Boris Johnson has this idea of connecting Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland (for some reason he missed Wales) by tunnels under the Irish Sea with a big roundabout under the Isle of Man. It seems to be an alternative to a long bridge between NI and Scotland, which turns out to not be especially feasible (something about a mega-buttload of explosives dumped in the sea there just after WWII).
So is anyone excited about this idea? Is there enough demand for traffic to make it worthwhile? Is BJ just jealous of the Faroes?
It would be a tunnel at least as long as and probably far longer than the Channel Tunnel but not have anything even close to the volume of trade and traffic going through it. I really doubt it’s viable.
Might make more sense without the Scotland tunnel. AFACT, that part of Scotland is pretty low population. Or they’d also have to build an expressway from the tunnel up to Glasgow. But even with that, it’s probably not viable.
It’s wholly unrealistic. I doubt he believes it possible himself, but it’s a way to keep the dumbs among his voters distracted from the fuckup that Brexit was and is with regards to NI.
And I don’t think that Johnson believes it possible, nor do I think that he believes it impossible. Either one of those would require the establishment of a nexus between his mind and factual reality. People like Johnson consider factual reality to be completely irrelevant.
I read somewhere a few months ago (sorry, I don’t have the cite, but it was from someone who knows Johnson) that Johnson wants to build some amazing thing – any amazing thing – so that he will be remembered for many centuries to come, ‘like the Roman emperors’.
My usual mental comparison is to a certain, last century, leader of a European country; but I’ll stress, purely WRT grandiose schemes. No other comparison intended.
I see more than one parallel to Ceaucescu, not only the grandiose schemes. Or did you mean Enver Hoxha’s bunker scheme?
Well he will be remebered for Brexit, as he chose to. Flanked by Farrage on the interior, Trump on the “friendly” exterior, and Putin from the unfriendly exterior. So he will be remembered for his political intelligence & people skills too.
And when he finally goes we will shrug, say “good riddance!” and soon forget him so we get over the trauma.
Why all that expense for an archipelago with a population of 50,000? I mean, £120 million doesn’t seem that steep (it cost $4.5 billion to add 2 miles to the NYC subway, after all) but was the demand that great?
As for Boris, nobody believes anything he says. He’s the personification of the ‘if his lips are moving’ joke. If Johnson wants to do something useful in the Irish Sea he could demand a complete accounting of everything dumped in the Beaufort Dyke, beyond the tons of conventional ammunition, biological and chemical weapons, and radioactive waste already known to reside there.
That underwater roundabout is pretty, you have to admit. Maybe they’re counting on it giving a boost to their tourist industry. The same might happen with this Irish Sea thing if they make it attractive enough.
But to get enough traffic otherwise, an additional tunnel to Dublin would help. Of course, that Brexit thing would complicate that.
Yet another issue with this: If one wishes to use the Isle of Man as a junction point, why not surface the tunnels there and put the junction above-ground? That way, it’d be of use to the Manx, too, and it’d probably vastly simplify the engineering.
I think the Brexit thing is already complicating that. Didn’t they resolve the Irish problem with Brexit by continuing to not have border controls between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and instead putting border controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland?
I don’t see how this is feasible engineering-wise. (To say nothing of financial feasibility.)
For example, air to breathe, and exhaust from the vehicles – where would that come from/go to? One of the reasons the Channel tunnel is a railroad tunnel is to avoid the problem of all those automobile engines running inside it.
The NYC tunnels under rivers are much shorter, but they have big air vents & powered fans in them. Where & how could you do this in tunnels that are many miles (kilometers) long? If you tried to do this all from the tunnel entrance, the air velocity would have to be so high it’d feel like driving into a hurricane!
Supposedly. But the Ulster Unionists don’t (not surprisingly) care for the idea. So BJ and his government have been trying to get the practical/physical realities of such controls (paperwork/inspections) so watered down, so as to turn it into a sort of Schrödinger’s Border (or, in terms someone like BJ might understand better, the Emperor’s New Border). The thing’s been kicked down the road several times, so it’s hard to keep track of where the negotiations are.
Call it another example of BJ’s magical thinking. Which is where we came in.
