Why It’s So Difficult to Build Subways in Rome
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- čas přidán 21. 05. 2024
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There's an old joke I heard while visiting Rome. It translates to "Did you hear? They found the ancient ruins of the C tunnel while excavating for the C tunnel."
E
lol
I live in Cambodia and that's actually happening in Siem Reap: The restoration work for one of the Temples of Angkor discovered that some slipshod restoration work had been attempted in around 1860, shortly after the whole complex's modern discovery, and now they can't proceed with the modern restoration work until they figure out how to deal with the fact that the 1860 restoration work is itself considered a historical artifact.
@@CinemaDemocraticaHistory indeed!
even the joke is old lol
Obviously the solution is to just build another city on top, complete with subway.
E
The evolution of cut and cover is here: just build and cover. Could be so easy!
Reminds me of New New York from Futurama, where they built it directly on top of the ruins of New York.
basically just elevated metro
cut and cover minus the cut
Screw subways, Rome should make Elevated Rail on fake aqueducts.
Edit: hey i'm done having my inbox flooded with condescending comments now.
Subwayducts
@@RoryRose_ Chicago would like a word with you
@@RoryRose_Not in this situation
Above ground subways are a great option, I honestly can’t fathom why. Maybe it’ll ruin the aesthetic? But that seems stupid, and all things considered it could probably be cheaper….
Rome was not built in a day makes more sense now
I never imagined that saying was about permits
Damn, excavation in Rome must be so fun for archaeologists
Job preservation I guess??
I’ve talked to many who have and - yes (largely)
E
It would be if they got paid. My uncle had to move to Ireland to find a job after getting his archaeology phd.
@@superj8502archeology used to be a “hobby”, well most humanities university fields were, of the rich. Just the way it is.
My uncle was a project manager for a large construction company. His stories about working in North America vs. Europe are hilarious. In the US, finding a human bones or an archeological artifact causes huge delays, requires calling in specialists from far away, and will usually make the news. In Europe they have specialists on-call for a whole slew of things that will inevitably be dug up. Archialogists for the really old stuff, historians for the more modern, and even EOD techs for unexploded bombs from wars. Deadlines would always include the expectations for the delays that would occur on every project and no one batted an eye at finding something that required extra care.
Meanwhile in the US they bulldoze through everything, even neighborhoods of people who are still living there - and still pay more per subway mile than the europeans... go figure...
It’s got to be both so terrifying and yet so mundanely obnoxious to be digging for a project and your shovel hits something hard and you gotta wonder if you have hit either, a rock, bones, an artifact, or a bomb.
@@philiphockenbury6563
Or an unexploded bomb that landed in an ancient urn filled with bones which then got buried under rocks...
I found it ridiculously funny to find a paragraph in some building permit that basically stated, "There are no known archaeological sites there, but statistical analysis shows a heightened probability for you to find remnants of a Stone Age campsite. Here's the number to call if that happens."
That’s pretty accurate. Where I live in Chicago they had to pause construction of a road and school because the land it was on used to be a cemetery that people forgot about. They had to call a special department to come on document and collect the remains.
Rome is “please don’t touch that, it’s 2000 years old” - the city
It's also the city of "oh, that 1000 year old piece of wall? Yep, it's just smacked in the middle of a new building, you can take a pebble from it it's w/e lol"
Rome is my favorite city ever, every single space had something magical about it
i think athens has random shit like across the street from the fucking acropolis
@@jonathanmong4927language
Archeologists 2000 years from now: "Get this guys, we found an ancient subway station preserving 3 more ancient subway stations preserving a 4000 year old training barracks from the 1st imperial era"
@@jonathanmong4927 it's not nearly as old as the Acropolis but The Alamo in San Antonio has random everyday city shit across the street from it. Your comment made me think of that.
If you think that's bad, try digging deep enough to avoid damaging ancient artefacts but not too deep because the city is coastal. Thessaloniki's metro network has been under construction since 2006 and is only expected to begin operating later this year.
My friend, I think we both know this will get delayed again. It's kind of a curse at this point 😂😂😂
E
@nConditorI know. It's the modern day Arta bridge
Nice
First proposed in 1917, entered the government budget in the 70s, first construction in the 80s, then actually starting the work in 2006. The capital of the Balkans™
Just build a subway at street level. Hundreds of years later it will be underground.
still faster than the metro c
genius
Italian Engineer: We build a Metroway and cover it a cave, now its a Subway
It doesn’t have to be a subway. A system of modern light rail would be an adequate solution imo.
are u dumb? if they had the choice to build it at grade level or even elevated they would've done it in a heart beat, and that would cost way less money and time, but in reality there is no other choice but to go underground
Naples, an even older city, has exactly the same problem. At 37 years old, they're still building lines that were started before I was born 😭
I happen to live in Rome, right on line C, and I can say that everything stated in the video is spot on, however it doesn't tell the whole truth. There are some other aspects that add up to the archaeological challenges that a city like Rome making building infrastructure much more complicated, and already built infrastructure much more unpleasant to use. To briefly sum them up:
-The municipal transport company is extremely inefficient and poorly managed, as are the in-house company and offices in charge of managing infrastructure projects. The line C extension has been plagued by dozens of project reviews even before any construction started, regardless of who was mayor at the time.
-The municipal, regional and national government are usually never ruled by the same party and, in a very roman fashion, they all try to mess with each other's business, for example withholding funds, denying authorizations, changing regulations. They then accuse each other of not caring about the city and not being capable of running it properly. The whole saga with the Rome-Ostia and Rome-Viterbo commuter lines, operated for years by the city but owned by the region, which should have been turned into metro lines decades ago, is a prime example of these conflicts. The company building the C line threatening to irreversibly bury the tunnel boring machines deep under the Coliseum unless they received funding before a specific date to keep digging until Piazza Venezia is another example.
-The fact that most of Rome is considered an Archaeological area puts many infrastructure projects under the jurisdiction of an authority, called "Soprindendenza", which has a tendency to stop them asking for completely unnecessary changes just because they can: it recently happened for two tram lines, one of which would simply need a renovation and would only cross the archaeological area for around 250m in the median of a four lane road, but whose development has been halted until who knows when.
-Rich NIMBYs are extremely powerful in Rome, and many local newspapers openly support them. One person was able to delay the opening of a railway line in the suburbs for years just by sending requests for more paperwork to a local tribunal.
You know, it makes sense that this whole process is complicated by petty local politics. My own hometown is in a constant struggle for cash because we got almost no businesses in town. And nobody wants to pony up the cash to pay for necessary budget increases. The whole town is caught between super progressive people and super conservative people. We are trying to have a weed store, but it is facing some headwinds because there’s a whole bunch of religious conservatives who don’t want to share a town with “The Devil’s Lettuce.” I guess all local politics is pretty much just the same thing no matter where you live.
you mentioned my belo(athed)ved Roma-Ostia so I Must mention: it literally doesn't have enough trains to work well. that's how things work with ATAC (and now Cotral)
and go look at the Tor di Valle station on street view. it has stayed like that for at least 4 years
@@ramppappiaSadly I'm aware of the situation! That line literally beggs to be connected to the B line of the metro, so that trains could run from the Jonio branch all the way to Ostia via Tiburtina and Termini. It would be such a massive improvement for the inhabitants of the southwest of Rome.
You would just need to do some adjustments to the loading gauge, or buy some custom built trains to make it happen, yet nobody is mentioning this idea just because the bureaucracy would be complicated, and no party or body of government, especially the Region, is willing to give away a little bit of its power. It's almost infuriating.
What's this you say? Part of the problem is down to bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption??? Why, I'm shocked -- SHOCKED I tell's ya.
@@ramppappia "Stazione Beirut" I'm amazed
Excavations accidents in other countries: i think we found a dead Dog, poor lad.
Excavations accidents in italy: wait, is this the tomb of Caesar?
Excavation accidents in germany: "Looks like it's another unexploded bomb"
Excavation in Bosnia: run it's a mine!!
Excavation accidents in New Zealand: Moa bones?
Excavation in Rome: OMG A PIECE OF SILVER WE NEED TO MOVE THE STATION
Any central European city is littered with ruins, artefacts and bombs one might dig up when excavating. Thousands of years of history and two world wars tend to leave their mark.
One for the end of year feast extravaganza: Roman legend placed the founding of the city in 753 BCE, not 713 BCE
Sieben, Fünf, Drei - Rom schlüpft aus dem Ei!
(Sorry, this doesn not translate well into english, but it was the way I learned about rome's founding myth in school. In german it rhymes and serves as a mnemonic device - literally translated it means "seven, five, three - rome hatches from the egg"...)
Same here! In Polish we have a mnemonic form as well and it goes like:
'Na siedmiu górach piętrzy się Rzym'.
Which directly translates to:
"On the seven mountains, towers the Rome".
So as you can guess "seven" goes for the first digit,
Then 'piętrzy' ('towers'), in Polish sounds almost like 'pięć trzy', which literally is 'five three'; second and third digit. :)
I don't think any school in the U.S. even mentions the founding of Rome, nevermind the date. We are lucky HAI got the correct century.
@@Carlton-B I was just noticing the same thing. I hung on every word of my sixth-grade history teacher's lessons, and he just about assumed the height of the Roman empire into existence from thin air.
@@Carlton-BI know it didn't take a day
In the town were I grew up in northern France, they have a similar problem. You can't dig a hole without finding something centuries old.
In my old school, they wanted to build an underground gym under the schoolyard. As soon as they started digging, they found yet another merovingian cemetery. Needless to say, patience is key if you want to get anything done.
And yet, even with all these digging difficulties, setbacks, and archeological discoveries, Italy still builds metros more cheaply than America. Rome's Line C is estimated to cost €3.5 billion (about $3.794 billion USD, and almost twice the original budget), and is so far 19.5 km long (12.1 miles), half underground and half above, with 22 stations open, and some still under construcion. New York's 2nd Avenue line, meanwhile, cost $4.45 billion for only 2.4 km (1.8 miles) for Phase I, with only 3 new stops, and future Phase II will cost $7.7 billion for only 3 stops.
Apparently it's not just subways in america, either. Highways have to deal with very similar red tape, and they are also extremely expensive, not to mention there's MORE of it--it cost in total half a trillion USD in today's money. Never would have thought that was the case considering how car-centric the USA is, but that's what I found when looking it up.
@@ajs787 Every empire in history (that wasn't militarily extinguished) eventually bureaucracy-ed itself into crumbling. Maybe that's why the Roman Empire is a meme in the US at the moment - some start to hear the bell toll...
3.5B? You can even build an airport, a train station or an opera house for that money in Germany...
EDIT: There's a "'t" missing above. Sry.
@@ajs787 Can I ask how the f*** it's possible to have more red tape than 'there is ancient artifacts EVERYWHERE and you need to carefully dig em all out by hand to continue building'? 😶😶
@@HenryLoenwind Like Berline Airport
the mexico city metro is pretty similar in this aspect. there have been thousands of archaeological finds during its construction and there's even an ancient temple to a mexica deity integrated into the Pino Suárez station
furry spotted :0
If you understand Italian, i wholly recommend one of the most recent videos from the channel GeoPop that focuses specifically on the Colosseo/Fori Imperiali station. Building Line C has been a complicated and extenuating process and the section that's being built now is by far the hardest. For the Venezia station, they've done a decade of archeological studies and only started actually building the station last summer, meaning it'll be finished in about 10 years. Luckily, the Fori Imperiali and Porta Metronia stations are scheduled to open next year.
czcams.com/video/xgU3gYQwFK4/video.htmlsi=dOkiLiQSZUNErI9o
Thank you for this! I ended up just watching it with subtitles!
It's crazy to think about all the high quality videos out there that I can't understand!
im surprised that geopop got a mention here, maybe they should try making an english channel aswell
I was just going to recommend the same thing! It was fascinating to see Andrea explain how they will put back everything in the Porta Metronia metro station!
Amy gutted not to get a field trip to Rome.
Sam probably would have only reimbursed the metro ticket for one ride.
The metro in Athens is a lot like this. It includes many artifacts on display that were found during excavation and some sites that were preserved in place within the station.
There is similar problem in Kyoto as well. That's why there are only 2 underground lines and overall more reliance on buses than other major Japanese cities.
The same situation happens in Xian(China’s ancient capital) literally every single block has some ancient tombs beneath and the subway construction just run into random kings tombs all the time😂
they dont need it because all roads lead to rome
E
Yes, but that doesn't apply to rails.
But what to do when you get TO Rome?
@@dustojnikhummerDo as the Romans do
This does not help if I do not want to get to Rome.
It's worth noting that half of metro C is not underground and it originally was a "tram" which got upgraded to Metro, which means a lot of money was saved, the same goes for half of Metro B, it was originally more of a "suburban" railway and it is not underground, but the Metro A is fully underground (except for a bridge over the Tevere river) and that's why some people consider it as the first real Metro line of Rome.
There is a similar situation going on in southern germanys city of Augsburg, which is also over 2000 years old, founded by the romans and important trade and finance center in the middle ages. The city is to small for subway lines, but old buildings are in high demand, because if you try to build something new, you are pretty much guaranteed to hit some historical significant stuff, which can delay construction up to a decade.
3:48 that cat sanctuary website is extremely confident and I love it
Italy is like this everywhere! Even in Napoli the subway construction is having a lot of delays because of artifacts being found! But also if you dig a well in your backyard you'll probably find something ancient!
A city with the exact opposite problem would probably be Brasilia where the city was less than 40 years old when the metro opened
Well I would like to point you to the lovely city of Thessaloniki, Greece, and its subway. Fun fact about that subway it still doesn't exist
Exists, just not in full yet. And mainly the first part, imagine how long they will take for the extended part xd.
What about the Northern Motorway of Crete? Even our grandchildren will be dead😅
For those who might think they misheard: Yes, Line B is older than Line A.
The first line they built didn't have a "metro" name, it was just considered a normal train line. When they built the second one they decided to start calling them with letters and for some reason they called Line A the new one and Line B the old one.
I can't sleep at night.
It’s because they followed the colors given to them, b is blue and a is for arancione which means orange in Italian, the issue is the third line cause they forgot about it by that point and named it c to follow the alphabet instead of V for green or something
+ the A is the main line
@@giorgiamoretti6642 They didn't need to assign the letters according to colours, they could just assign the colours according to the letter, so we're back at the start again...
B stands for Benito (Mussolini) because line B was thought by him (And this is the clear moment in which we can all say "Ha fatto anche cose buone")😆
@@FactotumProduction Ok, first reply was about colours and the second one about Mussolini.
Anyone else got other stupid things to say?
We somehow did the same thing when building a new web application a couple years ago. It had a series of functionalities that would be accessed by just passing its internal ID (and other parameters) in the URL. Something like ?functionID=X.
The first one we developed and brought to production was functionID=2 and the second one was functionID=1. No, I have no recollection of why we did that. We must have smoked something heavy.
It did make for a cool bit of trivia to bully our successors with, though.
A video by HAI about the metro I often take (and which is almost a meme in Italy) is the crossover I didn't know my heart needed.
Same story as Amsterdam. Amsterdam wanted a metro line (north-south) through the city center. The city is built in the mud and all the historic buildings are built on thousands of piles in the ground. Drilling started on April 22, 2002 and the opening was on July 21, 2018. There were always delays as historical attributes were found. Historic buildings also collapsed where drilling took place. The initial costs were estimated at 1.3 billion euros. Ultimately, the Amsterdam north-south line cost 3.4 billion euros.
That's nothing. That same boring machine who in Cologne built the North-South "Stadtbahn" (sort of metroline made out of trams) made sure the city archive collapsed into the newly dug tunnel, whilst digging it. So yeah, Amsterdam buildings collapsed a bit, in Cologne an entire building actually collapsed
I rode the line last year and the items that were found are displayed next to the escalators.
In the exact opposite sense, Brasilia had only been a city for 38 years when a metro was built
I was just in Rome, I forgot how many random sites are just all over the city
Athens, Greece: "I can relate".
I would so buy a metro ticket just to experience ancient ancient Rome! 😅
Don't need a metro ticket for that. Just talk a walk literally anywhere in the city and you'll - quite possibly literally - stumble over something ancient.
Phew, I almost didn't think about the roman empire today, Thanks HAI!
Reminds me of Toledo, in Spain, which was sort of Spain's capital for about a thousand years and so has a ton of artifact from the roman and Visigoth settlements, so you can't dig two meters before finding something and the authorities stepping in. Fortunately Toledo isn't so big it needs a metro line so it doesn't encounter this problem as often.
I'll be waiting till the year 2068 for you to release a part 2
same bro
That’s still too early too see line C fully working
Probably even later 😢
The metro in Bogota, Colombia has been constantly delayed for like 50 years or something at this point, it just started construction, and it looks like more delays are coming, they just can't get their priorities straight, or as of now, whether it's even going to go underground for certain sections lmao
meanwhile Médilin has a metro for like 30 years?
@@leonpaelinck Medellin, and yes it has been there for a long time, it’s kind of a running joke for those in Bogotá, that and the constant, incessant, ever-present road maintenance traffic jams.
on the bright side transmilenio allows you to feel a true close human connection with your fellow passengers sure there won't be space to move but who needs that when you are also traveling with free live performing music from indie artists, I want to see those paisas beating that.
@@leonpaelinckMedellin also barely reaches the size of one of Bogota's zones, so there's that
Mood
Imagine all these artefacts in the ground in rome. Probably many people have already dug up something in the garden and not told anyone about it. 😬🤣
I won’t say my grandparents’ living room is filled with ancient stuff they found when they built their house in the ‘70s
This has been done for two thousand years or so
Wasn't Rome founded in 753 BCE instead of 713 BCE?
I wasn't there at the time, your honor
SIEBEN FÜNF DREI - ROM SCHLÜPFT AUS DEM EI.
Yeah, 753 bce is generally considered the date of the foundation of Rome but they actually found older traces of settlements so it's probably older
*according to legend Rome was founded in 753BC not 713BC
It's going in the annual mistakes video
@@clementtremblay9056 yup
«Sieben-fünf-drei: Rom schlüpft aus dem Ei»
- Ancient Germanic proverb
@@fariesz6786 translation?
@@scotandiamapping4549 _"Seven-five-three: Rome hatches out of the egg"_ It works better in German where three and egg rhymes.
Oh just two giraffes below the surface. Okay makes total sense. Very intuitive unit right there.
It's okay, since the units Americans use are closer in concept to what the ancient Romans use than what the crazy revolutionaries at Paris cooked up.
1 giraffe is equal to 0.1 football field
@@inesis With a football field being c. 105 metres long, that's a bit much. It's more like 1 giraffe equalling 0.055 football fields. :D
Americans will do anything to avoid using metric units.
a giraffe is 55 burgers high on average
OK, but I need to know now, why is subway construction cost per mile so expensive in New York ? What's their excuse?
Everything is expensive and projects do not happen very often
I am always in awe of how some areas in Europe have been so densely populated for so long if you just dig around in your yard you could find anything from a significant historical item to insanely valuable old coins. In America where I live about all I'd find would be an old native American arrowhead. If I lived in Europe my hobby would be going through a forest with a metal detector looking for where someone buried a stash of coins hundreds of years ago and it was never found until I would stumble upon it.
Americans think 200 years is a long time.
Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance.
You'd mostly find unexploded bombs and landmines
Depending on area you would find mostly artillery shells, mines and relics of WW1 and WW2. :D Also it is becoming common in Europe to just ban digging things you found via metal detector, because if you find bombs you may accidentally make a lot of harm, but if you find some real artefacts, they are by law owned by the state, so you would commit crime taking anything dig out from the ground. :D
The same problem also applies to people or companys all over italy.
For that reason there are many who hide the fact that they found something and just continue the construction without letting authorities know about the finding.
I mean they have a moral obligation to do so.
Imagine destroying the potential of your country to preserve the ruins of it's previous success.
They call the unfinished subway the unicorn, everyone’s heard of it but no one’s ever seen it
Correction: The founding legend of Rome puts the establishment of Rome at 753 BCE, not 713 BCE
I'm very curious about what gets classified for 'destruction' and how that works. And how Rome was basically abandoned for 1000 years after its fall in the 400s until coming back in the late middle ages. It went from 1 million people to 40,000 people who grazed cattle in the old forum. That deserves its own video, maybe even a full length Wendover one!
Half-As Interesting/Wendover Productions; The one guy who definitely thinks more about trains and planes than he does about the Roman Empire.
Thank you!
I went to Rome and love trains! So I was surprised by the lack of subway lines. A tour guide explained the same thing you did plus Mussolini reasons for the subway!
So Mussolini wanted to build a fancy subway but after digging they all realized that there is alot of historical stuff underground. Mussolini wanted to reinvent Italy into the Roman Empire so he actually was willing to wait as they did archeological excavation...unlike everything else Reasoning being that destroying Roman stuff would be against his MO. Thus why Line A goes around alot of the old/touristy parts of the city.
Kyoto and the surrounding regions faced the EXACT SAME problem when building it's subways. It's always a pain in the ass to build basically any large modern infrastructures in historically valuable places
Love your choices for units, 2 giraffes is exactly what I needed to understand how far down that stuff is
Same in Athens and Thessaloniki, which hasn't made a metro line for more than 20 years.
Same is true for Istanbul, when Marmaray project finished, they had enough ancient artifacts to open a literal museum and so they did 😅
using anything but traditional metrics? 100x big ben? half a banana? 2 giraffes deep? 😂
edit: half a white house? 💀
yes, that is the joke
@@pancake5830 yes that's why i laughed
we have the same problem in istanbul, whenever you dig somewhere you find something historical. you invite the right people(professors etc) and they dig and take out the historical stuff in a right way and you continue your metro constructions. it delays for years but you still able to do it. it is not an excuse.
Surely the cost can't be truly measured if each station becomes a tourist site
Interesting depth measurements.. excellent
I appreciate that Sam is using the only proper patriotic American units of measurement, bananas. None of this feet or meters nonsense, only bananas.
the imperial measurements go wiiiiild in this one, i'm sure the americans really appreciated it
We also have an archeostation in Bucharest, called Politehnica where the floor of station is made with the fosils found there while making the metro
Absolutely excellent video on a great topic
They have the same problem in Athens. When building line 1 towards the end of the 19th century nobody cared, but for new lines it's difficult now. The Agora was recovered after line 1 was built afaik, so it now just runs across the place, but at least only at the edge and not straight through the middle. The new lines 2 and 3, both opened in 2004 for the Olympics, have these museums mentioned in the video integrated in the stations and it's really cool.
i’m excited for the prospect of line d though. my school in rome was in the western part of the centro storico close to the river and the metro doesn’t really go there, so having the metro there would make it oh so perfect
By the time line D comes, you’ll be retired if you’re lucky
Sam's "imitating people talking about Roman roads" voice is my favourite thing today
Thing is, no one is stopping them from building a city-wide tram network.
There is already the tram
*The legendary date of Rome's foundation is 753 BC.
Notice also that there is a safe version of the classical seven segment display where the 7 has the upper left segment active and the nine lacks the bottom segment. This is used so that if one segment fails, the displayed number is always invalid.
“Big Ben Clock Tower” thats one for the annual HAI mistake episode
Well duh! Everybody knows: Rome's subways weren't built in a day...
Visited Rome last year, still curious about why Rome metro is so tiny compared with that in Milan. Thanks for your video
Athens had similar problems with its Metro too. They went down the route of turning stations into Museums aswell.
2:17 Don't feel quite so bad now about the London UndergrounD Jubilee line extension causing the tower of Big Ben to list 14mm!
happy new HAI video for all those who observe this holiday
Legend has it that the Silver Line in Washington DC had the same problem, only with secret unmapped fiber optic cables, not ancient ruins. Every time the tunnel boring machine snapped another cable, out would come the men in black.
Conveniently this video dropped the same day I started planning a trip to visit Paris, Milan, and maybe Rome.
Rome does have a very extensive tram network on the other hand though and good regional rail and buses
I live in Rome, “good” is an overstatement, I’d say it’s decent on most days but I think it’s slowly improving
Don’t tell Caltagirone and Il Messagero
This is pretty cool! I paid £30 to look at junk in the Louvre. Pretty exciting that a subway ticket will include a museum gallery
They have the same problem in Milan, in Milan line 5, which began construction after line 4, has been opened fully while not even half of the planned line 4 has been opened due to archeological delays.
Not exactly so.
Milan Metro line 4 began construction after M5 (and actually after M5 was already operational) even if it was an older project, as the number 4 might suggest.
There are many reasons for this, but basically, due to its route which avoids historical center, was easier to build and to fund. Over all easier to fund, because it was conceived to have different functional lots which could be built, and funded, subsequently (while M4 wasn't).
Then the main reason M4 delayed its construction is lack of funding. Though during constuction they've found ancient ruins, necropolis, medieval walls... all that delayed the construction, but not that much. And over all that is not the reason M5 was built before M4
Sam: "Rome, trains, archaeology, politics..."
my brain: "DIGGY DIGGY HOOOOLE!!!"
I heard something very similar to this while having a beer with a mexican archaeologist. They have power to shut down construction sites and mark them as archaeological sites if any historically significant objects are found while digging. This makes everything very complicated for large projects, as there are over 16 thousand suspected pyramids/archaeological sites scattered around meso-america.
Also, to avoid archaeological regulation, sometimes these large construction companies will bury discoveries in concrete before anyone can stop them to avoid a multi-million project to be halted. My beer pal told me he knew of a full mammoth skeleton that was covered in concrete for this very reason.
As a NYer, when you said 375 mil per mile, I was like "that's it?!"
And then you mentioned NYC 😅
Sign on Roman subway sites: it has been X days since last major archeological find.
Sam do you understand how big you implied the roman artifacts were when you used big ben as a scale. thats ridiculous. a vase as wide as big ben's clock tower? 4:01 for reference
Same in Thessaloniki. We’re still waiting for it.
Check Thessaloniki, Greece metro. They started working on it in the 90s and and it's not complete yet
As a roman, not only it is difficult to build subways, there's always a weird frequency. Sometime a train can come straight after the other one comes and sometimes have huge time gaps in between. Also the map at the start is kinda inaccurate.
Same issue in athens, but mostly in the city center. They do have a couple of ancient buildings visible inside one of the metro stations too.
Ruined my first day of Rome in the search of how bus tickets work lol. You can only buy them in Tobacco shops not even in the train station haha
Videos like this remind me how sad torontos subway line is
Well, given it's Rome, you can't expect their subways to be build in a day
thank you for using actual units of measurement like bananas, big bens, and giraffes.
3:47 imremebr those cats from my vacation in rome😂
Coming from a country with a cold climate that prevented large-scale human habitation for most of history, with so few buildings built out of stone that would survive for centuries, that little remains even from only 500 years ago, I do look with some envy at countries that have been major centres of civilization for thousands of years. Although one will probably grow jaded of it fairly easily, there must be a sense of wonder in living among the works of the ancients. Everywhere you look, you are reminded of the great works (and even the ordinary lives) that came before, perhaps built by your very own ancestors. Every day, you are reminded that you are a part of something ancient and perhaps awesome that started long before you were there, and might go on for long after you are gone, and you have a chance to do your own part in adding to what will come after.
Roma is the only city in the world where you can actually live INSIDE the museum.
I suggest building an Ice highway in the nether, you could put toll booths in the portals.
The next jet lag season, "Break the ancient building to build a subway: Rome edition"
That gives me an idea for a task for the next Europe edition: "Find and touch something that is older than the US. You have 10 seconds. Reward: 1 point---it's too easy."
Look next door, at Athens & even better Thessaloniki Metro in Greece.😅 Thessaloniki Metro is still under construction since the first try to build it im the 1980s
This story is similar to the Thessaloniki subway construction, where it began in 2006-2007 and most of the stations are done about a year ago
Finally my two favorite things subways and archeology. I guess I really do need to see Rome so I can wander through that
Everyone should visit The Eternal City at least once.
1:04 3:59 5:03 5:18 "Anything but metric"
Sam and Rohin Francis will make great friends