It's a beautiful dream but we can barely manage upkeep in our existing road network, which is mostly just layers of dirt and asphalt. If we need to maintain tunnel systems I imagine the maintenance goes up by at least an order of magnitude.
people react viscerally to moving away from a sole reliance on cars, but most people intuitively enjoy human-centered environments more than car-centered ones. i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
>i wouldn't advocate taking away cars, but rather providing a more human-centered environment that de-emphasizes cars in our lives so that we can better build relationships and communities with each other.
You can't have it both ways. If you make it possible for everyone to have a car, then it becomes impossible for people to not have a car. You can do what we have here in Tokyo: make car ownership extremely inconvenient and impractical, by making the streets narrow and basically eliminating parking, or having a small amount of very expensive parking. Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course).
you'll never get change if your goal is to make cars so inconvenient that it pisses off the overwhelming majority of voters. cars are here to stay, so let's accept that reality and work around it. what you can do is demonstrate a better version of the world that people can get behind. but yes, it's not to create more car infrastrastructure, but actually less, because tunnels are expensive, so we'd be more selective about where to put roads. then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking, but also lane number and width), reclaiming much of our limited surface area for people first.
> "Then, the only vehicles using the streets are mostly taxis (they don't need parking) and trucks, not personal cars. Narrow streets + no parking lots means buildings are much closer together and the city is dense enough for walking and cycling (with the help of subways of course)."
yes, let's build denser/closer together, build trains/dedicated busways, and let's not build (surface) parking lots. that's not incompatible.
off of the underground roads, you can put central, underground parking to serve urban neighborhoods and eliminate the need for permanent street parking (obviously services could still have surface space for intermittent parking). you could have fun little green alleyways aboveground (like in japan!) to access the central parking lot. you could even use a single underground car alley under the middle of a primarily residential block to provide access to underground garages under homes/apartment buildings. imagine how cool it would be to replace the street between you and your neighbor and set up a sports field or a garden or a picnic area, or any number of possibilities (even a whole row of new housing could fit down most "residential streets" in many places).
What world do you live in? In my world, cars are extremely inconvenient. They're expensive, the parking is very limited and expensive, and to go anywhere you usually have to take toll roads, which are expensive. As a result, most people don't have a car, and use the subway, or take trains between cities.
>apan also has tunnel infrastructure for cars. one of my most vivid memories of visiting there is driving in and out of many-miles-long tunnels, and coming out of the last one smack dab in the middle of kobe. it was magical.
They're not highly common in Japanese cities. There are a bunch of car tunnels in the mountains though (no subways there). They tend to be really narrow; there's no way to pass in them.
>then we can also strategically reduce street area dedicated solely to cars (particularly street parking
Do you have any clue how much it would cost to build gigantic underground parking garages? Or how much the parking fees would be? This is lunacy.
it would be roughly $600B to build enough neighborhood parking garages in LA to serve all its residents. that's just half a year's worth of GDP, which is not nothing, but certainly within reach. with just that, LA could remove all on-street parking in neighborhoods and turn it into bike lanes and/or extend the curbs to add more trees and sidewalk.
You’ll notice throughout history that things like earthquakes, fires (see Chicago) or wars (see parts of Europe) have had extremely major effects on redevelopment.
Of course, we don’t want disasters because they cause total disruption, but when we talk about redeveloping an area, you can’t compare two entirety different places and just say “oh we can do it because we have more money” — you always need way more money to redevelop than to develop the first time.
https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...
Not even an argument for tunnels, people just have really warped views of tax burden in the US.
Keep in mind that low-density sprawl is likely to * create much higher infrastructure costs (in terms of streets, utilities, etc) per capita (I believe Strong Towns has written extensively on this topic); * force more people to buy, drive, & maintain a car (and spend more time commuting) when they would not otherwise need to (if you like driving, good for you, but it isn't for everyone).
Edit: point being, if your taxes are super high, it's usually a combination of very high income & owning very expensive property.
Edit 2: if you have very LOW income and own very expensive property, then you could end up with astronomical tax rates overall if you include property taxes. But that's usually not what people talk about in this context, and is kind of a separate problem (cost of housing).
So we can just do all the multi-modal mobility stuff and just skip the car-tunnel part