Spot on with the "still creating value" stuff. With most things, creating more so more people can have it is seen as good. With roads, it's somehow seen as bad.
It makes sense if the roads have negative externalities, like noise, or ugliness, or pollution, or destroying pedestrian access. But none of that applies to tunnels used by cars running on clean energy.
I've noticed a certain utopian streak in some urban planning enthusiast communities --- one that's not compatible with the automobile as the primary mode of personal transportation. The general thinking seems to be, "$PROPOSAL reduces the number of cars on the road? Good!"
Back when I lived in Buffalo, NY, there was a group of people who'd write editorials in The Stranger (the local alternative weekly) and various blogs demanding that the city or state tear down the "Skyway" (a large bridge for NY 5), rip up expressways, narrow roads, and so on. Buffalo is not a wealthy city. The city is lucky to have inherited this infrastructure from a more prosperous era; it'll need this infrastructure if it's to become prosperous again.
It would be ridiculous to spend millions destroying this infrastructure when the city can't even afford to remove condemned houses in abandoned sections of the city. Yet week after week, people would publish articles demanding that the city do just that. It was incredible.
The only explanation I have for this impulse is that these advocates of infrastructure removal were really motivated by an aesthetic romanticism, an impractical idea of what a city should be, and a general dispositional aversion to modernity generally and to internal combustion engines specifically.
This mentality drove me up a wall. The automobile is an incredibly useful invention. It's allowed billions of people a degree of personal mobility that our ancestors could only have imagined. That's why we use the things so much. We can talk about how to make automobiles more efficient. We can debate the best schemes for allocating space in limited public infrastructure to the most important uses. (I'm a fan of congestion charges.) But just railing against the existence of automobile traffic is ridiculous.
I share the aversion to internal combustion engines. Carcinogenic exhaust should be a deal breaker when buying a car. I find peoples romantic attachment to legacy technology to be perplexing.
It makes sense if the roads have negative externalities, like noise, or ugliness, or pollution, or destroying pedestrian access. But none of that applies to tunnels used by cars running on clean energy.