A plan to save Swiss ski resorts from sprawl

Fiona Pià has a radical idea for helping Swiss ski resorts limit sprawl and congestion, while simultaneously accommodating more visitors and protecting the natural landscape. To explain, she took swissinfo.ch on a tour of one of Switzerland’s biggest attractions. Like many Swiss ski resorts, Verbier has grown in an organic, piecemeal fashion since it began operating in the 1950s, without a unified vision for urban design and transportation. The views are breathtaking and town itself is festively decked out, even on a grey day in late November. But although ski season isn’t yet in full swing, the traffic is dense and makes walking and talking difficult.  “Verbier’s size is about five square kilometres [about two square miles], so to do it all by walking takes too long – it is a town that has been planned for cars,” says Pià, a Swiss federal institute of technology Lausanne (EPFL) researcher.  Buses use the same roads as the cars and there’s no efficient alternative ...