Jellyfish Undersea Roundabout | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfish Undersea Roundabout

visitfaroeislands.com

75 pointshydrogen780032 comments

The population of the Faroe Islands is just 56,210, how can they possibly afford this massive network of tunnels.

The website suggests the tunnel will cost 260m euros, how can that possibly be true?

Like Greenland,the Faroe Islands are a self-governing, autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. I'm sure this is highway funding from the mainland.

The article says this:

> The income from this new tunnel is expected to fund the next tunnel projects on the Faroe Islands.

Which seems like something of a rosy description. I tend to agree that this is going to require heavy subsidies. But back of the envelope:

- The "whole tunnel project", involving multiple tunnels, is estimated at 260m euros.

- One transit one way across the most expensive tunnel is estimated at 10 euros. The tunnels aren't very long, so taking a trip through one is not arduous.

- The project's costs of construction could be covered if every one of the ~50k residents crossed that tunnel 5,000 times. That's about 14 times a day over one year, or twice a day over 7 years. A 7-year payback time doesn't seem that bad.

- The problems in that estimate are:

-- Not everyone is going to use the big tunnel. Most of the population has no need to cross that route; they'll use cheaper tunnels or stay on their own island...

-- ...or they'll ride as a passenger in someone else's car. It's unrealistic to expect every resident, down to the babies, to pay for their own independent set of tunnel crossings.

-- The tunnels also need to cover the cost of their own maintenance. Maintenance on undersea projects gets tricky.

isn't this a tourist attraction? You wouldn't want to estimate with the local population but by visitors or something.

https://nors.ku.dk/english/news/2025/tourists-flock-to-the-f...

Looks like about 130k visitors a year but I'm sure the tourism board is trying to get that number way up.

Well, they want it to be a tourist attraction. But that's unlikely to work because it's in the Faroe Islands.

The other aspect of that is that while it's perfectly reasonable to expect some share of the residents to use a tunnel twice a day, tourists are going to use it 0-2 times per trip. 130k tourists a year are worth 260k trips a year at the upper end.

If built in America it would easily cost 10x that!

It's a game changer and it's less than five grand each. The US national debt is more than $100,000 each.

That roughly comes out to $1.75 trillion for the US. That is literally their entire discretionary budget.

I don't really think the US would spend their entire 1.75tn budget on a tunnel

Came here expecting a new Dave the Diver scenario, found a tunnel with color lights...

I never once thought of the Faroe Islands and now I want to visit!

If you do, rent the smallest available car. You'll be thankful for it on single-lane tunnels, single-lane (for both directions) roads and so on.

This tunnel was fine, a novelty on a relatively long drive. The natural scenery was wonderful.

Or do as I did and just use the buses. Highly reliable IME.

We were four people, and a car gave us more flexibility for hiking. A couple of times we abandoned plans during the drive once we saw the weather and went elsewhere.

But yes, the buses were good too. The others all used them when they wanted to do something different. (I didn't, as I was the only one willing to drive the car.)

Fair. I was solo :) got plenty of hiking done too and can’t wait to go back

The cosmopolitan capital of Tórshavn. Population 14k people.

The underground roundabout is cool, but that art work sits somewhere between "meh" and slightly disturbing.

Notably, nothing to do with jellyfish.

I think certain titles do well because they become a sort of unintentional clickbait. I absolutely expected this to be about marine biology. The original title, "World's First Undersea Roundabout," is much clearer.

</crotchety_old_man>

This is actually where LLMs save us from scummy human clickbait and shit, I can just ask ChatGPT etc to summarize an article and go on with my life while the AI suffers :')

Whilst the world suffers because more and more let's say "not entirely climate-neutral" data centres are being built beause you were to lazy to read an article you mean.

Nothing to stop you making assumptions if you feel you have to.

It depends on so many factors. Reading a long article on your laptop is likely less efficient than letting an LLM summarize it for you and then only reading the summary, while reading the article on your phone would be even more efficient. There are a lot of very contradictory estimations of just how much power, CO2e and water a single prompt consumes, and everyone (myself included) seems to just pick what fits their narrative best.

The data centers are spurring new investment and building of nuclear power plants, which are going to be critical infrastructure for any stable and reliable carbon neutral power generation future, IMHO.

When stable government collapses they're also going to be involuntary nature reserves.

Not with modern fail-safe designs.

Doesn't have to be a Chernobyl. Fuel leaching into the groundwater works just as well. And nobody has found a way to store those safely without continued maintenance.

We have plenty of solutions for spent fuel storage as well as recycling fuel now. We just have NIMBY folks who protest it because they’re scared of “nuclear”.

Nobody has ever invented one that survives by itself for the long term.

In fairness, it’s literally called the jellyfish roundabout on the local bus timetables (as I know from having visited and caught the 450)

https://www.ssl.fo/en/timetable/bus/450-torshavn-eysturoy-je...

Yeah, I was expecting jellyfish I'm disappointed.

Flag it. Seriously. It‘s against the rules.

Yea, but that's what they call it. No editorializing on my part.

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