Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "China builds world’s longest expressway tunnel" video.
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It's a bit of a stretch to say that "Travel time between the north and south of Xinjiang will be cut from 3 hours to 20 minutes". Drawing a straight line from Urumqi to Yuli County, which this new highway connect, shows a distance of 250 km. You'd have to drive real fast to go 250km in 20 minutes.
Instead, what this new highway does is make a more straight route through the TianShan Mountains compared to the previous expressway. Yes, there is already one modern expressway between the two cities/areas: It's the G30/G3012 National expressway, which goes around the mountains. Now they have one more, cutting highway travel time between the two cities from 6 hours to perhaps 4 hours. It's very nice, but will it really make such a big difference in investment as the researcher Li Lifan says?
To me, it seems to be more a case of:
1) We do it because we can, and it helps boost our prestige abroad
2) We do it because we believe infrastructure development is always beneficial
3) We do it because any infrastructure investment helps to prop up GDP, whether it generates economic activity or not.
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