A’highway over 20,000 km long to connect theEurope to the United States (from London to New York) crossing the Russia: this is the idea proposed in 2015 by Vladimir Yakuninthen president of the Russian RailwaysThe project, called Trans-Eurasian Belt Developmenthas sparked much discussion but, in the end, has been shelved. But what would this infrastructure have been like? And which would have been the main cities touched by this intercontinental corridor?
According to this project the super-highway would have started from London and by exploiting the motorways already present in Europe it would have reached the gates of Russia. From here a new infrastructure was to be built up to Fly and then across Russia, running alongside the already existing Trans-Siberian Railway. Once arrived at the Bering Strait, The project does not illustrate how the transition from one continent to another would be foreseen.
The only thing we know is that the narrowest point of the strait measures approximately 88 km, and that the intended landing point was north of Name, a small town of Alaska poorly connected to the rest of the country. This implies that even in this stretch it would have been necessary to design a completely new road systemThe final stages of the project would include Fairbanks, always in Alaska, and finally, after crossing the Canada and part of the United States, the highway would have ended at New York.
In fact, in addition to the road network, the project also included: Strengthen the railway network and of build a series of oil and gas pipelinesespecially in the more remote areas of Siberia.
The work would have an estimated length of 20,777 km: assuming that we travel along it at a constant speed of 120 km/hto go from London to New York it would have taken about 173 hours or a little more than an uninterrupted week. The Estimated cost of this work is in the order of thousands of billions of dollars but, according to Yakunin, the potential profit from the work would make it possible to compensate for the money spent to create it.
