For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn.
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
loudmax · 54m ago
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
andsoitis · 1m ago
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), so you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
glenstein · 47m ago
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival.
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary
ta1243 · 30m ago
You're looking at someone saying "look at this tiny pothole and how awful it is on a road" when 50 yards further down there's a massive chasm.
It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
potato3732842 · 22m ago
No it's not. The bad boxes are both literal and metaphorical. There are many stupid straws on this stupid camel and every stupid straw is there because a stupid person said "but what about my bats, or whatever" without consideration and/or caring for the big picture.
crinkly · 23m ago
When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
throw0101a · 1h ago
> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […]
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
potato3732842 · 11m ago
"But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
markus_zhang · 43m ago
There is definitely a long gap between "Don't care about env at all" and "Preventing everything being built because it hassles some small animal". I'm afraid and you and many people are biasing towards the other end even if you believe you are a white knight.
Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
milesjag · 6m ago
The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to.
Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.
Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.
The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
jamespo · 8m ago
Thank you for that non-caring contribution
7952 · 1h ago
I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
consp · 1h ago
From my abroad ivory tower it just looked like the torries were trying to extract as much money for their friends as possible and got away with it too. But that's just my personal, likely biased, observation.
actionfromafar · 26m ago
If you have little information, it's a decent rule of thumb.
potato3732842 · 24m ago
>There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
JackFr · 44m ago
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
potato3732842 · 10m ago
Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?
MichaelZuo · 57m ago
If you can’t even stop expenditures that lack credible explanations, of why it’s worth it, then how do you know it is a “strong legal system”?
ta1243 · 51m ago
That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
pu_pe · 1h ago
This is a big reason why most modern Western large-scale infrastructure projects get delayed and cost overruns. People making decisions treat construction as if it was cloud computing: just pay for how much you need, when you need it. Some sectors are highly specialized and if their future use is not predictable, they must charge a high premium for that uncertainty.
graemep · 1h ago
Basically they are acting like the sort of third world country that does grandiose vanity projects.
Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
zengineer · 1h ago
I live in Switzerland since 10 years and I am always - not only amazed to read about how the Swiss gov / people tackle things, but experience it first hand in my daily life.
Above all the train system is very interesting. From the smooth timetables to even the smallest details (E.g the acronyms sound or music notes in trains is based on the railway abbreviations SBB / CFF / FFE). I even made a post about it when creating a "Swiss train world": https://medium.com/@franzeus/building-an-interactive-colorin...
ipaddr · 13m ago
"They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country"
The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.
What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.
andsoitis · 4m ago
> They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country?
They work out what a good timetable looks like in that future. Then they build backwards from there.
A workback plan!
ajd555 · 26m ago
Great read, I didn't know about the Swiss approach to infrastructure projects, but I like it. In a sense, it's how successful networks are built: slowly, but steadily. I'm reminded of the Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen, where he states that starting at a smaller scale, you'll get a small network with more engagement that you can sustainably grow over time, whereas large companies that roll out a networked project in a big bang (Google+, anyone?) can dramatically fail.
Very insightful and I look forward to applying this in NYC logistics!
dhfbshfbu4u3 · 1h ago
The Swiss method works because their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high. They have a smaller geographic footprint and heavier services economy. The UK still has so much industrial traffic (inclusive of agriculture) and a far less cohesive political environment. This isn’t to say that HS2 isn’t a train wreck (haha - it is) but applying small country policies to big country problems is a a bit simplistic.
PaulRobinson · 1h ago
Not buying that.
The argument made in TFA isn't that the Swiss method works because of population size or GDP per capita, but because the processes and goals are completely different.
They work backwards from an agreed goal - written into law - that continuous improvement into infrastructure is a requirement of all governments, regardless of political bent. I actually don't think this is controversial, even in the UK, it's why there is now majority support for nationalisation of the railway operators (and water companies, and more) - it effectively forces capital expenditure rather than the decades of capital extraction we've suffered from.
Some of the Swiss projects are simpler because of geography (shorter distances), but some are harder (long tunnels through mountains). GDP per capita is an output, not an input - if we'd started doing this decades ago instead of believing the Regan/Thatcher nonsense we now know just doesn't work long-term, our GDP per capita would have benefited and it would unlikely be a 2x difference.
As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there - from capital investment into infrastructure, to sovereign wealth funds, to encouraging retail investment into stock markets more (compare the US landscape to the UK landscape), to abolishing leaseholds - all because "that won't work here". Yet the data being cited - including by yourself - is not data. It's a hypothesis. Perhaps we should just give it a go, eh? Maybe for 10 years, let's try something different and see if any of it is better than the current baseline? Because it probably will be.
The UK thinks it is special, and in some ways it is, but it is also constantly shooting itself in the foot so that the Duke of Westminster and Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall can keep making money, and so that the ghost of long-dead prime ministers with nothing to add of value to the 21st century can remain venerated by the political class.
We need to wake the hell up.
pantalaimon · 1h ago
What does the Swiss method (predicatable and consistent funding for the railway) have to do with population size and density?
Germany has the same problem. The railway can't plan much ahead as funding is always at the political whims of the next government, prestigious mega projects get funded while existing infrastructure crumbles - and now you have another mega-project to remediate existing infrastructure over the next years all at once, but for this they throw copious amounts of money at construction companies to ramp up that fast.
If there had been constant funding and maintenance, the network wouldn't be in such disarray in the first place and it would have come much cheaper than fixing it all at once in a short time frame.
ben_w · 1h ago
The UK — actually, no, just England in this case — less cohesive than Switzerland? Switzerland gives a lot power to each canton. It is also famously mountainous, which is hard on infrastructure projects. They're also a through-route from Germany (and Austria and France) to Italy, so looking at just their own economy for industrialisation and load is insufficient, as this wouldn't explain the existence of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
amunozo · 28m ago
Always this silly excuse. The Swiss method work because it's good and the country is governed incredibly better than the UK and most of the rest in Europe.
Hilift · 25m ago
Switzerland is the land of gobs of cash and gold. The UK is having difficulty making ends meet for basic infrastructure like the £20 billion in debt for one water company. UK debt is 96% of GDP (£2.8 trillion, £16.4 billion monthly interest payment). Switzerland debt is 38% of GDP.
7952 · 1h ago
If we could only deliver 1/12 relative to Switzerland it would still be a huge improvement on the current baseline.
macleginn · 1h ago
How is lower GDP per capita a valid reason for overspending? And a lack of political cohesion shouldn’t be a reason for poor planning.
avh02 · 1h ago
> They have a smaller geographic footprint
you seem to forget their famous mountains
herbst · 1h ago
UK has a much higher population density.
ur-whale · 44m ago
> and GDP per capita is twice as high.
And why do you think that is?
mrks_hy · 1h ago
Did you read the article and can point out which part of the specific method would not work in the UK?
There is nothing in the outlined strategy that would be made unworkable. You may reach a different value-engineered point, and it explicitly mentions cargo trains as well.
bootsmann · 28m ago
The long term commitment by the government works for Switzerland because the government is a permanent national unity coalition that has not changed in party composition for over 50 years. The fact that the people in power when things are planned will be the same that reap the rewards 4 elections later helps align politics for long term issues.
fragmede · 1h ago
Looking at GDP and population, without considering any of the other relevant details is also a bit simplistic, wouldn't you say?
yanis_t · 40m ago
Somehow following the rabbit hole led me to this list of infra megaprojects around the world [1]
> "megaprojects, which may be defined as projects that cost more than US$1 billion"
At our current pace a public toilet will soon qualify as a megaproject.
actionfromafar · 23m ago
In Europe, a defense megaproject.
gadders · 1h ago
I think the Lower Thames Crossing will make HS2 look like a model of efficiency by the time it is completed.
£1.2bn spent without even a shovel of dirt being removed. [1] Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2] (which may be admirable in themselves, but bribes to shut local communities and charities up shouldn't be part of the project).
The bribes are looking much worse for overhead lines. Just giving people money (off their bill) for doing no work and making no real sacrifice. People will either be insulted by the low amount or insulted at the bribe. It will change no minds.
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
ChocolateGod · 39m ago
Nimbyism needs to be shut down at the earliest opportunity when a project is mandatory for the economic growth of the country, people moan about their energy prices but also moan when a wind turbine is within viewing distance of their house.
I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though.
If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
iLoveOncall · 1h ago
> Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2]
Half a million at most out of 1.2 billion.
> To date, 55 projects have been awarded grants of up to £10,000
IshKebab · 1h ago
I'm way more ok with worthy bribes than I am with nonsense like the £100m bat tunnel. But yeah it's still pretty ridiculous.
ta1243 · 1h ago
Compensating local communities for the impact of national infrastructure is a simple approach. Wouldn't surprise me if longer term that would lead to no-win-no-fee consultants trying to extract more money from the process thus breaking it.
Otherwise it's
1) Don't build national infrastructure
2) Ignore local opposition
moomin · 57m ago
IIRC the principal cost overrun was a huge push to put nearly everything in tunnels in safe conservative consistencies. No project, good or bad, can survive that level of political interference.
raverbashing · 56m ago
Yea NIMBYs (including "what about nature" or "what about bats" and "what about the scenery) are a huge waste of money and oxygen
cs02rm0 · 1h ago
I think this sounds a little like it's viewed through a lens of survivor bias.
If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
evidencetamper · 1h ago
If the failure was not a failure, but instead an amazing success, then it would have been more successful than this exceptional success.
hnlmorg · 10m ago
It’s not really survivor bias if the article is about why projects fail. Then it’s just an “example”.
palijer · 1h ago
This topic is naturally viewed through a survivorship lens, but I don't think it is a bias in this situation.
If the facts of the situation were reversed, of course we would draw the reverses conclusion. That golds true for just about any argument.
kypro · 1h ago
You might have a point if it wasn't for the fact that infrastructure projects in the UK generally cost more than our European peers.
The UK's inability to build is apparent everywhere – our extreme lack of house building, our lack of modern nuclear power stations, our sewage system operating beyond its capacity, poor national transportation, etc. If HS2 was an exception to the rule then I doubt there would be this much focus on it. HS2 is just the most costly and extreme example of the problems we face when it comes to major infrastructure projects.
inglor_cz · 37m ago
I wonder how much of this difference is attributable to Swiss direct democracy, which teaches people to participate in the decision-making process, but it also teaches them that losing in a vote is natural, and that you in fact should have at least some position towards bigger projects, instead of ignoring 99 per cent of what is going on, because your position actually matters when the ballot is being counted.
NIMBYs and other special interest groups are usually non-majority, but used to getting their way over the wish (or, more often, tired indifference) of the majority, which the Swiss system makes a bit harder.
CraigJPerry · 1h ago
UK energy supply projects could do with that Swiss approach.
Emma_Goldman · 1h ago
Why isn't that the current CfD / RAB models?
linuxftw · 45m ago
> Well, first up, they'd have spotted that our major cities need more frequent and faster rail connections from suburbs to centres and that these are prevented at the moment by insufficient platform capacity in stations like Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Birmingham New Street. So we need more station capacity in our city centres.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing ones. When you keep building new infrastructure to shuffle people into the same cities, the property values at the tail end of the infrastructure rise, pushing people further out, increasing the demand for new infrastructure.
The property prices inside the city stay inflated, wages stagnate, the working class loses.
decimalenough · 28m ago
The UK does not need more cities. In fact, like most of the industrialized world, their second-tier and third-tier cities are suffering since the entire economy and population are both getting inexorably pulled into London. This includes the planned cities ("new towns") that tried and largely failed to do exactly what you suggest.
More and more people are moving out of smaller cities every year in favor of London. Building new cities that no one wants to live in does not solve the problem, no matter the cost. Look at Italy for a good example, there are places where the local municipalities are offering houses for 1€ if you come and live there permanently, but there's still nearly no takers.
jeffrallen · 1h ago
This is an excellent analysis of how to avoid the curse of megaprojects.
Heres a couple reactions based on the Swiss point of view.
> keeps the supply chain warm
Yes! And the human resources pool. And a constant supply of construction projects means every industry touched by them can keep a pipeline of apprentices in training.
And lots of small projects means there are places where the risk is not so big of taking a chance on some innovation, or a university research collaboration, further keeping the pipeline full of students and innovations.
But, for it to work, you probably also need a high trust society. You need light touch regulation on the training, research funding, and project management. And all of that is easier at the 9 million person scale than at the 60 million person scale.
zabzonk · 1h ago
But of course the British did create one of the greatest transport projects - the country-wide railway system, only to have it destroyed by the Conservatives.
I used to live in North London, and it made me so sad that each branch-line I walked over on bridge, now allotments, or simply overgrown, could have taken me int the City far faster and more efficiently than the tube (I like the tube, as much as anyone can).
The UK can build things, but not if politicians are directly in charge, as they were in the Beeching cuts.
ta1243 · 33m ago
The majority of railway miles closed under Labour
And your branch line wouldn't take you into the city - there isn't the terminal capacity.
However new lines, like the Victoria, Jubilee, and Crossrail will.
thebruce87m · 1h ago
> Swiss vs. UK approach to major _tranport_ projects
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), so you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them.
Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring.
The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.
What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.
They work out what a good timetable looks like in that future. Then they build backwards from there.
A workback plan!
The argument made in TFA isn't that the Swiss method works because of population size or GDP per capita, but because the processes and goals are completely different.
They work backwards from an agreed goal - written into law - that continuous improvement into infrastructure is a requirement of all governments, regardless of political bent. I actually don't think this is controversial, even in the UK, it's why there is now majority support for nationalisation of the railway operators (and water companies, and more) - it effectively forces capital expenditure rather than the decades of capital extraction we've suffered from.
Some of the Swiss projects are simpler because of geography (shorter distances), but some are harder (long tunnels through mountains). GDP per capita is an output, not an input - if we'd started doing this decades ago instead of believing the Regan/Thatcher nonsense we now know just doesn't work long-term, our GDP per capita would have benefited and it would unlikely be a 2x difference.
As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there - from capital investment into infrastructure, to sovereign wealth funds, to encouraging retail investment into stock markets more (compare the US landscape to the UK landscape), to abolishing leaseholds - all because "that won't work here". Yet the data being cited - including by yourself - is not data. It's a hypothesis. Perhaps we should just give it a go, eh? Maybe for 10 years, let's try something different and see if any of it is better than the current baseline? Because it probably will be.
The UK thinks it is special, and in some ways it is, but it is also constantly shooting itself in the foot so that the Duke of Westminster and Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall can keep making money, and so that the ghost of long-dead prime ministers with nothing to add of value to the 21st century can remain venerated by the political class.
We need to wake the hell up.
Germany has the same problem. The railway can't plan much ahead as funding is always at the political whims of the next government, prestigious mega projects get funded while existing infrastructure crumbles - and now you have another mega-project to remediate existing infrastructure over the next years all at once, but for this they throw copious amounts of money at construction companies to ramp up that fast.
If there had been constant funding and maintenance, the network wouldn't be in such disarray in the first place and it would have come much cheaper than fixing it all at once in a short time frame.
you seem to forget their famous mountains
And why do you think that is?
There is nothing in the outlined strategy that would be made unworkable. You may reach a different value-engineered point, and it explicitly mentions cargo trains as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects
At our current pace a public toilet will soon qualify as a megaproject.
£1.2bn spent without even a shovel of dirt being removed. [1] Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2] (which may be admirable in themselves, but bribes to shut local communities and charities up shouldn't be part of the project).
[1] https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/1-2bn-spent-on-l...
[2] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/lower-thames-crossi...
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though.
I watched this video from TLDR last year and found it easy to understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPFlDGQah4
If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
Half a million at most out of 1.2 billion.
> To date, 55 projects have been awarded grants of up to £10,000
Otherwise it's
1) Don't build national infrastructure
2) Ignore local opposition
If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
If the facts of the situation were reversed, of course we would draw the reverses conclusion. That golds true for just about any argument.
The UK's inability to build is apparent everywhere – our extreme lack of house building, our lack of modern nuclear power stations, our sewage system operating beyond its capacity, poor national transportation, etc. If HS2 was an exception to the rule then I doubt there would be this much focus on it. HS2 is just the most costly and extreme example of the problems we face when it comes to major infrastructure projects.
NIMBYs and other special interest groups are usually non-majority, but used to getting their way over the wish (or, more often, tired indifference) of the majority, which the Swiss system makes a bit harder.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing ones. When you keep building new infrastructure to shuffle people into the same cities, the property values at the tail end of the infrastructure rise, pushing people further out, increasing the demand for new infrastructure.
The property prices inside the city stay inflated, wages stagnate, the working class loses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
Heres a couple reactions based on the Swiss point of view.
> keeps the supply chain warm
Yes! And the human resources pool. And a constant supply of construction projects means every industry touched by them can keep a pipeline of apprentices in training.
And lots of small projects means there are places where the risk is not so big of taking a chance on some innovation, or a university research collaboration, further keeping the pipeline full of students and innovations.
But, for it to work, you probably also need a high trust society. You need light touch regulation on the training, research funding, and project management. And all of that is easier at the 9 million person scale than at the 60 million person scale.
I used to live in North London, and it made me so sad that each branch-line I walked over on bridge, now allotments, or simply overgrown, could have taken me int the City far faster and more efficiently than the tube (I like the tube, as much as anyone can).
The UK can build things, but not if politicians are directly in charge, as they were in the Beeching cuts.
And your branch line wouldn't take you into the city - there isn't the terminal capacity.
However new lines, like the Victoria, Jubilee, and Crossrail will.
The ‘s’ in tranport stands for security.