What is every traveler’s ideal for the ultimate road trip? Is from the East Coast of the United States to the beautiful shores of the Pacific? Up and down Italy’s Amalfi coast? What about from London to New York?
If Vladimir Yakunin gets his way, that third option may become a reality. Yakunin, the head of the Russian Railways, proposed the idea for trans-Siberian highway that would connect London and Moscow to the U.S. by way of Alaska at the Russian Academy of Science annual meeting last year.
Yakunin’s hypothetical plan for Trans-Eurasian belt Development (TEPR) comes out to some 8,064 miles (12,978 kilometers) from London to Alaska via Moscow, according to CNN.
The Russian leg of the trip is incredibly long, with the proposed highway covering an estimated 6,200 miles from the Western region of Russia to Chukotka in Siberia.
The highway would then cross the Bering Strait to Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, connecting to the tiny town of Nome. The plan doesn’t offer any details on how drivers will travel 55 miles across the ocean. Unfortunately, there is also no road connecting Nome any major expressway, so you might be better off using a dog sled.
Presuming the road is built from Nome to Fairbanks, which then connects with the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the total mileage from London to New York would come to 12,910 miles. That’s a hell of a lot of pit stops.
Yakunin has idea who is going to pay for TEPR (Vladimir Putin, Yakunin’s buddy), but the project would cost an estimated “”trillions of dollar,” making it depressingly unlikely. But hey, we can dream!
h/t CNN, The Siberian Times