
Switzerland bores underground - Osiris30
http://www.revue.ch/en/editions/2016/04/detail/news/detail/News/switzerland-bores-underground/
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bogomipz
"According to a study conducted under the leadership of the Federal Office for
Spatial Development, the new alpine tunnel will hardly relieve any pressure on
the roads but instead create new rail traffic, as the newspaper “Der Bund”
reports."

Isn't the environmental impact of 1000 people traveling from point A to point
B via rail far preferable to than 1000 people making the same journey by car?
The quote above seems to imply that rail provides no appreciable environmental
benefit, I'm finding that hard to believe.

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tallowen
What they're saying is that there will be just as many cars on the road as
before and therefore not reducing the environmental impact of the road.

I imagined it to be something like this:

Old:

\- Road: 1000 users

\- Train tunnel: 1000 users

New:

\- Road: 1000 users

\- Train: 2000 users

Although the train is more environmentally friendly than the road, I think the
article is saying the impact of adding it is just that more people make the
trip rather than the same number of people doing it in a more environmentally
friendly way. This is basically the concept of induced demand i.e. build it
and they will come.

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131hn
Am i reading right ? 17b € for a 57km tunnel (on an existing railway, only to
flatter trajectory a little) just to save a little time ? That seems
expensive..

~~~
jcranmer
"Just a little" reduction in grade can mean quite a lot. The grade on a
typical staircase is about 60%--for every meter of horizontal distance, the
staircase rises 60 cm. In terms of hiking, one trail I went downhill had a
persistent 30% grade for 1.5km or so, very much to the complaint of my knees.
A persistent 10% grade would usually be considered quite strenuous for hiking.

For roads, the maximum permissible grade is lower. The steepest road in the
world is about 37% grade; the exit on a highway signed "Truckers: DO NOT USE"
was 13% grade. In general, anything above about 5% grade requires excessive
grade warning signs.

Railroads have even stricter grade tolerances. The original B&O used "inclined
planes" (effectively stationary locomotives providing extra pulling power) to
navigate the tortuous 5% grade in Mt. Airy. This was quickly replaced with a
1.5% grade loop and eventually a tunnel (.8% grade). In general, freight
railroads like the max grade to be around .5-1%, although mountainous terrain
is usually not so forgiving (most of the major passes in the Rocky Mountains
run about ~2-2.5% grade). The steeper grades require either extra locomotives
to be put on the trains or the weight of the trains to be drastically reduced.

~~~
jmcdiesel
I've seen trucks (tractor-trailers) with flames coming from the brakes on 6%
grades downhill... and the uphill sides of those the trucks are in low gear at
high RPM doing 15-20mph MAX, running at 3-4x the rpm they'd run doing 75 on
the highway... people underestimate grade and the effect it has on heavy
vehicles

The maximum commercially viable (due to weight restriction) grade for freight
railroads is 2.2% ...

~~~
jcranmer
If you want some hard numbers on why high grade is so problematic:

When you're pulling something along a road or a railtrack on level ground, the
primary force you need to overcome is rolling friction, which is proportional
to µ×N, where µ is in the range of 0.001 (rail) to 0.01 (road) and N is the
normal force against the surface. For a 10 kN car (that's about 1000 kilos),
this means that you need a force of about 10 N for a railcar. When you go up
an incline, the rolling friction decreases according to the cosine of the
angle, but now you need to overcome gravity--and this amount goes up by the
sine of the angle. A measly 2% grade requires pulling a force of about 210 N,
a factor of 21×.

Basically, grade really kills because you actually have to counteract gravity
as opposed to friction.

~~~
jmcdiesel
First, thanks! I genuinely appreciate that knowledge, I'd have never looked it
up on my own..

Second... why's gravity gotta be such a dick? :)

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jsingleton
Appears to be down and I couldn't find a cached copy.

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merraksh
The original title is "Switzerland bores underground". I'm fine with a
different title, but please replace "it's" with "its". Thanks, and sorry for
nitpicking.

~~~
raverbashing
When I saw the title and the domain I knew the title had been changed because
no average Swiss would do such a stupid mistake as to get its and it's
confused

~~~
gpvos
It is indeed a mistake that is almost only made by native English speakers,
which is in itself an interesting phenomenon.

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dnet
IMHO it's because you learn your first language spoken first, written after --
and most people learn further languages after they learned writing, so they
can learn to differentiate between words that sound similar/same.

~~~
lazyjones
Perhaps it's because native English speakers more frequently communicate with
English-speaking people in an informal setting (where such mistakes happen
more often and are copied), whereas non-native speakers tend to read English
mostly in edited publications etc. and (more sloppily) communicate with
friends in their native language.

~~~
raverbashing
While it is true that yes, people in general communicate more sloppily in
informal settings it doesn't mean they don't know the formal way of writing
(at least for common terms)

German dialects are pretty far from the "official" language, but everybody
knows that

~~~
sievebrain
You're assuming its vs it's is always due to lack of knowledge. Sometimes it's
just a brainfart.

I noticed today that I had sent an email that used the wrong form of "to"
("too" instead). This isn't because I don't know English. It's just that what
came out of my fingers was wrong. Mea culpa, it happens.

The way English uses the apostrophe is especially tedious and offers no value:
it'd be no real shame if the distinction between "its" and "it's" disappeared
over time, just like English lost gendered nouns and words like thy and thine.

~~~
raverbashing
Oh brainfarts and autocorrects do happen, but by the frequency I see this
mistake happening I see it's not just a regular slip

~~~
sievebrain
You probably see a lot more English than other languages, so you'll see a
proportionally higher number of mistakes too.

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speps
The amount of traffic they're getting from that Newsletter will look insane on
their dashboard.

URL has : ?utm_source=Newsletter42016&utm_medium=E-Mail

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jsingleton
It would do if the site was up. HN hug of death?

~~~
gpvos
It was sluggish, but I did get through.

~~~
gpvos
Archive: [http://archive.is/AdZrF](http://archive.is/AdZrF)

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simonebrunozzi
Should it be "its" instead of "it's" in the title?

At least that's the way they taught me English in high school (in Italy).

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OJFord
It is, is it?

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spacemanmatt
...but above ground, they're killing

