Old Elbe Tunnel
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Today it's a very important bike route for people living south of the river Elbe (especially in the districts Wilhelmsburg and Veddel, both experienced heavy gentrification in the last two decades).
While the english version only states yearly usage numbers for 2008 (300k cars, 63k bikes, 700k pedestrians) the german also has numbers for 2018 (52k cars, 300k bikes, > 1 million pedestrians).
In my own experience the pedestrians are mostly tourists and the cars people working at the shipyards south of the river Elbe.
I witnessed a lot of conflicts between pedestrians for which crossing the tunnel is some kind of special experience getting in the way of cyclist which just want to get from one side of the river to the other as quickly as possible. There are sidewalks on both sides of each tube but tourists don't care much.
But I guess this is kind of inevitable if such a curiosity is part of the daily used traffic infrastructure.
German aircraft production increased each month right up until substantial homeland territory was lost, apparently unaffected by massive bombing. Given its military futility, most of the bombing should probably be considered war crime. Air crews' lives were squandered.
This sticking out is also the reason all the terminals for larger ships are downstream of it, because their keels would crunch it, even at high tide.
The roof of the tunnel is too high in the water, to let contemporary large ships pass. Where large ships means the giant container freighters with 19.000+ TEU capacity. Mission impossible. Covered or not. This is not true for roll on/roll off ferries, or some cruise ships which seem similarily large, but aren't, at least not below the waterline. They just manage, but barely.
It is a barrier inhibiting ships with large draft/draught from passing. Which is why all the terminals servicing them are downstream.
I think there might be a similar tunnel in Antwerp, Belgium (great city, awesome Jewish bakeries) I seem to recall having transited such a place in that region too.
The wooden escalator is impressive still working after so many years.
https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/sydneytrains/advertise-sydn...
However, for true balls, you have to look at the French who completed the incredible Haiphong to Kunming railway, mainly to extract tin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunming%E2%80%93Haiphong_railw... Incidentally, I just purchased some bulk solder which is still being produced from Yunnanese tin today. The town was mined so heavily the center collapsed and turned in to a craterous water feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gejiu There's a mining company museum which features an early computer imported from the US (I have photos somewhere), possibly off the back of US-China anti-Japan collaboration during WWII, which was significant in the area. How times change!
The English of course wouldn't have it and tried to beat the frogs by bringing a line in from Myanmar with the support of the US but failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yunnan%E2%80%93Burma_railway You can read the minutes of them pompously pontificating in London. It would make a great film, IMHO. China has recently rebuilt the French line as a high speed line to the border, from which travelers may appreciate the relative infrastructure fail that is north Vietnam.
I find it really interesting in this tunnel there are lifts for cars, because the entrance/exit points are vertical drops to the tunnel.
Also, we generally don't have tolls anywhere in Germany. If we do I have a hard time thinking of examples. Our taxes are (too) heavily invested in road infrastructure anyways and the tunnel isn't privately owned.
I use the tunnel 3-4 times per week!
For most people who pass through one of these stations (which are pretty busy), their general impression is that the stations look cheap and dirty. You wouldn't really notice how lavish the decorations in these stations must have been at opening unless you were paying particular attention to your surroundings. It's sad how little the US has invested in maintaining its public transit infrastructure compared to other countries.
I'm on the fence about this, on average across the US, I'd agree. But where we do have decent transit, we seem to spend a lot. The NY MTA will spend $18B[1] in total in 2022, more than 6x the amount the state spends on all state roads in NY for 2018[2]. Despite this amount of money being spent, we have the general problems that you mention above, plus the fact that any expansion is prohibitively expensive. I just have to wonder, even if a lot more money were spent, would we actually see proportional improvements?
[1] https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-10...
[2] https://cbcny.org/research/building-sound-fiscal-future-new-...
Looking specifically at the NYC subway, they are both over-spending and under-spending at the same time. In a nice example of the Boots Theory[0], they are spending money by the boatloads to keep the dating infrastructure working. A lot of it dates back to the 1930s, and it is impossible to get replacement parts. A newer system would be far easier and cheaper to maintain - but in the short term replacing it would be an enormous cost.
This is made even worse by it running 24/7. Without a maintenance window, doing proper preventative maintenance is pretty much impossible.
I am a New Yorker, and have seen the MTA do maintenance at night or over a weekend. Or, if things are desperate, during the day.
I don't know the real issues either, but always assumed politics played a big part.
[0] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R32_(New_York_City_Subway_car)
That doesn't seem to contradict th idea that they've spent far more money maintaining obsolete equipment when buying new would be cheaper overall. (Not really "boots theory" though).
“One big chunk of revenues, about $5.5 billion in 2013, comes from fares, which has steadily increased since in the last decade on the back of growing ridership and two fare hikes. But it’s been nothing drastic.
Instead, the drama has come from the other major component for the MTA’s revenues: taxes, grants and subsidies that are routed through the city and state governments. In 2013, for instance, “grants, appropriation and taxes” brought in about $5.3 billion in revenues.
Large components of these revenues are linked to taxes levied on real-estate transactions in New York. The Mortgage Recording Tax is among the prime sources, collected in New York City and the seven other counties within the MTA’s service area. 30 cents per 100 dollars of recorded mortgages, and 0.25 of one percent of certain other mortgages, are paid into this.
In 2005, before the great recession, it raised $1.3 billion. And in 2009, in the depths of the great depression, it raised $350 million. It’s hard running an agency, especially one so big, with such volatile revenue sources,” explained Russianoff. “The others don’t come close to the Mortgage Recording Tax but they have their volatility as well.”
[…]
But the same manpower is also turned into a sort of liability, partly due to the MTA’s own doing. “All the benefits have begun costing a lot and the MTA, for a long time, had a deal where they would basically give retirement benefits after 10 years,” explained Jain. “So people would go find other jobs, or they would retire and go find another job. And when the time comes, they’d be collecting retirement benefits.”
City to city comparisons can be tricky because city borders vs metro area can be a bit arbitrary, but no matter which way you cut it NYC is vastly more populous.