Comment by jacobolus
6 years ago
If you extend it to the whole Pan-American Highway, the timeline gets stretched to 3 or 4 decades from first proposals through execution, but the scope is pretty amazing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-American_Highway
I've always found it kind of surprising that the Darien Gap has never been closed. I can only assume that if Panama and Colombia were rich countries rather than poor countries that it would have happened. People solved the engineering challenges required to build the Channel Tunnel and the Øresund Bridge, after all.
(Note that I'm not saying that it should happen or that it would be a good thing necessarily.)
The Øresund Bridge was discussed for a century before being built, and was deeply controversial.
It’s not just money, it’s a matter of government not having very good control over those northern areas of Columbia. Even if they built the road, it wouldn’t be safe to travel due to the density of smugglers and cartel activity in general.
Building (not to mention maintaining) a long road through a sparsely inhabited tropical marsh/swamp is pretty expensive and complicated, especially if you want to minimize environmental immpact.
The reasons are mosly two: -deforestation -blocking illegal drugs
Yeah,
I think this example along with what I just randomly know about the other examples, gives the impression that this list is essentially meaningless.
I recall the "Marin Ships" being indeed constructed quickly but of very poor quality and in no way equivalent to constructing real navel ships quickly, just "we can put X amount of metal into the water and hope it doesn't sink too quickly".
And so forth, for significant number of these examples. Some of the examples, that I know nothing of, might be more "real" or more significant examples time-efficiency, but the list doesn't seem a credit to them. Lots of these are "yeah, we can put a stake in the ground quickly" and that's it.
I had to look this up. Marinships were the west coast Liberty Ships, built in Sausalito. Later they build fleet tankers & oilers there, probably to the same "get it done now" quality standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinship
My dad went to the European theater on a Liberty. He had the top bunk in the hold and spent the voyage looking at the truly awful welding that had been done in the shipyard. But they didn't have to last longer than a few years, so lots of corners were cut.