Russian Official Proposes Road That Could Connect London To NYC

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."

Comments

Re:They don't have the funds for that also that pa

[siddesu]

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....

So with Russia still under sanctionsq

[silentcoder]

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 ?

They're still paving the trans-Siberian highway

[Dr. Evil]

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

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

Real porpose of the road

[Catmeat]

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... http://newobserveronline.com/r...

Better commincations across Russia will help them counter this and help tie the country together.

Re:Real porpose of the road

[dywolf]

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.

Re:Cool idea with a problem

[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 obviously, but in the other direction, you know, to avoid Putin's airliner murdering Buk SAM launchers and all that.

Re:Cool idea with a problem

[thedonger]

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.

Re:Bloody Hell!

[Paradise Pete]

Great idea. We definitely need 13,000 miles of this.

prepare for unforeseen compliactions

[nimbius]

some things we may not have considered:
1. Having to learn the phrase "can i have the key to the bathroom" in 7 languages.
2. understanding, yet never being entirely certain, when left or right lane driving applies but being totally sure your wife is probably wrong.
3. switching road trip snacks from potato chips, to Kotlety, to pea pats, to landjager, and finally back to potato chips but now you have to call them crisps while youre stuck in gridlock piccadilly traffic.
4. having to keep multiple bribe currencies for various checkpoints and rolling infractions.
5. The phrasebook doesnt have anything to get hungarian insurance scammers off the bonnet of your car at 3 am
6. 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.

No one trusts Russia

[Karmashock]

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.

Re:How about Russian roads without pot holes?

[fraxinus-tree]

Generally, this is exactly what Russians really propose: pay us to fix our roads so you can, sometimes, having a lot of money and time, drive on them. The whole "proposal" consists of roads that currently exist. Outside Russia, they are even in a good state.

Sounds like fun but...

[Drakker]

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