Why there are abandoned tunnels under Dallas
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G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is if you're listening. Last week we looked at how Donald Trump's trade war is playing out in two very different Canadian provinces, Quebec and Alberta. Now, we love a tunnel on this show, and a few months ago we did an episode about the FBI's secret tunnel under the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Today I thought I'd take us back underground into a style of tunnel network that's found in many Canadian cities. cities. This story is about the rise and fall of the Pedway, an infrastructure idea that spread through North America in the 60s and 70s with mixed results. I'm joined again by supervising producer Kara Jensen McKinnon. Hello, Kara.
Hi.
So, Cara, you have been working at the ABC's Ultimo office for some time now. Yes. I worked there for nine years, and I discovered that you can actually go from the ABC building as far as David Jones in the CBD without going outside.
Yes, I have done this. I have done this before. All the way there? Yes. Mostly to stay out of the rain, but the longer I stay underground, the more fearful I get that I'm gonna get some weird like underground mole sickness. I don't like to do it, but I have done it in my life.
Now, why you would want to go into David Jones, really who knows? I've never needed to go into the David Jones there in town, but I have done it for the fun of doing it through the tunnel system. And this, when I was exploring how far in Sydney I could go underground without getting wet, got me interested in the idea of in the world, where is the biggest system where that you can do this in? And I learned about Alberta, which is where it links. To the story that we did last week. Alberta has two big cities in it Edmonton and Calgary.
Mm-hmm.
And both Edmonton and Calgary have what is called a pedway system.
Okay.
I mean, I wouldn't have called it that, but that's what they're called, a pedway system. Sure. I've sent you a link, I think, the Calgary plus fifteen system. Wow.
So it's extensive.
It's enormous. It is a 16 kilometer system across the downtown area of Calgary. And it means that you can be in the downtown area of Calgary and never need to go outside into the extraordinarily cold temperatures. And there is a similar system in Edmonton as well, not as big. I kind of went, Oh yeah, this is kind of cool. Yeah. But uh didn't think about it all that much until this last week when I started looking into the history of this and it's stranger and a lot more fun.
What sparked the hosts’ interest in underground tunnel networks?
than I expected it would be. Amazing. This is the history of Penny. The history of mole people who live under Alberta. In fact, Alberta is only a tiny part of the story. Okay. Basically, Pedways started in the early part of the twentieth century as a totally disorganized thing. There are a few examples in Houston, Texas, Will Horwitz owned a bunch of movie theaters that were all kind of like on the same street across an intersection. Okay. He was like, Well, I don't want to build three air conditioning systems. So what I'll do is I'll dig tunnels between the different theaters. Okay. And I will just put an air conditioner in one of the theaters, and the air-conditioned air will just blow. Flow down through the tunnels to the other theaters, and I won't have to pay for a bigger air conditioning system.
I like being so cheap that digging a system of underground tunnels is like the solution you come up with.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:36
2
What sparked the hosts’ interest in underground tunnel networks?
3:36–8:27
3
How did the early cinema‑theater tunnels in Houston inspire the pedway concept?
8:27–10:58
4
Who was Vincent Pont and why is he called the ‘father of pedways’?
10:58–13:53
5
Why did cold‑weather cities like Montreal and Calgary embrace pedways?
13:53–17:11
6
What caused the decline of North‑American pedway systems in the 1990s?
17:11–17:13