[buybackoff]

Just yesterday B1M published an interesting video about the future longest tunnel between Lyon, France and Turin, Italy. It will be more than 50km, deeply below the Alps. The project has finally secured funding, from both countries and EU, and is on track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFrr-L_BcC4

[sofixa]

It would be brilliant. Currently the Paris-Milan train line is barely competitive with flying between the two; knocking off 2-3 hours from the trip would make it around 4 hours in total, which is very competitive with flying (1h30 flight, but both CDG and Malpensa are big airports far outside the city, with significant time wasted getting to them, through security, etc). And of course it would be massive for Lyon - Turin, and Lyon - Milan too, where flying wouldn't even make sense any more.

[ur-whale]

And now that Italy has built a tax haven for HNWI [1], the faster commute will IMO make business boom.

https://nomoretax.eu/italy-a-new-tax-haven/

[seqastian]

Another one between Italy, Austria and by extension Germany is scheduled for 2032 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenner_Base_Tunnel

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Isn't Italy a little geologically unstable?

I'd be a bit nervous, going through a long tunnel, in a region known for vulcanism and earthquakes.

[gunzel412]

Let me introduce you to the Seikan Tunnel [1] between the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido in Japan, 53.85km with 23.3km of that under the sea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Now, that’s scary. I do know that the Japanese have the world’s best anti-earthquake architecture (because they need it), but it’s still scary.

[bobthepanda]

Tunnels are actually pretty safe in earthquakes, Japan for example is criss crossed with them.

A tunnel is actually the least likely to shake; if you shake a jello with fruit inside it, the surface moves a lot but the interior fruit won’t move all that much.

[eCa]

The 57 km Gotthard Base Tunnel has been in operation since 2016. There's also a 3km long tunnel between France and Italy that opened in 1882. Nowadays there's probably hundreds of 1km+ tunnels in the Alps.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Well, from the other responses, it seems the Italian Alps are pretty stable.

[tacone]

Yes but we're drilling holes through them to fix that.

[whizzter]

Italy isn't a puny country, it's over 1000kms between Sicily and the Alps (Like LA to Albuquerque), seems the fault lines reaches northern Italy (about 100km from the alps) but the amount of larger quakes seems smaller there.

[AnimalMuppet]

It is unstable, but (I think) more so in the south. I'm not sure that the Alps region is unstable.