MATREI AM BRENNER, Austria, May 30 (Reuters) – Thousands of local residents shut down Austria’s Brenner motorway on Saturday, a vital north-south \u200ccorridor through the Alps between Germany and Italy, in protest at \u200ctrucks and tourists perennially clogging up their roads.<\/p>\n
The protest was led by Karl Muehlsteiger, mayor \u200bof Gries am Brenner, one of the towns in the shadow of the artery that snakes through the narrow, steep-sided Wipp Valley on giant concrete stilts.<\/p>\n
The issue of excess traffic and pollution in the valley, which leads to \u200cthe Brenner Pass, has for \u2060decades been a source of tension between Austria and Germany. Local authorities in the Austrian state of Tyrol have \u2060introduced various measures to stem the flow, often prompting howls of protest across the border.<\/p>\n
“You are making history!” Austrian news agency APA quoted Muehlsteiger as telling \u200ba crowd \u200bof around 3,000 protesters who gathered \u200bon the motorway at 1 \u200cp.m. to block it symbolically, hours after police cordoned off both ends of the corridor. Cars arriving there turned around and drove away.<\/p>\n
The eight-hour shutdown from 11 a.m. did not cause the chaos many had feared as drivers largely heeded warnings to stay away, even during what in some German \u200cstates, including neighbouring Bavaria, was a school \u200bholiday.<\/p>\n
Trains passing along the same route were \u200bcrowded, local media reported.<\/p>\n
The provincial \u200broad that runs from town to town alongside the motorway \u200cwas also closed to all but \u200blocals and local \u200btraffic.<\/p>\n
In Italy, a suspected arson attack on electrical control units overnight disrupted rail traffic between Peri and Dolce, near Verona, on the Verona \u200bPorta Nuova\u2013Brenner line.<\/p>\n
Investigators were \u200clooking into possible links to radical environmentalist or anarcho-insurrectionist groups.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Christian Mang and Francois Murphy; Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer \u200bin Rome; Editing by Kevin Liffey)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MATREI AM BRENNER, Austria, May 30 (Reuters) – Thousands of local residents shut down Austria’s Brenner motorway on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1663,15121,39,15122,5,15124,12440,15123],"class_list":["post-20969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-austria","tag-brenner","tag-germany","tag-gries-am-brenner","tag-italy","tag-karl-muehlsteiger","tag-local-authorities","tag-matrei-am-brenner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}