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Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before…
So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?
I say this without commenting on the actual financial viability, since that is very much a matter of debate and I'm tepidly optimistic on it at best.
So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?
If they aren’t going to finish the Vegas monorail, maybe they can build a tunnel from the airport to the Strip?
Minneapolis did the right thing with its light rail: Going from the Airport, to downtown, to the Mall of America. When I was consulting in Minneapolis, getting from the Airport to the apartment I'd rented downtown was just a typical jaunt on public transit. Here's how to win with public transit: Build it where people want to go. Amazing how difficult that is.
Twins ballpark / transit hub (not there at time of construction but it helps that it is now), downtown, Vikings Stadium, Airport, MOA... pretty obvious and useful route. Then to the U and St. Paul.
After that is is a question of what direction out to the burbs you reach out to, and then the next, and so on.
Note: if this was the article's original title and, as sometimes happens, they changed it, then none of this applies. Usually it's just the NYT who do that though.
So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?
Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before…
I'm not at all convinced that this design can scale.
If they aren’t going to finish the Vegas monorail, maybe they can build a tunnel from the airport to the Strip?