- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, but see my earlier remarks about the scope of the project compared to the Trans-Siberian Highway or just "build entire freeway network for whole western USSR."
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
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HanEmpire
Delicious
That project just creates bypasses for the pre-existing highway. Right now the road passes through the middle of towns and cities, and it's a mess for the local traffic. 150 is reasonable for scooting the highway a bit to the side here and there.
Random Member
Gardener of Human Happiness
- Location
- Behind You
>people want to actually build more roads
Gulag, gulag, gulag! All of you go to gulag!
None of you are free from revisionism!
Gulag, gulag, gulag! All of you go to gulag!
None of you are free from revisionism!
- Location
- Elsewhere
Bah, we don't really need roads. Needing roads is for capitalists, we can just build more trains and steel plants. 
- Location
- Germany
But capitalists love trains too.Bah, we don't really need roads. Needing roads is for capitalists, we can just build more trains and steel plants.
The only methods of transport untainted by capitalism are tanks and tractors.
- Location
- Elsewhere
Give every citizen a T34 instead of a car. They don't need roads after all
- Location
- Under your couch
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[]Trans-Siberian Road: Constructing a simple road across the vastness of Siberia and the Far east is a massive but highly important undertaking. By committing to building out a single road line across the entire nation and bypassing any slow down a high-speed corridor can be built. This should greatly enhance traffic through towns while minimizing the load on local roads while also providing a critical avenue for the maintenance of the trans-Siberian and an important military corridor. The program itself is also more involved in the construction of bypasses for urban concentrations rather than a new road itself, saving a considerable degree of funds while improving through-flow. (60 Resources per Dice 0/150)
[]Moscow High Capacity Road Ring: A four-lane combined road system for the linkages around the Union's core industrial city is important for both local development and for further initiatives toward the construction of more automotive capacity. Truck shipping is steadily becoming a larger factor of conventional enterprise and it needs to be supported to improve general economic throughput. The current plan calls for the construction of a number of rings of high capacity unlimited speed roads around Moscow with interlinks built into them along with links to the broader urban network. Expansions might eventually be necessary, but for now, the proposal should be sufficient for a decade. (60 Resources per Dice 0/300)
[]Western USSR High Capacity Roads: Spreading development into far more interlinks and proper four-lane systems across the Western Union is economically important as road-based travel and shipping have increased exponentially. Expansions will reduce the load on trucks, improve transportation efficiency, and contribute to a growing internal demand sector for automotive production. These interlinks will be focused on reaching and then bypassing major urban concentrations, enabling easy travel with a minimized degree of congestion. Some additional new construction of roads will be necessary, but as much of the work is expansion disruption and costs should be minimized. (60 Resources per Dice 0/700)
We should basicly try and prioritize these three projects especially the last one.
[]Moscow High Capacity Road Ring: A four-lane combined road system for the linkages around the Union's core industrial city is important for both local development and for further initiatives toward the construction of more automotive capacity. Truck shipping is steadily becoming a larger factor of conventional enterprise and it needs to be supported to improve general economic throughput. The current plan calls for the construction of a number of rings of high capacity unlimited speed roads around Moscow with interlinks built into them along with links to the broader urban network. Expansions might eventually be necessary, but for now, the proposal should be sufficient for a decade. (60 Resources per Dice 0/300)
[]Western USSR High Capacity Roads: Spreading development into far more interlinks and proper four-lane systems across the Western Union is economically important as road-based travel and shipping have increased exponentially. Expansions will reduce the load on trucks, improve transportation efficiency, and contribute to a growing internal demand sector for automotive production. These interlinks will be focused on reaching and then bypassing major urban concentrations, enabling easy travel with a minimized degree of congestion. Some additional new construction of roads will be necessary, but as much of the work is expansion disruption and costs should be minimized. (60 Resources per Dice 0/700)
We should basicly try and prioritize these three projects especially the last one.
- Location
- Under your couch
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And what are those?
- Location
- Philippines
Would building the roads allow for light rail to be installed later on? Not sure if we have the infrastructure for above ground light rail currently.
- Location
- Northish
We are making large scale electrified rail projects and underground metros already, we can definitely figure out how to run some light rail around the big cities if that proves necessary. It seems out problems are not around moving bunches of people but smaller enterprises moving bulk goods around because the trucking infrastructure is lacking.
The Trans-Siberian road is paving two lanes along a ~9000 km route with bypasses for the occasional town along the way. Call it 18k lane-kilometers of paving with occasional infrastructure for bypasses but mostly just a straight line through empty nothing, and a solid amount of that 18k probably already exists and just needs to get connected up into one network. A 4-lane network of nested rings around Moscow plus interconnects for the rings comes out to somewhere between 10k-12k lane-kilometers of paving by my quick guesstimate math, through some of the most heavily built up urban areas in the entire Soviet Union.
I don't think the costs look that suspicious when you factor in having to get right-of-way and design around or demolish solid chunks of the biggest city in the country, plus having to pay Moscow labor prices instead of Central Asia/Siberia labor prices, etc.
I don't think the costs look that suspicious when you factor in having to get right-of-way and design around or demolish solid chunks of the biggest city in the country, plus having to pay Moscow labor prices instead of Central Asia/Siberia labor prices, etc.
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- Location
- The great frozen north
Thank you for clarifying the general state of things and reminding my just how long "last mile" actually is in the wast expanse of Soviet Russia. I get now that building rail lines to within a few kilometers of each enterprise is not at all viable. I wish we could just have them truck things 200 km to the nearest depot instead of 2000 km across Russia though. I do now grudgingly concede that we must "Build Road" as @Khop says. But aside from the Trans-Siberian and maybe starting the West Russian network, that's work for next plan when we don't have Build House eating all our infra dice.
Oh, and "we'll never build suburbia" is not much reassurance. I KNOW that, but that merely confirms the ultimate capitulation to cars won't happen. There are many possible lesser defeats I would still like to avoid. The eastern bloc had some bad moments of carbrain OTL (example: Bratislava running a highway right through the city, demolishing most of the jewish quarter in the process) that I would like to avoid.
I think we tried to fix that during the post-WW2 plans, but perhaps we overestimated how much we fixed it.
Thank you for finding this! Mmm so sexy, I want infra projects that our astronauts can see! Any idea if the upper lena dam would also make a big visible lake?I'm a few pages late but I just wanted to repost this beauty...
Thank you for the info! OK, so we're not building the rings inside Moscow, we're building them far enough out to link the smaller towns. That makes it not horrible, and the cost makes more sense. But it still smells of massive scope inflation or corruption like the three rings of high speed rail.
Oh we definitely can build light rail. Question is if we'll get the opportunity to, with highways and fresh housing already occupying the space.
Local light rail is below our level of abstraction, there have been streetcars and shit in our cities since the game started, the top level director for economic activity in the largest country in the world just doesn't get pestered every day about the state of the tram network in Chelyabinsk. Sidewalks, bike infrastructure, surface light rail etc. all get handled by our Infra department and local city authorities, the only stuff that makes it to our desk is the stuff that requires intensive earthmoving (metros) or other similarly serious capital outlays that require going all the way to the MNKh director for permission. If you just want to build a sidewalk or a streetcar that's the kind of thing you can already do on a city budget without having to beg Moscow to fund it personally.
Fools and roads.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, in a lot of cases we've already taken care of that or are taking care of that.
It's just that if you're thinking of starting a very small factory or even a large workship that uses heavy equipment or exports bulky goods, whether the nearest depot is 200 km away or 2000 km away hardly matters. If the roads between you and the place you need to ship in the machinery are bad, then it might as well be on the dark side of the moon and you cannot run your enterprise. 10 km over genuinely bad roads can be a much greater obstacle to transportation than 100 km over good ones.
Notice that that's a Jewish quarter getting demolished. A literal OG ghetto. Gee, does that ever remind me of what happened in American cities! The underlying problem isn't "people build freeways," it's "people think that tearing down neighborhoods full of undesirables is an important part of 'urban renewal.' The freeways are just a pretext.
Also, we're never going to get the level of micromanagerial resolution that lets us ensure that all freeways everywhere in the USSR are built to highly enlightened standards of good judgment that seem entirely unproblematic. Especially if we judge 'entirely unproblematic' from a 21st century viewpoint where the economic consequences of having or not having the freeway are barely relevant and the cost of having any houses torn down to build it seem ruinous.
So we end up in a position where we can let the Soviet economy stagnate and/or grow very unevenly (tightly clustered around places we've built rail, with everything else being "in the sticks" and incapable of serious development), or we can build some roads.
If we are willing to drown vast tracts of Siberian wilderness, we are implicitly, by basic consistency, probably willing to tear down Arthur Dentovich's house (with compensation) to build a bypass.
- Location
- The great frozen north
I wonder at what point we'll get to to a general upgrade of roads in rural areas, because if the issue is that anything not near a major artery has roads too bad to handle truck traffic, upgrading said major arteries from two to four lanes won't actually improve things that much.
The 3rd ring and Modern Garden roads mentioned as inner rings are deep with in the built up city. So unless I'm misunderstanding them and those two inner rings aren't actually part of the plan, then it very much includes building rings in the heart or Moscow.
It's probably because as I noted above, you're building rings deep inside a city. Which mean demolishing vast parts of the city, which is expensive. And in my opinion economically detrimental as it worsens city efficiency.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yep, because your starting to aproach the point where a small two lane(1+1) road causes jams with busses, in front of the supsov. Even discounting the supsov members driving to work. Plus a trafic accident can stop core urban trafic, which... yea. Like, no one in the project is attempting to re-create Austin road system, its... a 2 lane each side main road.
My apologies for misunderstanding then. I guess I got put some what on the wrong track due to looking at the current day Moscow road infrastructure.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The current Moscow road infrastructure is the result of a strong adverse reaction to the prospect of having massive traffic jams caused by buses stopping in front of the Supreme Soviet. Say what you will about the 1980s-era USSR in our timeline, but I imagine they didn't have that problem anymore by the 1980s.
Well, let's be aware, not all good things can be measured with numbers, and this has been a real shortcoming of effective altruism as a philosophy. If you look for solutions to problems that make number go up most per unit input, you are ignoring all the problems you can't measure by default.
Voz is... Not as bad as he could be. But his personal shortcomings will be leading to serious problems, though hopefully serious problems that are small in scope, and thus won't give the next head of the ministry a heart attack when they see how bad Voz let things get.
I mean... This is talking about stuff that, to my knowledge was never seriously considered in OTL and that makes me wary.
I know that considerations for similar projects up in Alaska were projected to barely be profitable, due to high construction costs and the costs of super long distance power lines, and that isn't even getting to the environmental issues that the US wasn't terribly interested in during the 60s, but which would be significant.
It's important to remember that while people need a certain amount of industry to live and work in modern cities, they also need clean air, clean water, freedom from natural disasters and other such "environmental services" which the surrounding ecosystem does for free if it isn't too badly crippled.
While we can consider some damage to wetlands as being acceptable, there is a point at which the damage is so bad it makes the line go down, and where a coal power plant would have actually been LESS damaging.
Unfortunately, Soviet science isn't at the point where there's people there who can tell Voz when the environmental damage is enough that the line goes down, so we players are kinda groping in the dark.
So ya, wary.
Thing is, electricity is relatively easy and cheap to transport, coal, bauxite, iron ore etc. less so. Makes more sense to bring the electricity to the mines than it does to bring the mined resources to the electricity.
Also, building new cities is seriously difficult - every artificial "new city" has taken decades of bugfixing to get close to being efficient, even in countries where people cared about efficiency (during previous 5 year plans, so long as one industry worked well, the rest of the functions of the new cities didn't matter, but we're at the stage when worrying the quality of life in the new cities we build will start to be relevant, since the marginal returns on our investments into the central industries for each new New Town will be dropping). That isn't to say that we shouldn't build new cities - but we should consider very carefully whether to do so.
So what if they don't have a surplus? That doesn't actually matter very much. Even if the entire block had an energy deficit, building interconects would help, because doing so increases reliability, which helps the economy operate more efficiently. Now, we've been at the stage where just building new power plants made more sense than building interconnects, but that is starting to change. When we're at the point of building butt-loads of nuclear reactors, for example, we'll have a large surplus of power when certain regions are in night that we'd want to export to places that are in the morning or evening, and a large number of timezones to shuffle power around in. Also, we'll want to be deploying things like wind power around the 80s or so, and not all regions get the wind at the same time.
So the case for international interconnects is strong in the next 5 years or so, so that the grid is ready for the changing production technology.
So, the issue here is that the later we leave the emissions problem, the more expensive it is to fix it, and the more economic activity proportionately has to be dedicated to the problem every year (because the less time we have to fix things, the more the effort has to be prioritized). In OTL, starting to act in the 1970s would have been of minimal short-term cost and yielded significant long term gains. To leave this to 2023 would, as has happened in OTL, be giving up on fixing things and instead asking "do we want to allow millions of people to die because of this problem, or billions". Needless to say, climatic disasters that impoverish entire regions of the USSR will also have the risk of causing the collapse of the regime. And since we are playing as high-ranking bigwigs in said regime, that isn't something that we want.
And the reason we are pushing so hard in 1962 is because the USSR needs to develop the technology NOW so that it will be ready for the 1970s when a reasonably funded and consistently executed program can ensure the survival of the Soviet Industrial economy through the headwinds of the next century.
Now, personally I am not sure about what some people are saying about pushing nuclear super hard. Building too many early generation plants will mean that the inevitable flaws of that first generation are so widely spread that fixing those flaws will be super expensive. Pushing the techology to advance faster with a big roll-out is all very well, but what we really need experience, and experience needs time.
IMO we want to start off with a one dice autonuke, and ramp things up during the 70s.
Right, and to be honest the best place to put alot of the high-tech industry we'll need is in Moscow or Leningrad, where the best universities, the best economies of scale and the best nightlife are. And we don't need to turn Moscow into the Soviet version of 'Frisco.
Regards,
fasquardon