This morning I watched a particularly interesting TikTok, one that posed the question: What if there was a bridge from Australia to the U.S.? It dug into what that would look like and what it would be like to drive on.
Firstly, the TikTok. It comes from user @jamesbrave64, whose whole brand is ‘City Planner Mismanages’ – videos of city planning roasts and memes, typically taking the form of Cities Skylines gameplay (which is a terrific game, I highly recommend it).
@jamesbrave64 Ever dreamed of driving from Australia to California in United States. This is a simulation and the mathematics behind a possible route. Could a long motorway ever be possible? #geographytok #mapping #motorways #funny
What I love about this video is that it’s a terrific use of Google Earth’s awesome tools, which have been used to measure the distance between islands and, ultimately, the entire distance between Australia and the U.S. if an optimal route was taken.
B-lining it from Australia to the U.S. would probably not be the right call because it would be more expensive to both build and maintain. Tather, bridges from island to island would make more sense.
So, rather, Brave has factored in Pacific islands that could function as rest stops and fuel stops. Here’s how a straight line would differ to what Brave has proposed, with both routes ranging from Brisbane to San Francisco.
From what I can tell, the math checks out in the video – floating fuel stations would be required constantly across the route, with it hypothetically proposed that each car travels at 130km/h with a tank of 800 litres. At least four floating fuelling stations would be needed across the distance between Hawaii and San Francisco, a distance of roughly 4,000km, along with floating stations between some of the more distant islands, and standard petrol stations where there is land.
The total distance of the trek? About 14,000km – on top of the rough 11,000km if you were to B-line it from city to city. For some context, Perth to Sydney is 3,925km, taking 41 hours of nonstop driving.
The Australia to the U.S. bridge trek would require about 17.5 refuels, by my calculations (or 14 by Brave’s), if your car has an 800-litre tank. Additionally, if you were to do this gigantic trek, you’d be either in the car or resting (for 20 minutes when refuelling) for up to four days, provided you were travelling at the full 130km/h speed when driving and you didn’t take any longer breaks. If you want to take your time and maybe stay a little longer on the islands, you can probably broaden the trip up to a whole week.
Additionally, Brave’s pretty on the money when it comes to the cost of the journey. Their calculation includes a price of fuel at $2 per litre (in-line with the NRMA’s recent weekly fuel report). With a full tank costing between $140 and $177, by my calculations, it would cost upwards of $2,500 if you stopped to refuel 17 times.
That’s a lot of money, but it seems cheaper than flying – especially if you’ve got multiple people in the car (we’re of course not factoring in any road tolls, but we can safely expect that this extremely expensive and unlikely project would have tolls).
Meanwhile, if you were to book a one-way flight from Brisbane to San Francisco today, you’d be looking at a price of between $1,844 and $4,449 (as per Flight Centre), or between $3,680 and $7,131 for a return flight. So, if you’re travelling individually, flying likely would be cheaper, but if you were travelling with a carload of people, you might save thousands of dollars all-up. It would also be less time-consuming, with flights between Brisbane and San Francisco typically taking between 17 and 30 hours.
Would this project ever actually happen? Look, I highly doubt it. As Brave notes in their video, the cost to the environment would be considerable, and many of the islands in the Pacific are being hit hard by rising waters.
Additionally, there’s no way that fuel would be only $2 along this route. Supplying this infrastructural behemoth would be a nightmare.
But hey, it’s a really fun idea and a huge shoutout to Brave for this terrific video. Extremely good stuff.
Would anyone stomach a bridge from Australia to the U.S.? I don’t know, I think the journey would hit me pretty bad though.