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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 1040436, member: 27"] I suspect Ottomets is right and the powers that be are at least leaning hard towards the cheapest solutions to the problem, which means the tunnel options are being all but discounted. I hope that when the solutions are debated, they take into account the long term costs for each solution, as well as safety. Given the harsh winter environment in CNY, the elevated highway options are going to have huge on going costs to continually re-build the roads as they get destroyed by snow, ice, salt and the extreme temperature changes that the roads are subjected to. They erode at a significantly faster rate than normal roads because they are exposed from above and below. The sunken highway option also ends up with significantly higher day to day costs, a little less than an elevated highway, because of all the new bridges required to allow traffic to flow over the highway east and west. With a tunnel solution, all that goes away. You don't have to salt it, you don't have to plow it, and it is almost completely shielded from the primary causes of erosion and deterioration. It should last much longer and be far easier to maintain, even given that tunnels surely have some extra realatively maintenance costs for fans, etc. When you take this into account, and take into account all the prime real estate that is freed when you opt for a tunnel based solution, I am not sure the true long term cost for a tunnel based solution is really going to be higher. Couple that with the safety gains (anyone who has driven in the winter on elevated highways knows they are the most dangerous stretches of highway that exist); a tunnel, protected from all elements of winter, should be if anything safer than a normal stretch of highway, at least in the winter where even a white out is not a problem, I think a tunnel based solution starts to make a lot of sense. Not a fan of the 4 billion dollar Eastern tunnel proposal, that one sounds like the cost could well double over time and the pricetag is too high even now to look at seriously. But the relatively shallow cut and cover type tunnels they are proposing should be relatively straightforward to get done and I don't see great risk in cost overruns. Would love to see cost estimates for all the solutions but right now, this is where I am leaning. [/QUOTE]

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