62 years in the making: NYC's newest water tunnel nears the finish line

The problems with getting public infrastructure projects done in time or at all are political, not technical.

There typically are no technical solutions to rhose.

AGI is easier than getting New York City to complete an infrastructure project in less than a decade or less than a billion dollars.

The corruption and graft run so deep you would have to literally murder a lot of people to get that to happen.

That is true. In fact it relates to one of current America's greatest truths: coordination problems here are much more difficult than many technological problems. This is what makes many of those "oh so you take those autonomous vehicles, put them on a track for efficiency reasons, then link them together so they can transport more people, and voila! you have a train!" comments ring hollow.

Building a train requires coordination. Building an autonomous vehicle requires technological innovation and convincing a few people at the top levels of government. The specifics matter (and the Abundance guys have done a great job summarizing them) but it's due to an entrenchment of certain styles of laws.

So the answer to "why do Americans build self-driving cars to ease transport when Europeans just built subway systems?" is "we do these things not because they are hard, but because they're actually much easier than the other thing you find easy".

The "problem" here isn't the construction of a tunnel. It's the political reality of the people on top of it.

You have to deal with directly affecting real estate owners, potentially 100s of thousands of different ones in NYC. Not to mention 100s of years of underground infra and all the different companies that own that stuff without cutting service to anyone. It's insanely difficult and I'm not sure I understand why you think it wouldn't be.

Haha the technical difficulty is not the hold up here sweet summer child

Should they ever reboot Die Hard; it'll need a sequence involving CA HSR infrastructure.

The project started in 1954. A 70 year old project.

I was just going to ask is this the tunnel from Die Hard, so cool.

Die Hard: The Way of Water

Mark's money is sucked up from the entire world, whereas NYC's money is picked from the pockets of NYC residents, obviously I'd prefer one over the other given I live in NYC

> remember that Mark Zuckerberg spent $77 billion on the Metaverse.

I'll never be a billionaire, but I'll also never spend $77 billion with so little to show for it.

Still a bit more to go. Hopefully they offer some tours of the final phase before it’s flooded and no longer accessible for decades.

> The Bronx and Manhattan already receive water from it, and the final phase — extending service to Brooklyn and Queens — is expected to be completed by 2032.

I don't know about New York in particular, but Chicago water engineering seems a related topic.

Here you do deep tunnels to avoid the surface, in ways another poster said; everything is easier when nothing is in the way.

For the mathematical difference, 400 feet below sea level and 800 feet below are almost exactly the same: difficulties are water getting in to your pit, but the machines that work on rock, work on rock at the same speed regardless of depth, so the difference between 400 feet and 800 feet is best described as 400 feet difference. A big issue here is that they do not drill; they hammer. Pounding base pylons into bedrock causes dramatic rhythms in the surrounding 500m, but that's to deal with the bedrock, not depth.

The depth allows it to be drilled through bedrock, which avoids a bunch of complications on an already complicated project.

This thing will probably be operating hundreds of years from now. What a project.

It's a 60 mile long tunnel and in order for water to flow through it, you need either pumps or a downhill gradient.

I'd guess the reason for the 800 ft is because the reservoir it'll draw from is near sea level.

> Also, what is the general mathematical relationship between depth, rock pressure / weight, and energy required to drill?

There isn't any. It completely depends on the local geology.

Liquids are easy because there are no lateral load transfers, and the structures have to bear the weight of the entire water column above them. But with soil you get lateral load transfer, so the pressure on the tunnel is not easily relatable to its depth.

That's also why you can have mines that are kilometers deep, yet with tunnels held by wooden beams.

> energy required to drill

That depends on the rock type. In london, most things are clay, so not actually that solid (ie it needs shoring up immediately, and will collapse without supports, hence the travelling shield)

manhattan schist appears to be reasonably hard (not granite, but also no clay)

Those are… actually some very good questions.

Probably never. The tunnels cost a lot to build but, once built run almost for free - they're powered by gravity and will keep running for close to a century before major maintained is needed.

Capital vs operating is a big factor here. The tunnels operations & maintenance cost is probably far lower than a desalinization plant that could produce an equivalent volume of potable water.

Desalination will be a West Coast thing. The East Coast has abundant fresh water.

It’s probably more likely AI will become sentient and kill us than it is desalination and clean energy are cheaper than this.

This was only a 60 year project because of politics.