I wonder what it would be like, if it were possible (which it’s not) and practical (which it’s also not).

I was thinking maybe it’d take the path of least water – Iceland then Greenland, but probably not. Having seen Greenland from a plane I suspect building a road there would be harder than buliding it across the water.

I think some kind of floating pontoon structure would work best. But of course, the journey would be immensely long and you woudln’t be able to drive straight through. There’d have to be artificial islands every few hundred miles with service stations on, but they’d have to be like overnight resorts with loads of stuff for you and the kids to do to remain interested – like transatlantic cruises are now.

Without any junctions you would have loads of constant speed traffic. You could fit speed and distance regulators to cars to have them all drive at speed a set distance from each other, and steer – you wouldn’t have to drive then and could read or watch movies or something. There’d be few hazards too apart from the odd seagul landing on the road.

You could always fly…

Or you could have just as good an experience with a RoRo ferry…

… and some drugs.

You don’t want no stinkin’ bridge what you need is A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!

We need traveltoobs, humanpods blown thru using compressed air, you know like the money tubes in Tesco !

Hmm, a transatlantic ferry would be fun too. It’s a pain in the arse having to get all your stuff in little bags to fly and then hire a car when you get there.

Hmm.. travel tubes.. or maybe a train bridge like Eurostar but you have a decent sized carriage to yourself with sofas, TV, videos, food, drink etc. The trains could be electric powered by wave energy from the pontoon floats.

Was about to mention a tunnel. Think it was the BBC did a program about one that would be tethered to the bottom of the ocean, have a maglev train in it and contain a vacuum so the train wouldn’t have any air resistance so it could go bloody quick. Seemed like a great idea.

Seemed like a great idea.

Until a ship drops anchor and cracks it…..

Would there be a bike path?

Cyclists don’t pay road tax, so obviously they wouldn’t be allowed to use it.

Without any junctions you would have loads of constant speed traffic.

Interesting…what would be the overtaking etiquette on this bridge?

There wouldn’t be any. There’d be a 60mph lane, 70mph lane and 80mph lane, you have to go exactly at that speed, and you don’t change lanes.

😀

Can’t we just build a large ramp in Milford Haven, extend the M4 from Swansea, and just jump the atlantic? Anyone afraid of doubles could just land in Waterford in Ireland and drive the middle bit……. 😉

The problem is to be of any use the bridge would have to connect big population centres. So that’s northern europe with north east USA (probably round about boston) that’s about 3000 miles.

Which is a long way to drive!

The bridge would be of no use in reality. You can drive from the East coast of the USA to the West coast but no-one does this for business, they all fly. Road freight does this, but plenty of that already goes by sea and it’s a lot cheaper than road even on normal roads, never mind giant floating ones 🙂

I was just finding it fun to consider what such a thing would actually be like that’s all.

It’s only 3 hours in a Bloodhound

I was just finding it fun to consider what such a thing would actually be like that’s all.

Well in that case, a big floating conveyor belt is your answer.

Here’s how it would work.

Bridge is 3000 miles long
The first 100 or so miles are conveyors running at increasing speeds, with only a small transition between each on. After the speed up zone the central conveyor runs at around 1,000 miles an hour. This get the cars across the bridge in 3 hours, where they meet the 100 mile long slow down zone.

Its a brilliant idea and I thought of it first. I can almost smell the money 🙂

It already exists and I’ve cycled over it…

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQF6MgubEXdWhJUI-gAP8MdaCNG1RodVGC_IVtphTUZhjpwi3sZ

How would crashes be handled? This is a fun thought exercise!

@richmtb, Robert Heinlein had most of it back in the 1940s in The Roads Must Roll

I’m adding the shops and restaurants to your scheme – that’s where the money is!

Without any junctions you would have loads of constant speed traffic.

Given everybody is travelling in between the same two destinations why would anyone be driving – aside from the abject boredom and the danger of thousands of drivers asleep at the wheel on their 50hr drive – each car is going to be getting through 6 – 10 tanks of fuel – even in a Prius that a £500 trip each way in fuel alone (presumably the toll is more than a fiver). You might as well just load all the cars onto a train and let the drivers sleep through the monotony

Its a brilliant idea and I thought of it first

‘Fraid not, doesn’t Assimov have these things in his books?

Link it to Mexico. That is further down so gravity will do the work. Fact.

Downside is that cars will come off the end at Mach 6, so stopping them before they hit Peru could be an issue.

After the speed up zone the central conveyor runs at around 1,000 miles an hour

Wouldn’t work. Too much power, too hard to build.

How would crashes be handled?

Helicopters every so often to clear up the mess, and a boat to take the wreckage back home.

How would crashes be handled?

Each 50ft of road section can flip over so crashes can be dumped onto a conveyor belt suspended below the road deck.

If the construction budget is tight do away with the conveyor and just drop them in the sea.

This is what we all need in our houses 🙂

No need for bridges or cars then.

Nimoy yes, but Shatner would start to get annoying after a while.

Arthur C Clarke described a high-speed underground transport system covering global distances using sealed ‘pods’ or ‘carriages’ running through evacuated tubes in his novella Against The a Fall Of Night, and the expanded novel, The City And The Stars. He wrote the first story in 1956.
He also postulated the use of orbiting satellites during WW2.
Clever bugger. 😀

It’ll never work – imagine the chaos when everyone needs to switch to the other side of the road half way across.

Clever bugger

The satellites thing was a good shout but we’ll never be travelling the world in evacuated tubes. The cost of air travel is high enough, the tunnels would cost far more to make, and be very hard to keep evacuated.

Remember how long it took to build the channel tunnel? Imagine 200 times that distance.

Look to the East. If the plan is to take the car to America then a crossing/tunnel across the Bering Strait is more realistic. Some road trip that though!