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The Almighty Buck Transportation United Kingdom United States

Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC 226

Posted by samzenpus from the use-the-bathroom-before-you-go dept.
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."
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Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC More

Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC

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  • They don't have the funds for that also that part ak does not really have a year round road link to the lower 48 as well.

    • Re:They don't have the funds for that also that pa (Score:5, Insightful)

      by siddesu ( 698447 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:12AM (#49343509)
      Actually, they may even have the money. They just have to put Yakunin in jail and get back what he stole -- for himself, and for his boss. http://navalny-en.livejournal.... [livejournal.com]

      • Every one color revolution begins from requests to punish corruption and ends in total chaos. I don't need a color revolution in Soviet Russia.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by siddesu ( 698447 )
          I didn't realize putting thieves and liars in prison for their crimes is 'revolution'. In my dictionary this is called 'due process' and is a function of a properly functioning government.

          • I didn't realize putting thieves and liars in prison for their crimes is 'revolution'. In my dictionary this is called 'due process' and is a function of a properly functioning government.

            Yes, but in these cases it is less about due process and rule of law and more about a shift in power between rival factions. Sort of like one Chinese Communist party memeber being kicked out of the party and then tried and convicted of corruption that all the other party members are also part of. Or Hitler having somebody executed for murder when he was probably the one that gave the order to do the killing in the first place.

  • Cool idea with a problem (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's a nifty idea, but the major problem is that it would have to go through Russia.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 obvi

      • They won't have to worry about spilling their vodka when they all have Google(tm) self-driving cars. Of course, they'll have to add additional collision avoidance code to miss hitting the occasional bear, moose & flying squirrel.
      • It's OK -- the guy who wrote the article doesn't seem to understand that a "high speed rail" system is a type of train, not a road....

    • Re:Cool idea with a problem (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thedonger ( 1317951 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:59AM (#49343759)

      It's a nifty idea, but the major problem is that it would have to go through Russia.

      I'm sure buried somewhere in an engineering spec is the requirement that it support a weight that coincidentally is the same as that of a Russian tank division.

    • But not a new idea.

      http://books.google.com/books?... [google.com]

  • Why would anyone drive East when going West is a shorter distance?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bondsbw ( 888959 )

      This brings to mind a more literal meaning of "going around the world to scratch your ass".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      Are you thinking of building bridges to Iceland and then Greenland? That would be a considerably more impressive undertaking than building a bridge across the Bering straight (which is already impressive).

      Of course the other problem with this road is that it will be snowed in half of the year and it is primarily linking up two sparsely populated areas with little industry or population. They're not talking about laying down cement from London all the way to NY, they're assuming you'll use existing roa

  • Seems like a logical first step.

  • So with Russia still under sanctionsq (Score:5, Funny)

    by silentcoder ( 1241496 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:18AM (#49343531)

    The US would of course have to block the road where it hits NYC to prevent trade with them... leading to a 13-thousand mile traffic jam ?

  • hmmm (Score:3)

    by sociocapitalist ( 2471722 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:29AM (#49343589)

    So...a train company president is suggesting a road be built...

    Couldn't be that he's waiting for someone to suggest that it would be better to build, oh I don't know...a train line instead?

    • it would be better to build, oh I don't know...a train line instead?

      No, skip the roads and train lines . . . go straight for the flying cars!

    • Train... car.. what's the difference?

      At least compared to the main competition of planes and ships.

    • it would be better to build, oh I don't know...a train line instead?

      There is a 16,000 mile train link from China to Spain. It takes 4 months for goods to arrive and they are subject to extremes of weather that make a lot of shipments impractical. It's also slower and more expensive than sending goods by sea. Any fixed link is going to be subject to delays, breakdowns, politics and difficulty in "overtaking" slower vehicles ahead of you.

      It sounds like a neat idea, but we've already got better solutions: depending on whether you want speed or low cost.

  • Miles != kilometers (Score:3)

    by Mini-Geek ( 915324 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:30AM (#49343593) Homepage

    a 13,000-mile stretch of road

    The article:

    A theoretical drive (as fancifully calculated by CNN) from London to Alaska via Moscow might cover about 12,978 kilometers (8,064 miles).

    • The headline says NYC, the summary says Alaska, but even that's not another 5k miles. And there might already be a road there.

      I think I'm almost as confused as the author.

      • London to "avtodoroga Kolyma, Magadanskaya oblast', Russia" (which is the furthest East I could get google to give me driving directions to from London) is just shy of 8000 miles.

        Fairbanks AK, (furthest West google would recognize) to NYC is just over 4000 miles.

        I was able to estimate the distance between Fairbanks and that Russian location at 2000 miles.

        So, 8000+4000+2000 = 14,000 miles.

    • They should make an underwater passage: the 8000 miles become kilometers

  • Snowpiercer (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now I know where the movie inspiration came from.

    I can imagine my kids sitting in the back at mile 500 asking 'are we there yet'... no kids, only 12,500 f*ck'n miles to go

  • TFA doesn't go into very much detail either, such as how the Bering Strait might be circumvented or how exactly the "massive economic returns would more than make up for the massive cash outlay".

    In the plus column:

    It does mention Yakunin is considered a likely successor to Putin, so if you consider the excursions of the current Russian leader, perhaps this dreamer is still an improvement.

  • Great, just need Autobahn-esque speeds to make the journey in less than 5 days!

  • Russia can't even build and maintain roads already (Score:3, Insightful)

    by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:44AM (#49343655)

    Russian roads across the bulk of the country are shit. And they haven't even built a decent interstate system going across the country. And they can't even properly maintain the shit roads they already have. And the country is NOTORIOUS for intentional accident scams (why do you think that they have those dash cams?). And a sizable percentage of drivers there are drunk and/or crazy.

    In short, who the fuck would want to drive across Russia if the alternative of even a slow boat is available?

  • They're still paving the trans-Siberian highway (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dr. Evil ( 3501 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:44AM (#49343663)

    ... and they're talking about bridging Alaska and Siberia....

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Highway [wikipedia.org]

  • Real porpose of the road (Score:4, Informative)

    by Catmeat ( 20653 ) <mtm&sys,uea,ac,uk> on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:44AM (#49343665)
    The Russian's don't give a damn about connecting London to North America.

    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.
    • Why would you drive from Moscow to Vladivostok? Wouldn't it make much more sense to fly to Japan or South Korea and then take another place to Vladivostok? Or even fly directly between the two cities? Nobody drives between Los Angeles and Anchorage, except as a road trip just to say they did it. There is absolutely no point in building a road like this.

      • Re:Real porpose of the road (Score:4, Interesting)

        by dywolf ( 2673597 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @10:07AM (#49344495)

        Except for the fact that a robust national highway system is a key factor in fostering and supporting economic growth.
        People also used to question why we needed links between LA and NY.

        It's not about people wanting to drive their families.
        It's about the economic support and stimulus that such infrastructure provides.

        China has already learned this lesson, having observed how it benefited our country and helped fuel our greatest period of prosperity and growth. China began its massive interstate (interprovince i guess is more accurate) highway project a little more than a decade or two ago, and in the space of 7 years had more highway miles than the US. and the results have been dramatic, spurring economic activity far inland where prior to the highways there used to be little or none. the majority of economic activity was clustered around the seaports and only as far inland as the roads reached. with a modern highway system constructed the potential reach of freight, and the volume of freight the roads had the capacity to handle, was increased by several orders of magnitude, and it's been pivotal in the expansion of their economy.

        As for Russia, there is economic activity on the east (largely based around exporting oil and other resources), and economic activity on the west, but there is little in between and the two areas of activity are currently tenuously linked at best, mostly by rail. More capacity and capability to move people and goods between them would be very beneficial to the country.

  • Ah! (Score:2)

    by bytesex ( 112972 )

    I see someone dusted off this old boondoggle again.

  • And occasionally somebody proposes a space elevator too (which, based on current technologies, is only slightly more infeasible.)

    The economic benefits of such a road would be minimal. Seriously, somehow transporting goods from Russia to the US via truck, (but only during the parts of the year when the road isn't blocked due to snow) is supposed to make sense, when we have perfectly good trains and container ships that can do the job just as quickly for far less money?

    This makes the fanciful "Hyperloop" pro

    • And occasionally somebody proposes a space elevator too (which, based on current technologies, is only slightly more infeasible.)

      The proposed road is uneconomic but not infeasible. A space elevator requires materials we can't even produce yet. (Worth some research dollars though since those materials would be really handy in a lot of applications)

  • High-speed rail instead? (Score:3)

    by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:54AM (#49343735)

    While still ridiculously expensive, a high-speed (or even regular-speed) rail line linking Asia and North America would at least be a little more practical. No need to build (and man, and resupply) gas stations/rest stops/etc every 50 miles or so across thousands of miles of frozen tundra. I'm not sure how far a train can go without needing to refuel, but they never have to stop to pee.

  • One guy straps together 8000 laptop batteries to make an electric car, prove its viability and creates the most successful challenge mounted ever to the dominance of internal combustion engines in the luxury car market. Then ...

    Every damned fool who was lucky enough or criminal enough to make oodles of money thing they are visionary thinkers too and come up with grandiose projects. Let us award Vladimir Yakunin, the Wannabe-Elon of the Year award.

    BTW China just demonstrated the Steel-Silk Road, a rail li

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:11AM (#49343857)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      "5. The phrasebook doesnt have anything to get hungarian insurance scammers off the bonnet of your car at 3 am"

      Maybe you should be travelling in a hovercraft instead (full of eels of course)

      " GPS may not be capable of routing you safely around a drunken and somewhat bloated Jeremy Clarkson as he hurls homophobic remarks at you from the doorway of a run down pub in leeds."

      Didn't they fire him because he hit the producer? Or did they just can the show instead? Its a pity because I thought Top Gear was mostly

  • No one trusts Russia (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:14AM (#49343883)

    No one is going to get involved in a big project like that unless they're comfortable with the Russians remaining reasonable.

    We're not seeing that. So... yet again, russia is fucking themselves out of fiancial opportunities.

    Think of where Russia is... the land. It is extremely valuable. And do they use it effectively? Are trains running from China to Europe over Russian rail? Not really. Everyone bypasses them because they're too crazy and stupid to realize that their behavior damns them to being a backwater even though they're in the fucking middle of everything.

    We trust the fucking Saudis more than we trust the Russians... and they are basically funding most of the crazy terrorism we're dealing with. That's how little we trust the Russians.

    And amongst that, the Russians want to know if we want to build an expensive road through their territory? Why would we do that? That would just give them leverage. They already give us shit about the generally meaningless space launches. They try and exert leverage everywhere. Especially where it is extremely stupid to do it.

    I'd love for the Russians to not be fucking retards. I really would. I'd love for us all to be happy hands across the universe. But who is holding their breath for that to happen?

    Till then... what evhs.

  • Russian made cars might get 13,000 miles to a tank of gas, but us capitalist pigs have to stop every 400 miles for gas. Even if it was a train tunnel, no train on this planet can go 13,000 miles on one load of fuel. Then you have the pesky problem of ventilation.

    • ever hear of electric trains such as the TGV or the Acela? Power distribution would still be problematic along long stretches between the usual power distribution points in cities etc.

  • Laugh (Score:2)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    Has this guy not seen the Russian dash cam videos?

    https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]

  • Who would pay for that? The US and Russia can't even maintain the existing roads they have.

  • At least Sarah Palin would not only see Russia from her house but be able to drive there for the family vodka.

    OTOH, the Crimea was a gift while Alaska was just a cheap sell, but nonetheless, one should be careful with infrastructure supporting tanks.

  • Someone is going to drive 3/4 of the way around the world to avoid a 6 hour flight? Very efficient.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Someone is going to drive 3/4 of the way around the world to avoid a 6 hour flight? Very efficient.

      Sometimes it's not about the destination, but the journey. If I was back in my late teens or early 20's this would make for an epic road trip. However I think the bigger potential is for international shipping and not really long commutes. I'm sure this (like all of his past plans for this link) includes a rail line as well. Add in some "road-trains" like they use in Australia and it would make a decent alternative to ship based transport for goods coming out of China.

      Still though, this is all just talk

  • Sounds like fun but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Drakker ( 89038 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @10:07AM (#49344499) Homepage Journal

    I think they played way too much Ticket to Ride. There's no bonus points for the longest route in real life.

  • As cool as this would be, this guy throws this idea out in one form or another every few years and it never goes beyond some pie-in-the-sky "plan". Call me when the construction begins on the bridge.

  • First time ever (Score:3)

    by LeadSongDog ( 1120683 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @10:50AM (#49345003)
    Never before has everyone on /. agreed that a proposal couldn't possibly be any good. When do the shovels hit the ground?
  • New York City is now in Alaska? No wonder this winter was so nasty.

  • When a headline says a road is proposed to connect "London to NYC", it's hard to imagine that could possibly mean anything else but the truly mind-bogglingly dumb idea of creating a road all the way across the Atlantic ocean. Which would be hilarious, but rather monumentally unlikely.

    The actual proposal, which I've seen before, so it's not like it's a totally new idea, would connect Alaska with Russia, thus connecting the western US with Asia. Would still be stupidly expensive, but not *impossibly* so, and

  • ... for to make roads fitting T-90 Russian tank.

  • You guys are missing the obvious solution: make like the Japanese and their artificial islands. Fill in the Bering Strait and just build a paved road on top of the ridgeline you just created between SIberia and AK.

    WCPGW?

    • Or do like the Chesapeake and make it a mix of Bridges and tunnels. That way when the Chinese, N. Koreans or Russians try an invasion we can seal a tunnel on the American side, and wait for the invasion force to fill up the tunnels and bridges before we blow the other end. But, if they built it, I'd do that road trip! Think of all the tourist spots, Tunguska, Wooly Mammoth fields, Gulag,...

  • OK boys.. We need $3000 for gas, 6 oil changes en route and a new set of tires when we get home.

  • ... And in the Arctic Bind them.

  • Pretend you wanted to drive 8000 miles. The IRS expects that the cost per mile allowance is $0.50 based on gas, oil, tires, vehicle depreciation.

    To drive those 8000 miles the apportioned cost would be $4,000. You can get 10 round-trip tickets London-NY off-season and 5 on-season for that.

    During your trip if you follow your manufacturer's recommendations you'd need to change your oil three times. So would everyone else. At equal intervals. What a pile up at the mechanic at 3000m, 6000m, and just past i

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