA competition’s Mega-Sized Projects category.

Rock tunneling

the alliance model