The context here is not cars but delivery trucks.

The tunnels in question also did not transport pedestrians and were essentially focused on coal delivery and ash removal.

Sure, let's restrict statistics to any automobile used to transport merchandise. What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?

Sure. In 2022, 672 pedestrians were killed by large trucks. How many of those do you believe happened in say New York City? And how many of those do you think you could eliminate with this hypothetical tunnel system? And how much will this hypothetical tunnel system cost?

New York has about 300 pedestrian deaths total from all vehicles every year. So my guesstimate is that if you eliminated all of the trucks from New York City, you might save 50 lives a year, max. I would also guesstimate that it would probably cost well north of $50 billion to create this tunnel system to connect all of the major buildings in New York City. So we’re looking at about $1 billion per life saved. I bet you could save more than one life per billion if you put that money somewhere more useful.

> What do you think, ready to imagine such a comparison?

What are you intending to accomplish with your snarky and condescending tone?

it is not possible to eliminate the risk from the absolute requirement to move heavy bulk stuff, through and in citys. roads need work, big things break and fail ,wherever they are, new stuff gets built, again, precisly, wherever, it gets built. civil engineering is completly mature,and wildly boreing,and will dry your eyes out. much of the cannon is millenia old, with fuck all room to "inovate" and what works in one place, is a total fail somewhere else. what is more is that the ancient world is littered with the ruins of civilisations and citys, that did fail, and in every case part or all of that failure was to overextend, undermaintain, there infrastructure, or worse, jump to some new flashy thing that then fails, spectacularly. having walked through those ruins, and marvled at there engineering and planning of infrastructure, and also become a keen reader of all things civil or infrastructure engineerin, and also aircraft engineering, where the most important concept is up front, "failure mode", I have no respect for sudden ideas, and approve of what China has done to prohibit un educated comentary on infrastructure development and implimentation. "influencer engineering" by way of "saftey"

Nitpick: it is one life per year for the billion invested. Which after the typical metro infrastructure lifespan of a century is actually viable because the cost for a working-age US life in medical and other contexts is probably around the $10mn ballpark.

(Assuming financing happens cheaply by the federal state rather than via PPP grift; and assuming that $50bn is the number, which in NYC is an underestimate by a factor of at least five…)

That’s a really good point. This is all very back-of-the-envelope, but if the total cost per life saved were 10 million it gets into the ballpark of sane.

But as you noted this 50 billion is likely a major underestimate (for comparison the recently built SR-99 tunnel in Seattle cost 1 billion per linear mile and connects to approximately zero buildings via elevators). NYC covers 300 square miles and estimates are that there are upwards of a million buildings across 120k city blocks.