“He described the new $400 million infrastructure as a colossal ‘tunnel with windows’”
What would an actual tunnel cost in Europe or China?
What would an actual tunnel cost in Europe or China?
This specific "tunnel with windows" is $400 m USD quoted in toto for a 675-foot avalanche resistant rock shed.
In Yosemite they're cutting through the edges of hard rock - as opposed to the much softer soils under London and the Thames, and they're making an impact shock resistant structure exposed to daily heating and cooling as opposed to relatively zero shock resistant tunnels with far less of a temperature cycle.
For a Yosemite tunnel the length would be greater and the cutting challenges greater (rock V soil).
Apples, Oranges.
You might be better served looking to European rock shed construction of a similar scale - the civil engineering aspects would be similar.
Scotland, on the other hand, could do with a lot more tunnels (especially on the Rest and Be Thankful route) but it never seems to be considered. The Faroe Islands have so many tunnels that one island is nicknamed the piccolo.
The environmental consultants will drag this out for a decade if they can.
I don't think I would blame the environmental consultants though. This is just how we do things now.
The USD 2B path train stop at WTC became USD 4B+ and nobody went to prison for it. I don't think it should have even been USD 2B. All we needed was a path train stop.
Now that those neighborhoods are occupied by people who go on Hackernews and Bloomberg, they tend not to like having their streets converted into open pit mines, and so constructing subways is ungodly expensive.