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That sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enou
by yuliyp 3y ago
That sounds like railroads but worse. What's the advantage? Tunneling is incredibly expensive to do, yet you're proposing it in a situation where it'd need enough coverage so as to ban large freight transport over roads.
- anonporridge 3y agoThere's not. Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.
- XorNot 3y agoRight of way acquisition is still one of the most expensive and time consuming parts of constructing new railways though.
- some_random 3y agoDon't worry, once you factor in tunneling expenses it won't be!
- MBCook 3y agoThe one advantage I can think of is no weather to deal with like snow/ice.
- abathur 3y agoPerhaps not no weather--water intrusion/management will still matter.
- bobthepanda 3y agoAlso as a practical matter, a lot of systems stop running to discourage traveling; the underground may be safe but you still have to travel on the surface to your final destination
- MBCook 3y agoSubways work well, but I have a hard time seeing people travel long distances such as between metro areas knowing their entire journey would be underground. Maybe people would get used to it. I don’t know. I was only thinking of freight really since it doesn’t matter.
- Ekaros 3y agoThere are two areas where such tunnels make sense. You are either going underwater or you are going through mountain. That is you need to it to go through an obstacle. For rest, over ground or above ground is preferred.
- Moldoteck 3y agoIs this a problem for rail? Afaik they just put some special thing in the front of the train to clean up the snow
- heads 3y agoI’m not arguing with you here but it would be interesting to know what about tunnelling is fundamentally expensive. Things I can think of: it is slow, so you burn through a lot of wages. To compare with road building the only major road I can think of, built in my lifetime, was the M40. It is 90 miles long and took 4 years to build but I don’t know what the cost was. The channel tunnel is much smaller than a freeway — two train tunnels and an escape tunnel in between. It is 30 miles long, took 6 years to build, for £9bn at the time. Tunnelling also must require a lot of energy. What it probably doesn’t lean heavily into, in terms of cost, is either compulsory purchasing of the majority of the route or the political consultation and planning process. Those were both a huge deal when building a motorway through the Oxfordshire countryside.
- rewmie 3y ago[dead]
- svnt 3y agoYou could calculate the cost to tunnel under one linear mile at 40 ft diameter and then realize that whatever number you got, it is the cheap part because you haven’t reinforced, drained, ventilated, or surfaced the tunnel. This doesn’t require a discussion to figure out. You just have to mentally walk through the process and do some back of the envelope math.
- SonicScrub 3y agoIt's even easier than walking through that. Just Google the costs per mile of a typical subway line extension. There's a reason subterranean rails only makes when land costs are at a premium.
- bluGill 3y agoEven then most subways would be better as elevated rail
- 3y ago
- senectus1 3y agoIts away from weather and extreme temp changes. Its super common in Australia for railways to shut down due to warping of the rails from heat.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Moldoteck 3y agoI'm not sure, but maybe it's just a problem of their design? There are many countries where rail works fine even during summer
- xgkickt 3y agoNot a compelling reason but it’s probably harder to steal a lot of copper or cargo in a tunnel.
- adverbly 3y agoSome advantages: - no impact on environment, birds, bugs, animals, trees, etc... - can use surface land for other things - no weather exposure
- johannes1234321 3y ago> - no impact on environment, It requires tons of concrete, which causes lots of CO2. Also might require ground water control, which might impact lakes etc. nearby. Tunnels often are still beneficial, but it's not like there is no impact.