I would say that since we’re building the under-seafloor hotels and restaurants to service travelers anyway, why not just build tunnels that maintain themselves?
Northern Piper, you really know your stuff. Idea dropped.
It would probably be better to just invest in more economical ships or loading/unloading facilities.
so let’s ignore all the obvious difficulties.
Let’s assume 3500 miles. Google tells me that the Channel Tunnel cost £12Bn in today’s money - call it $20Bn for all of you in the US.
that’s about $850M per mile. working on that - total cost of the tunnel would be in the area of $3Tn- about (as someone said) 3x the US (or EU) annual GDP.
This leaves the issue of how much do you charge for a ticket. Well Eurotunnel’s costs in 2014 were around €600M, so let’s assume 10 times that at - call it $5Bn per year operating costs. Let’s also assume that they have to pay back half the capital investment over 100 years at 0% interest, so that’s $15Bn/annum in repayments.
So costs at $20Bn /year. I saw a figure of 66M transatlantic passengers for 2010 so let’s go with 10% take the train - call it 7M - about $3000/person. It’s somewhere between air travel and a cruise ship.
Oh and the rest of the US will pay substantially higher taxes to pay the debt they’ve just incurred for the other 50% of the capital cost.
and yes, you can drive a tunnel sized train through these figures, if you really try!
As LSLGuy pointed out upthread, a longer/deeper tunnel doesn’t have the same cost per mile as a shorter/shallower tunnel. By the time you’ve reached the middle, you’re having to convey excavated soil 1500 miles back to the tunnel entrance to get rid of it (compare to the Channel Tunnel, for which they only needed to convey excavated soil 12 miles back to the entrance). Ventilation/Cooling/Power for the boring machines all become massively difficult logistical problems.
Your $3T estimate might be useful as an absolute lower bound, i.e. a trans-Atlantic tunnel will definitely cost much more than $3T.
Also, the Channel Tunnel took six years to build. Assuming a similar rate of progress (unlikely, given the logistical difficulties), a TA tunnel would take about 800 years.
I will now take a moment to wish a pox on the OP for his choice of subject line; I’ve had the theme song from The Little Mermaid running through my head for the last week!
By the by, for those thinking about building a tunnel on the sea floor, consider that some icebergs are so massive that they scrape the sea floor, especially on the continental shelf. A lesser risk would be being hit by a sinking ship.
When engineers and marketers meet.
I don’t think you can build this tunnel for $3Tn, but that aside, the US GDP is now $18Tn. The EU is approximately $18.5Tn.
A deep-sea tunnel is clearly NOT the place for lyrics like “Darling it’s better, Down where it’s wetter – Take it from me!”
:eek:
With enough global warming-* not so much.*…
Here’s the thing, which I alluded to earlier: Let’s assume you overcome the non-trivial costs and problems of constructing the tunnel in the first place. A person can’t drive for 48 hours, so they will need to make several stops along the way. That means subterranean hotels and restaurants. My Civic would need about 10 tanks of gas, so you’ll need plenty of gas stations.
A person can’t just commute 1500 miles to get to work, so you’ll have to build dormitories for the workers to stay in full time. That adds to the expense of food, shelter, maintenance, transit, etc. Then what happens when there is an emergency? (Car crash, heart attack, someone got mugged or forgets their insulin.) You can’t wait for an ambulance to drive 1500 miles, so you need to install hospitals, police, fire, and all that stuff every few hundred miles. If somebody’s car breaks down, they’ll need a tow truck. To drive to the midpoint, pick up a broken car, and drive back is itself a 48 hour round trip. We would have to install prepositioned tow trucks and maintenance garages along the route.
So at this point, you are talking about adding entire self-contained cities whose closest resupply might be 1500 miles away. All of these costs get added to the price of the ticket.
Or you could just take an airplane, which takes a fraction of the time and has the supporting infrastructure already in place.
I sort of hate to say it, but as a retired engineer, this is probably the most far-out of all the far-out ideas that I’ve seen (and enjoyed) on this Board.
Keep 'em coming!