The Proposed New York–London Superhighway Through Russia Explained

A Historical Proposal for a London–New York Transcontinental Road

In March 2015, Vladimir Yakunin, then head of the state-owned Russian Railways, floated an idea that sounded like science fiction: a continuous overland corridor that would let a driver set off from London and arrive in New York without ever boarding a ferry. CNN estimated such a trip at roughly 12,910 miles. The plan, known as the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development, or TEPR, was never approved, funded or started, and more than a decade later no road reaches the Bering Strait from either side. Here is what was actually proposed, why it caught the world's imagination, and why the gaps on the map are so hard to close.

What Yakunin proposed in 2015

The idea, reported by CNN on 24 March 2015 and picked up by Motor Authority a week later, was less a single highway than a development belt. Its spine would run across Russia beside the Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest rail line on Earth, and would bundle together a modern road, power lines, pipelines and, eventually, a high-speed railway. Existing motorways in Europe would carry traffic west to the English Channel, while the road network of Canada and the United States would take it onward to New York once the corridor reached Alaska.

Reports at the time spoke of a price tag in the trillions of dollars, with some outlets quoting figures of up to $3 trillion. Those numbers were rough guesses rather than engineering estimates. No feasibility study, financing plan or international agreement was ever published, and Yakunin himself left Russian Railways later in 2015.

The headline that circulated online, that "Russia" had formally proposed a road linking London and New York, also overstated things. It was a pitch from the head of a state company, presented as a vision for the coming decades, not a decision of the Russian government.

The missing links on the map

Look at the route on a map and most of it seems to exist already. Europe and western Russia are covered with roads, and North America has its interstate and Canadian highway systems. The trouble lies in three enormous gaps.

Eastern Siberia

The far northeast of Russia, especially Chukotka, has almost no year-round roads. According to the overview of Bering Strait crossing plans on Wikipedia, there is no railway within about 2,800 km of the strait, and the nearest proper highway is roughly 2,000 km away. Building through permafrost, mountains and swampy tundra, where the ground heaves and thaws with the seasons, is among the hardest civil engineering anywhere.

The Bering Strait itself

At its narrowest the strait separating Russia from Alaska is about 82 km (51 miles) wide, and it is shallow, no deeper than about 55 m. The two Diomede Islands sit in the middle, which is why most designs imagine either a chain of bridges hopping between them or a long tunnel underneath. The water is shallow enough to make the idea technically conceivable, but sea ice, storms and long winter darkness would make construction and maintenance extremely costly.

Western Alaska

Even on the American side, the road would start in nowhere. Nome, the largest town near the strait, has no road connection to the rest of Alaska; Fairbanks, the nearest major city, lies roughly 520 miles away across wilderness. A road to Nome alone has been estimated at $2.3 to $2.7 billion and has never been built.

An old dream with a long history

Yakunin's plan was only the latest in a long line of proposals to tie Eurasia and North America together by land. In 1890 William Gilpin, the first territorial governor of Colorado, described a "Cosmopolitan Railway" that would circle the globe. In 1892 the engineer Joseph Strauss, who later worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, sketched a Bering Strait railway bridge in his student thesis, an idea the Russian imperial government turned down.

More recently, Russian officials backed a 2007 plan for a tunnel of roughly 103 km as part of a $65 billion transport and energy link, and the government endorsed that project in 2011. Like TEPR, it never moved beyond paper. Each revival tends to follow the same pattern: a striking map, a vast cost estimate and enthusiastic headlines, followed by silence once the practical questions arrive.

Why such projects stall

A line on a map is the easy part. Turning it into a road requires several things at once, and the 2015 proposal had none of them in place:

Money. Trillions of dollars would have to come from governments or investors willing to wait decades for any return, on a route with very little local traffic.
Political agreement. A Bering crossing needs a binding treaty between Russia and the United States, two countries whose relations worsened sharply after 2014 and again after 2022.
Demand. Shipping containers across the Pacific or Atlantic is far cheaper than trucking them through Siberia and Alaska, so the commercial case is weak.
Climate and terrain. Thawing permafrost already damages existing roads and buildings in the Arctic, and a new corridor would face the same problem on a much larger scale.

None of this means the idea was worthless. Grand corridor plans can focus attention on real needs, such as better links for remote Arctic communities, even when the full vision never materialises.

Where things stand today

As of the mid-2020s, nothing has been built that brings either country's road network meaningfully closer to the strait. Russia has long-term plans for roads in Chukotka, including the Anadyr Highway, which officials do not expect to finish for years, and Alaska has slowly extended its roads in the interior. Neither effort is connected to a transcontinental scheme.

If you see the story shared as news that a London–New York superhighway is coming, it is worth remembering that it describes a 2015 concept, not a project under construction. For now, the only way to travel between the two cities is still by air or by sea.

Quick facts

Proposed by: Vladimir Yakunin, head of Russian Railways, in March 2015.
Name: Trans-Eurasian Belt Development (TEPR).
Estimated London–New York driving distance: about 12,910 miles (CNN estimate).
Bering Strait width: about 82 km (51 miles) at the narrowest point.
Reported cost: "trillions of dollars," never backed by a published study.
Status: not approved, not funded, not built.

Sources: Motor Authority: Russia proposes superhighway linking New York and London (March 2015); Wikipedia: Bering Strait crossing; original report shared via AnonHQ.

Related: