Road traffic and pollution have been a problem for quite a while now, and some say that a solution is putting them underground.
“Human beings tend to like those things to be operating in the background,” says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer at University College Dublin and author of Subterranean London. “There’s almost something magical about it.”
There are already 40 million miles of roads and 1.4 billion cars in the world, and those numbers are only going to go up. This adds up to the average American driver wasting about 54 hours each year waiting in road traffic, and many other negative side effects, such as increased carbon emissions and pollution.
In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk said, “traffic is soul destroying, it’s like acid on the soul.” He thinks that one answer is to put roads underground, but not all of them. What would happen If we did? Could there be many positive effects, or do the cons outweigh the pros?
A huge impact of underground roads is more space. The amount of space taken up by roads in the world is tremendous, and freeing it up could leave room for other helpful things. There can be more room for agriculture and more space for animals to roam, and they wouldn’t get hit by cars. Studies have shown that there have been up to hundreds of millions of roadkill a year in Europe alone.
Driving underground would also be much easier than on the surface, as drivers wouldn’t have to deal with bad weather, like rain or snow. It would also not be impacted as much by earthquakes, which was shown when an earthquake in Chile barely even touched the underground metro system.
Another obvious benefit for underground roads is pollution. There would be almost no air pollution from cars, as well as no noise pollution, which can lead to premature death, as well as many other negative health effects.
However, the benefits of underground roads also come with some risks. Flooding is a very big risk for roads underground, as well as fires from accidents.
The process would also take a lot of money. Boston’s Big Dig, which was only 7.5 miles of road underground, took 15 years and cost more than 20 billion dollars, and the 40 million other miles of road would cost a lot more.
There are many positives and negatives to putting roads underground, and there’s no clear answer as to whether it’s worth it or not. While this probably won’t happen in the near future, sometimes it’s good to wonder if it did.
“Human beings tend to like those things to be operating in the background,” says Bradley Garrett, a cultural geographer at University College Dublin and author of Subterranean London. “There’s almost something magical about it.”
There are already 40 million miles of roads and 1.4 billion cars in the world, and those numbers are only going to go up. This adds up to the average American driver wasting about 54 hours each year waiting in road traffic, and many other negative side effects, such as increased carbon emissions and pollution.
In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk said, “traffic is soul destroying, it’s like acid on the soul.” He thinks that one answer is to put roads underground, but not all of them. What would happen If we did? Could there be many positive effects, or do the cons outweigh the pros?
A huge impact of underground roads is more space. The amount of space taken up by roads in the world is tremendous, and freeing it up could leave room for other helpful things. There can be more room for agriculture and more space for animals to roam, and they wouldn’t get hit by cars. Studies have shown that there have been up to hundreds of millions of roadkill a year in Europe alone.
Driving underground would also be much easier than on the surface, as drivers wouldn’t have to deal with bad weather, like rain or snow. It would also not be impacted as much by earthquakes, which was shown when an earthquake in Chile barely even touched the underground metro system.
Another obvious benefit for underground roads is pollution. There would be almost no air pollution from cars, as well as no noise pollution, which can lead to premature death, as well as many other negative health effects.
However, the benefits of underground roads also come with some risks. Flooding is a very big risk for roads underground, as well as fires from accidents.
The process would also take a lot of money. Boston’s Big Dig, which was only 7.5 miles of road underground, took 15 years and cost more than 20 billion dollars, and the 40 million other miles of road would cost a lot more.
There are many positives and negatives to putting roads underground, and there’s no clear answer as to whether it’s worth it or not. While this probably won’t happen in the near future, sometimes it’s good to wonder if it did.
