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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
"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.
> 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.
Switzerland's public transport is nearly perfect; it can take you anywhere, fast, in some of the most hostile inhabited terrain on the planet.
However, a lot of people still drive because for many journies it's cheaper. I don't know if the UK can afford such great infrastructure investment.
Being Swiss, there's a lot of things I think we could do better. Public transport is not one of them though, I really have to say we got this nailed down pretty well.
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
> 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?
I love this. In the UK we're currently in the middle of a ~25-30 year rail upgrade programme and if you ask what the new timetables will look like (i.e. tangible benefits), they look at you as if you had 3 heads.
They're too busy blowing their own trumpet any time they complete a minor piece of work to answer such nonsense questions.
Switzerland is a very rich country. But UK infrastructure construction is significantly more expensive than its European peers like France, which is just as budget-constrained as the UK is.
24 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] thread£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...
The ‘s’ in tranport stands for security.
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.
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.
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.
As someone who lives near a train line with people, pets and wildlife all seeming unbothered by the train line, I'm not sure it's really necessary.
>The project required more than 8,000 permits, each needing surveys, consultation and legal sign-off.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects
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.
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!
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
I love this. In the UK we're currently in the middle of a ~25-30 year rail upgrade programme and if you ask what the new timetables will look like (i.e. tangible benefits), they look at you as if you had 3 heads.
They're too busy blowing their own trumpet any time they complete a minor piece of work to answer such nonsense questions.