Enhancing safety on the A1 motorway: a strategic mobility project for Switzerland
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In Switzerland, two VINCI Energies business units – Mobility Smart Solutions and Etavis Romandie – are renovating safety equipment on the A1 motorway between Arrissoules and Payerne. The project will begin in April 2026 under challenging technical and time constraints.
Almost seven million privately owned vehicles are using Switzerland’s roads, around five million of which are passenger cars. This is twice as many as in 1980, despite the population having grown by just 40% over the same period.
This strong growth in road traffic requires constant renovations and upgrades to the infrastructure. The Federal Roads Office (OFROU) recently launched a project to renovate some of the operational and safety equipment on the Frasses and Sévaz covered sections of the A1 motorway between Arrissoules and Payerne. This is a strategic section of motorway that crosses the country east to west.
Partnership of experts
The VINCI Energies business unit Mobility Smart Solutions secured a contract for this project in partnership with Etavis Romandie, another VINCI Energies BU specialising in electronics, communications and automation solutions.
“The contract covers the renovation of numerous systems,” explains Sylvain Jimenez, Business Unit Manager at Mobility Smart Solutions. “These include emergency telephone systems (20 emergency phone points), the tunnel fire detection system (interface with the heat detection cable and transmission of alarms to the section management system), various auxiliary systems (monitoring of radio, weather, HVAC, pumping, wastewater extraction systems, etc.) and the section management system, which provides hypervision of all these installations and coordinates all subsystems pertaining to user safety and inter-domain management.”
He continues: “We are managing the project and creating the hypervision system, which has to incorporate specific modelling provided by OFROU, which we need to digest and then disseminate to the business units working in different domains. For example, Etavis is responsible for the telephony, fire protection and miscellaneous systems, as well as for site coordination.”
Site constraints
The Mobility Smart Solutions/Etavis partnership, which has 50 people working on this project, must procure and install the equipment by the end of 2025, ready for work to begin in April 2026, with handover due the following October.
“We are managing the project and creating the hypervision system, which has to incorporate specific modelling provided by OFROU.”
“We can’t actually start work in January 2026, due to the winter closure,” says Nicolas Roche, Head of Road & Tunnel Infrastructure at Mobility. “The time constraint will be even more pressing given that we have to manage ten work phases to avoid closing the motorway to traffic, because it serves such large swathes of Switzerland.”
The other challenge facing the partnership is to coordinate co-working on the site, with other companies working on traffic signs, energy and lighting alongside the normal tunnel maintenance. “As a transport specialist, Mobility Smart Solutions has strong experience in managing constraints like these,” says Sylvain Jimenez, “as does Etavis, with whom we’ve previously worked on similar projects.”
01/15/2026
