Norway Is Building A Submerged Bridge That Can Cut Trip Time By 11 Hours

I am a country, I have about $870b in oil funds saved and I have a population of 5.2 million people. What’s my name and what can I do with the money?

Well my name is Norway and I can build a “crazy” submerged floating bridge for $25b/9tr Naira.

A trip from Kristiansand to Trondheim which is estimated to be about 1094Km can last for about 21 hours because of a congestion of ferries and that’s nearly a day but this ambitious plan seeks to cut that time by 11 hours all things being equal.  

According to the Wired, Norwegians are quite used to going underwater in tunnels, says Kjersti Kvalheim Dunham, the project manager overseeing the revamping of the E39 route. The nation’s already got 1,150 tunnels, 35 of which go under water……. the 4,300-feet deep, 3,300-feet wide Sognefjord may be the perfect candidate for this first-of-its kind crossing. The structure would be made up of two curved, 4,000-foot long concrete tubes—one for each direction—hanging 65 to 100 feet below the surface.

Besides the immediate advantage of cutting significantly the amount of time needed to travel across both locations, there is the advantage of a near zero weather effect like flooding and snow preventing people from travelling and while this looks cool on paper, questions like interference with Navy ships still remain unanswered. Also significant are questions of bedrock strength among others.

World over, smart transportation is the way forward even as engineers mull technologies like the hyperloop which is capable of transporting humans at speeds of 700 miles per hour or 1,125 Km per hour. So the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is over 610Km or 380 Miles with an average drive time of 6 hours and 25 minutes. In the Nigerian context, this could be a typical trip from Abuja to Sokoto or from Lagos to Delta barring heavy traffic. With this concept though, when you have steady speeds of over 1000Km/hr, you can be in your destination in about 30 minutes. The idea was born out of the California’s government’s plan to build a $60b high speed rail system of about 340Km/hr.