Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC 226
An anonymous reader writes There's great news coming out of Russia for epic road trip lovers. Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin has proposed building a highway that would reach from London to Alaska via Russia, a 13,000-mile stretch of road. "This is an inter-state, inter-civilization, project," the Siberian Times quoted Yakunin. "The project should be turned into a world 'future zone,' and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies."
Real porpose of the road (Score:4, Informative)
What would be of more importance to them is better transport infrastructure between European Russia and the Russian Far East. Across much of thet route, roads are simply non-existant even today. If you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok then you're not taking a journey, you're mounting an expedition
Why would they want this infrastructure? Well large numbers of Chinese are moving north to settle in Russia. There's speculation that Chinese will be a majority in the Russian Far East few decades. See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Internat... [go.com] http://newobserveronline.com/r... [newobserveronline.com]
Better commincations across Russia will help them counter this and help tie the country together.
Re:Cool idea with a problem (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, jokes aside about Putler and his Ukrainian invasion, it's probably relevant to note that Russia has one of the worst road death rates in the world, it's 5x higher than that of the UK which it's proposing to connect. It's much worse than even countries like Peru that likes to balance roads precariously on the side of mountains without any kind of safety barriers or landslide prevention.
It's probably down to all the ice, or Vodka, or both. Either way, it'd be far safer to fly. Well, not over Russia obviously, but in the other direction, you know, to avoid Putin's airliner murdering Buk SAM launchers and all that.