In my imagination these tunnels are, like, 200' down. Like mole people.
Tunnels probably only make sense in cities, not wide open rural spaces.
Maybe people would get used to it. I don’t know.
I was only thinking of freight really since it doesn’t matter.
For rest, over ground or above ground is preferred.
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.
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.
Designing a high capacity train station or highway exit in the middle of a city is quite expensive.
It's impossible to make the case for thousands of miles of underground tunnels that will add no benefit (what happens when something goes wrong? you can't simply overtake when something inevitably goes wrong (three train derailments per day in the US), it's underground so it's hard to access / fix problems etc etc.
It's a foolish, expensive idea, when the US struggles to take care of it's own railway systems.
Less issues if there’s little down there to begin with. Although personally I don’t see why America can’t just build a train like a normal country.
I’m still left wondering though, in the open countryside, what the complexity (and cost) comparison is between laying down a mile of freeway and boring out a mile of tunnel. It feels like tunnelling is hard and complicated, but so too is making millions of magic coloured tiles that are all connected to each other so we can see each others cats and, very rarely, make phone calls.
Its super common in Australia for railways to shut down due to warping of the rails from heat.
- no impact on environment, birds, bugs, animals, trees, etc...
- can use surface land for other things
- no weather exposure
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.
For example, "centipede" nominally means 100 feet, though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede says "Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 pairs of legs; number of legs ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs, always an odd number."
Centibillionaire is the obvious extension of centimillionaire, and "centimillionaire" has been around for a long time. https://archive.org/details/per_chicago-daily-tribune_the-ch... shows a use in 1883, explicitly referencing $100,000,000 of Vanderbilt capital.
(A Google Books search finds two other uses of centimillionaire in the 1800s.)
Another old word using centi- to mean 100 is "centimillennium", for 100 thousand years. Here is an 1882 use: https://archive.org/details/loverinschartoft00love/page/36/m... and Wiktionary adds several more recent uses at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centimillennium .
I thought of this idea when I was 14 and immediately dismissed it- long before this guy came along and claimed it was such a "great idea." Why did I dismiss it?
Terrorism. In the best case, all you'd need to do is punch a hole in the side of the tubes, and any train would hit a wall of air at supersonic speeds. In the worst case, it would derail catastrophically when it hit my hole if it were big enough.
It's a terrible idea for so many reasons.
Being intelligent yet humble isn't mutually exclusive, but I see a lot of elitism in that 'oh I have this concept which must be totally novel and I'm gonna implement it now' with engineering at large before we all start laughing at their inevitable failures from things they could have learned in the past. Crypto is cool, even cryptocurrency. 99.9% of people in the space though have no idea what they're doing with it. I still think it could be useful for voting and/or DNS for distributed consensus, the cryptocurrency aspect could be improved and already is a better backend imo than our batched out wire transfers with traditional banking (but it lags well behind credit cards or cash for point of sale transactions), and hell merkel trees are supremely useful already for supply chain or ex version control, but the hype and path of crypto currencies is an embarrassment in light of history.
Recent examples:
- mastodon and the fediverse in relation to the threads backlash
- cryptocurrency markets and the desire for regulation for when things go wrong (someone stole my coinz! My smart contract was exploited! My exchange was hacked! Fraud!)... Like it was speed running what the Netherlands+UK+us faced over 400 years in a period of 4 years
- any libertarian when they start to run their own government (sorry grandpa)
Which, in the US, typically have been heavily monopolized and poorly regulated and existing regulations poorly enforced. The history here is pretty extensive, actually, and often forgotten, because rail has significantly lost it's power.
So, we keep trying to make better roads, it frees up space for individual travel, it prioritizes commerce, and roads seem better fitted to a Democratic society than what rail ends up being here.
I just invented trains again didnt I? Whatever you do, you always end up with trains
I'm... not convinced it scales well, cost-wise!
> Small electric vehicles
why not just use pneumatics? It's a proven technology used in sufficiently large facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#Contemporary_us...
If I were to invest into something today it would be medium size (about a tall van size) autonomous containers that can drive at night within city limits and drop off small reusable containers at delivery points such as apartment buildings. Case in point: Luxer One is a fairly common setup in SF today, the next step would be to stop delivering individual packages and, instead, deliver daily boxes for the whole building.
Edit: Actually, I can't count. Only a few hundred thousand pounds. That's still probably a bunch of zeppelinworths though.
Design the Zeppelin for literal tons of ballast, trade out sandbags/dirtbags for product or waste on docking, andaybe add an aerodynamic shield if you don't care about speed as much
We already sacrifice significant speed for boats, but I grant they're several orders of magnitude better at balancing buoyancy with cargo given they flot in the water rather than atmosphere
I still haven't seen the math to prove ground effect aircraft are less efficient than cargo ships, but I suppose it's true or it would've been done already.
The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.
The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.
There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)
They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.
For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.
There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling.
> if you operate the trains that way.
Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.
Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.
What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
I think it is using overhead wires.
As any emergency worker will tell you, the problem with batteries compared to ICE engines is that if the battery is on fire it doesn't just stop once you extinguish it. You need to keep at it until it has cooled down sufficiently to prevent spontaneous reignition and that takes a while. Plus the entire time it burns it generates large amounts of toxic fumes.
Compare that to an electric line that just needs to transmit electricity and just stops if you shut it off. Yeah, ozone accumulation is a problem but so is heat so you'll need some venting anyway (plus you probably want the air in the tunnels to be breathable because we're humans after all).
I'm actually looking forward to future me being able to ride my motorcycle around a freight-train's worth of semi-automated cargo-haulers on interstates that are mostly devoid of vacationing families.
Once while I living in eastern Wyoming we had an "80 car" pileup, probably more like 60 cars but one tank truck caught fire:
https://www.facebook.com/118611954828240/photos/update-on-i-...
To my knowledge it has never serviced freight, only transit.
I aim to keep calling it the Bus tunnel—even though the transit authorities are keen on changing it—and I hope fellow Seattlites keep the name alive just for the pure quirkiness of the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown_Seattle_Transit_Tunne...
Go through the Bus tunnel and Ride the SLUT.[1]
[1] South Lake Union Transit. I presume all the paraphernalia around 'ride the slut' is semi-official at best.
Less now that I've moved out of premiere on line, but still