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Comment by startupsfail | Hacker News Reader

Cars really should be put underground. Electric cars going in tunnels, not gasoline cars spewing the exhaust from the top of the bridge.

… The mansion’s bright white siding is turning dull and black from car exhaust. …

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It puts the fun into “In 2000 we’ll have flying cars” when the whole XXth century was spent building highways and ramps that were higher and higher into the air, and the whole XXIth will be spent trying to put them underground. The real futurist landscape is a city like Lyon in France, or Amsterdam, where cars are put away and we walk or bike to work.

Flying cars is a dream of baby boomers. To everyone else, this is a nightmarish scenario of unending noise and exhaust spewing from these baby boomers flying over the residential areas.

I will skip the ignorant ageat drivel, but why would there be exhaust spewing any more than any car, electric or otherwise? The noise point is fair, as passing airliners are already quite loud, and I am quite far from any airport.

Well, you wouldn’t expect a baby boomer to drive something tiny and electric, right? Traditionally it’d be a V8 engine pickup truck.

We have plenty of flying cars today thanks to our crumbling infrastructure! It's that infernal hard stop at the end that's the problem. /s

Hem-hem Tokyo Hem-hem

Most of the times I have worked in Amsterdam people did not go to work by bike or on foot. Most people came in by car, the second largest group used the train into Amsterdam and only a small part was able to walk or bike to work. Those were usually upper-management, people able to afford housing in Amsterdam and not living in the surrounding suburbs and satellite cities. For them it was still a 25 minute bike ride to the industrial estate that the office was in, so sometimes they would call an Uber to work.

Anecdotal though.

It takes a decade and many billions of dollars to dig a single tunnel in most cities in this country. So best of luck with your plan..

I understand that the price of a tunnel is somewhat comparable to the bridge.

You are misinformed. Consider the engineering challenges alone.

"A frequently cited rule-of-thumb in transportation engineering is that tunnel construction costs two to three times as much as bridges, and that simple rule of thumb explains why there are so many more bridges than tunnels in operation today."

What gives you your understanding? Mine is from multiple sources at the top of Google for the query "price of tunnel versus price of bridge"

I’ve never said it was the same. Somewhat comparable. In practice bridge is likely more expensive, if you take in the externalities accumulated over the lifespan of the bridge full of cars.

Engineering costs its a matter of volume, what kind of ground you need to dig, expertise and experience. If you can get something like the Boring company up, costs would drop down.

And engineering costs don’t account for externalities of having a bridge full of noisy cars hanging there, polluting in every modality: view, noise, smell, splitting the neighborhood, reducing walkability, destroying the property value.

The bridge is literally on top of a bunch of faults. Tunnels are even more of a death trap. No thanks.

It's an interesting chicken and egg problem in America.

Have people lost the will to think big because others before them have failed, or do people assume that they will fail because they don't think big.

I guess the asset-light strategy works sometimes (a lot of cities are regretting mass transit investments post-pandemic), but it sure doesn't seem to lead to better quality of life.

Why tunnels tho? Or rather, why single occupancy vehicles in tunnels? It just feels like a public transit system with extra steps…

Because a lot of people will never want to take public transit even if it was more convenient than it is now. In the US outside of NY, Chicago, SF, and perhaps a few others public transit sucks. Even adding 5 new light rail lines isn’t going to change things in Houston when most people want suburban life and only go downtown for a sporting event or concert.

I’m not sure if your first sentence is true, but it’s an interesting idea. My gut says even the most staunchly anti-local transit folks would still gladly use public transit in a city that has a good system (e.g. if they were to visit Paris, or Tokyo, etc).

Saying people would never use transit even if it were more convenient doesn’t match the pattern of what I’ve observed actual humans do. It would be nice if there was a study on this.

Visiting vs living is very different. Everyone I worked with in Rome drove to work, but the people I worked with were admittedly of a certain group.

I'm all for that, if you're able to pay for it!

Sadly, boring tunnels is a teensy bit more expensive than paving roads... :(

Every bit helps. If you look at the Central Expressway (Bay Area) and compare it to Lawrence Expressway. Lawrence sits above, goes via an overpass and generates a lot of noise. Central, on the other hand had been lowered down. And lets smaller roads to pass over it. A lot less noise.

I've been living on a busy street for the first time and the amount of fine dust from car exhausts is absolutely staggering. Never again.

I think it's mostly not exhaust but the dust from the road top layer and from tires. Electric drive helps little with that.

Brake dust, too. You find it all over things near completely electric rail lines, which have no gas or tires.

Turning black is almost certainly from tire dust, which electric cars also produce.

Or, you know, shift the entire building away, brick by brick, if it's historically important for the city?

If an electric car is in an accident and the battery catches fire, my understanding is it is very difficult to get under control.

Something I am curious about is what will happen when we have hundreds of electric cars going through the Lincoln Tunnel? Will battery fires be better or worse than gas fires?

The numbers say EVs catch fire at a lower rate than ICE so presumably there would be fewer, although EV fires are more intense.

https://www.autoweek.com/news/a38225037/how-much-you-should-...

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