[thaumasiotes]

The article says this:

> The income from this new tunnel is expected to fund the next tunnel projects on the Faroe Islands.

Which seems like something of a rosy description. I tend to agree that this is going to require heavy subsidies. But back of the envelope:

- The "whole tunnel project", involving multiple tunnels, is estimated at 260m euros.

- One transit one way across the most expensive tunnel is estimated at 10 euros. The tunnels aren't very long, so taking a trip through one is not arduous.

- The project's costs of construction could be covered if every one of the ~50k residents crossed that tunnel 5,000 times. That's about 14 times a day over one year, or twice a day over 7 years. A 7-year payback time doesn't seem that bad.

- The problems in that estimate are:

-- Not everyone is going to use the big tunnel. Most of the population has no need to cross that route; they'll use cheaper tunnels or stay on their own island...

-- ...or they'll ride as a passenger in someone else's car. It's unrealistic to expect every resident, down to the babies, to pay for their own independent set of tunnel crossings.

-- The tunnels also need to cover the cost of their own maintenance. Maintenance on undersea projects gets tricky.

[nemomarx]

isn't this a tourist attraction? You wouldn't want to estimate with the local population but by visitors or something.

https://nors.ku.dk/english/news/2025/tourists-flock-to-the-f...

Looks like about 130k visitors a year but I'm sure the tourism board is trying to get that number way up.

[thaumasiotes]

Well, they want it to be a tourist attraction. But that's unlikely to work because it's in the Faroe Islands.

The other aspect of that is that while it's perfectly reasonable to expect some share of the residents to use a tunnel twice a day, tourists are going to use it 0-2 times per trip. 130k tourists a year are worth 260k trips a year at the upper end.