Get out of my head, witch!
Because this was almost exactly what I was going to post.
:rolleyes:
What are you, my English teacher?
How about I just point out that this has all been done before, several times, on a smaller scale. The arguments have always been the same: There’s no rational reason for it; people can move around more efficiently given other ways. But the logic never applies. The construction of the Erie Canal resulted in a population explosion in western New York state that carried the frontier even further out. Those people could have walked just as easily, if not easier, but they needed the canal there to give them the idea it was okay. The creation of the Soo Locks (according to Bruce Catton) resulted in the iron boom which was what enabled the North to win the Civil war. (Prior to their construction, naysayers claimed no one would ever use them, and they were a waste of tax dollars.)
Creating this tunnel will encourage people to use it. Everyone who has read this thread and thought to themselves “it’s a dumb idea, but I’d drive over just once to grab a bowl of Rassolnik and a glass of vodka, and look at the view” is someone who would be contributing to the economic base of both Alaska and Siberia, and a fair number would come back saying “You know, that place isn’t so bad in the summer time. Look at this handmade balalaika I picked up for ten bucks!” So the section where the tunnel ends Russia will start getting tourist dollars for the first time ever in history, which will encourage the Russians to change their laws to develop this cottage industry. Think of all the Alaska cruises that happen now, along with Alaskan fisheries. Think about those cruises now including the Siberian side, with a daily stop at little tourist towns. Watching the glaciers calve off the Alyatki Peninsula. Have you ever looked at the place on the map? Some interesting geological stuff there.
American Corporations which are powerhouses in Alaska will follow soon after. Siberia will be logged and strip mined, which will result in a wave of environmentalists moving into Siberia to save the place, put up Greenpeace posters all over the scenery and raise the education level of the populace. Once the Russians realize their natural resources are being drained, there will follow a wave of Russian nationalism and anti-American capitalist movement, which will be the moment countries feeling left out (like Uzbekistan and Mongolia) to start tauting their pro-business agenda and encouraging the now- nearby investors and companies to look their way.
This isn’t just a tunnel to Siberia. It’s a tunnel to peace, prosperity and worldwide brotherhood. It’s a tunnel to the future! Pass me the vodka, tovarisch, I’m gonna go find me a Svetlana in the promised land!
Yes, that last part is meant to be humorous. Lighten up.
Are you going to drive for two or three weeks to visit Alaska? Some do if they have nothing better to try and plenty of time. How many are going to go to a masssively expensive tunnel still way out of their way, to go to a place which isn’t very different, where they then have to go out of their way to get to somewhere interesting.
This isn’t Ohio. Very few people live there and very few people want to. This isn’t even a hundred-mile trek - it’s closer to a thousand-mile trek. If I want to get to Russia, I’ll take a plane. It’s far, far cheaper.
I’ve driven the Alaska highway. This is a 1500 mile drive from Fairbanks to Seattle. This isn’t something you do on a whim. This is a serious road trip. Nowadays it’s all paved, so the earlier potholes and death traps are mostly gone, but it is a major undertaking. So, if you wanted to visit Alaska, how would you do it? Drive? Or fly? Or sail?
As Leviosaurus pointed it out himself, you’re much more likely to take a cruise. And maybe someday you can take cruises from the west coast to Kamchatka, but the thing is, you’ve got a long long cruise to get there. This isn’t a short scenic cruise from Seattle/Vancouver up to southeast Alaska. This is crossing the Bering straits. Ever see “Deadliest Catch”?
And even within Alaska, people FLY. You fly to get in and out of the villages. You fly to your hunting and fishing lodges. You fly to the parks. Or you sail. Leviosaurus just doesn’t understand how few people live in Alaska and Siberia. You can’t just drive to Siberia on a whim, even if the bridge existed. How many people drive to Alaska on a whim? The vast majority fly. And the eventual Siberian tourism industry will be the same way. It will be massively cheaper to fly to Siberia than to drive, even if the roads were given to us for free, and you don’t take 2 weeks getting there and 2 weeks getting back.
Multiply that a few times. Google Maps gives me a distance of 2144 miles just to get from Seattle to Fairbanks. Bering is another 600 miles from Fairbanks, and at least another 3000 to Vladivostok.
Nitpick note: I looked to double-check the big difference between the 2144-mile route I got on Google Maps, and Lemur866’s claim of 1500 miles. The route on Google Maps does look rather direct so I was suspicious. I tried this pedometer, which gave me a straight-line distance from Seattle to Fairbanks of 1512 miles. So my conclusion is that there are a lot more twists and turns in that 2144-mile route than would appear at first glance. Of course, I will be happy to defer to any comments which veteran driver Lemur866 would care to make.
Given the terrain, straight-line routes may not be possible.
I grabbed that 1500 mile number from the wikipedia entry on the Alaska Highway, cited above. Looking more closely that isn’t the Seattle to Fairbanks number, but Dawson Creek, British Columbia to Delta Junction, Alaska. It’s another 100 miles from Delta to Fairbanks, and some unknown number of miles, perhaps something like 500, from Dawson Creek to Seattle.
So 2000 miles is more like it. At an average of 50 mph (which is optomistic on some of the roads, pessimistic on others), that means 40 driving hours. Driving 10 hours a day, that’s only 4 days, which seems about right.
Add drive time from your town to Seattle, although you could cut this down by going on a more interior route. Add in the couple hundred miles from Fairbanks to Nome, which as of now does not exist, over permafrost, Yukon river valley, swamps, muskeg, and mosquitoes. Add in the drive across the strait, either bridge or tunnel. And then…well, you’re in Chukotka. Chukotka has a population of less than 60,000, not enough to fill a small town. And there’s no current rail or road link out. Looking at the map, it’s damn far to Vladivostok. Thousands of miles.
And…what’s the infrastructure in the Russian Far East going to be like? Gas stations every 100 miles? I don’t think so.
Look, people in Germany don’t hop in their cars and drive to Mongolia, although it’s a land journey all the way. The don’t drive to Egypt. They don’t drive to South Africa. They don’t drive to Kuala Lumpuur. Although they could. Why not? Because it would take months, would severely depreciate your vehicle, it would take thousands of dollars worth of gas. And you can hop in a plane and get there in less than 12 hours. As for economic development of Siberia, well, there’s road links from the lower 48 to Alaska and Canada, and I don’t see massive economic development in Nunavut due to the mere existance of roads.
Take a look at some of these entries. Pay close attention to the population figures:
Folks, we can’t even agree that it’s even feasible to tunnel across the Strait of Belle Isle, which would be 17 kilometres long and link two halves of the same province which already have road networks capable of reaching the tunneling spot, and which would provide much-needed land access between the population and industrial centres of Newfoundland and the natural resources of Labrador.
Let alone join two parts of the world over a much wider strait, which have no road network connected to anything else, at a ridiculously high environmental cost, for no feasible benefit. Why don’t you just build a bridge from New York to Southampton while you’re at it?
Well, if we do that and tunnel under the Bering Strait, one could drive around the world! In eighty days.
Apropos of nothing:
That would be because there aren’t any road links between Nunavut and the south, except for one winter road from the NWT to a mine just across the border.
There have been some proposals to extend that road to a future port in Bathurst Inlet, or a road from Manitoba to Rankin Inlet, allowing the cost of shipping goods to be reduced. (Everything in Nunavut is insanely expensive because it all has to be flown in.)
Drive. I’ve driven the entire length of I-90 around ten times, I-75 from Detroit to Tampa twice, the whole length of I-5 three times… so a 2500+ journey doesn’t intimidate me. But we’re not talking about ME, despite your efforts to make this personal. What my extensive road trip experience has led me to conclude is that I’m not alone. A LOT of us prefer taking the extra couple of days to drive the distance. Most of them are retirees and college age kids. The typical tourist crowds. You notice throngs of us types at places like Devil’s Tower, Wall Drug, Mt. Rushmore… you don’t fly to those places, you drive. That’s without even mentioning the bikers at Sturgis. I’ve planned to drive to the arctic circle for years, just lacked the time / money / motivation. If they built that tunnel, I would make the time to go up there.
Actually, I never said anything like that, I used the cruise lines as an example of businesses that would expand as a result of this. I hate cruise lines, I drive.
You don’t understand that you’re being incredibly, incredibly rude to tell me what I do and don’t understand. Not surprising because you already demonstrated an alarming lack of respect when you misstated my words in the previous paragraph. I’m awfully glad you don’t travel in the same circles as me. Maybe you should back off a bit, reconsider your words.
As to how few people live in those areas, so what? The lack of people is exactly what results in the available resources. You won’t find anyone looking to start a logging company in downtown Boston.
It wouldn’t intimidate me either (my family has crossed Canada by car, albeit not all at once), except for the complete lack of motels, restaurants, gas stations, services of any kind, rescue detachments, or really anything, over the span you suggest.
In Quebec there are stretches of highway running into Abitibi that go for as little as 350 km without any services. Very, very few people attempt that route for pleasure, even though you can see some cool hydroelectric dams at the end of it. (Woo!)
You’re having major scale issues with this idea. (Not to mention perspective issues. Chill out.)
You know, for the price of the war in Iraq, we could have built 4.62 of these things.
1930s ocean liners did the transatlantic crossing in what, five days? Doing London-New York via Russia would simply be going the long way around.
I’ve accompanied my family by car from Boston to Wall Drug and Mt. Rushmore. If they had tried to tell me that we could see a really cool tunnel if we only continued on for another five days, I’d have thought they were insane, and hijacked the car back to Boston if need be.
Also, I’d be interested to see how far you’d get trying to convince someone to invest in a $65 billion dollar tunnel by pointing out how it would pull in tourists like Wall Drug would if Wall Drug was several thousand miles further into the absolute ass-end of nowhere.
Sounds to me like a gas and oil pipeline with rail added since it costs little more.
Diversification of consumers, quite sensible, it would allow Russia to play off Europe, China, Japan and the USA - all against each other.
I would say it is a negotiating ploy, but one that makes some sense.
I think your idea may have merit.
Provided it can be run on something other than hydrocarbons.