Links in Progress: Expanding the Mediterranean's busiest port
Plus: New tunnels, monorails, canals, small modular reactors, and horseless carriages
This is the second issue of ‘Links in Progress’, semi-regular roundups of interesting stuff that's happening in topics that we care about. In this one, Harry Rushworth gives his update on new physical infrastructure being built around the world – tunnels, ports, canals, and more. You can opt out of Links in Progress here.
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1. The longest rail tunnel in the world, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, reopened in September after almost a year of engineering works following a derailment last autumn. The tunnel shaves an hour off most journeys between Switzerland and Italy compared to the ‘panoramic’ route that twists through the Alpine valleys.
2. The Fehmarnbelt tunnel under construction between Denmark and Germany crosses an 11 mile strait in the Baltic Sea and will set several records when it opens later this decade. It will be the longest and second deepest immersed tunnel in the world, the longest combined road and rail tunnel, and the longest underwater road tunnel. Whereas tunnels of this length are conventionally bored, the shallow nature of this waterway allows the immersion technique to be used, where a trench is dug across the sea floor into which precast concrete segments are sunk, joined, and sealed. When finished, the link will replace a 45 minute ferry journey with a ten minute drive, and it will shorten the Copenhagen to Hamburg rail journey by over two hours. At a total of $8 billion, the tunnel costs around $730 million per mile.
3. The elevated section of Hanoi metro’s new Line 3 opened in August, connecting the west of the city with the central bus station. This is Vietnam’s second metro line, following the opening of Hanoi’s Line 2a in late 2021 (Lines 1 and 2 are planned, but have not been completed yet). The tunnelled section of Line 3 that will connect the network with the central rail station remains under construction, but has been delayed to 2027. Despite the delays, Hanoi has recently expanded its programme into one of the most ambitious metro programmes outside of China (though supported by Chinese construction partners), with an aim for around 400 kilometers of intracity railways across ten lines to be built by 2035, for less than $40 billion (~$160 million per mile).
4. Saudi Arabia’s government has announced that it is to build a driverless monorail system in Riyadh, connecting offices, retail and leisure across the new King Abdullah Financial District. The 3.6km elevated network is being built at a cost of $241 million (~$108 million per mile). It’s the latest of many mass transit investments in the Saudi capital, including a seven-line metro network that is under construction; the first line of which is due to open later this year.
5. Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have signed deals for nuclear energy to power their growing AI and data capabilities, including deployments of Small Modular Reactors. Some of the deals have already been subjected to environmental and permitting challenges, including Meta’s proposal for a data centre on a site next to a nuclear power station, which is home to a rare species of bee.
6. The Tanger Med Port in Morocco is to be expanded. It’s the busiest port in the Mediterranean, with capacity for nine million twenty-foot equivalent containers a year being expanded to allow another one million by 2025 by developing twelve new berths and an additional 87 hectares of open land. For a port that only opened in 2007, it’s had incredible growth, but any celebrations may be short-lived as further expansions are severely constrained by its position on the edge of the continental shelf.
7. France has begun construction of a €5.1 billion canal to connect Paris with the ports of the English Channel (or Le Manche in French) at a cost of €77 million per mile. When completed in 2030, the 66-mile long, 54-meter wide Seine–Nord Europe Canal will increase the tonnage of ships that can traverse the route from 650 to over 4,000, improving the efficiency and carbon footprint of freight haulage in the region by shifting freight onto waterways.
8. Earlier this summer, the Polish Government confirmed its intention to proceed with a new transport hub in the heart of the country, with a new airport, high speed rail links including to the German border at Frankfurt (Oder), and associated highway infrastructure. Initial plans are for a two-runway facility to open by 2032, and future expansion is set to include an additional two runways that can manage a total of 100 million passengers per year. This would rival London’s Heathrow and Istanbul airports, both of which currently serve around 80 million passengers per year.
9. Brazil could become the first country in the world to have an air-taxi service with an electric vertical take off and landing vehicle, after a test flight by China’s EHang took place in Sao Paulo this summer. The autonomous vehicle has a range of 16 nautical miles and a top speed of 80 miles per hour.
10. Nearly a third of the costs of building a tram in Britain are spent on relocating utilities. Ben Hopkinson has written about how a few small changes to rules and principles for tram network design could dramatically reduce the cost and time to build them.
11. Egypt is home to the tallest building in Africa now that construction of the structure of the 394 meter tall Iconic Tower has completed (13m taller than the Empire State Building). The skyscraper is a key landmark of the New Administrative Capital, a new city being built to the east of Cairo that broke ground in 2015, and it will one day be joined by the 240m Forbes International Tower, a first of its kind design that will be powered by clean hydrogen.
12. A new 3.1km bridge opened between the two newest landmasses of Macau, which also carries utility infrastructure to provide water and power for urban development, and in a first for the territory, novel wind barriers to protect motorists from typhoons. The bridge has two dedicated lanes for motorcycles and at a cost of 5.27 billion patacas, equates to ~$330 million per mile. Alongside land reclamation in Macau, on the other side of the Pearl River Delta, 1,600 acres of land is being reclaimed for a third runway at Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok airport.
13. Horse-drawn carriages that take tourists around the historic centre of Brussels have been replaced with electrical ones, after the city banned the use of horse-drawn carriages for animal welfare reasons.
14. A French company is selling e-bikes that use capacitors rather than batteries. The capacitors charge up when pedalling, braking, or travelling downhill, avoiding the need to plug in any batteries or pay for power.
15. Judge Glock argues that the United States may be building too much infrastructure. As in the UK, permitting obstacles and bureaucracy are a key blocker to private investment, but Glock argues that federally-funded infrastructure has often provided a net negative return.
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