This is the long and short of it.We're fucked. Joke country. Can't build a fucking railway.
there's another set of questions about what counts as infrastructure and who decidesI keep wondering whether part of the solution would be to essentially de-politicise infrastructure by handing off the specifics of the decision making to an independent public organization, kind of like the Bank of England. That way you at least remove a lot of the tendency to fuck around with long-term strategic projects to satisfy the contingencies of electoral politics.
Good article about infrastructure costs in the UK: https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/britains-infrastructure-is-too-expensive
More than £250m has been spent on the Lower Thames Crossing’s 63,000 page planning application. In effect a quarter of a billion spent so one branch of government can ask another branch of government for permission with no guarantee of success.
This additional bit of detail is mind-boggling:Right, that's it. Consider me a born-again ultra-libertarian. Time to abolish all governments.
To put that figure into perspective, that’s more than double the cost of building Norway’s Laerdal tunnel, the longest road tunnel in the world.
In fact, Norway built the world’s longest road tunnel and the world’s deepest subsea tunnel for less than the LTC’s planning application.
Yeah, I saw that bit. It feels like a comparison of the average monthly protein intake of someone in India to what the winner of the world hotdog eating contest can put away in ten minutes.This additional bit of detail is mind-boggling:
i was impressed that the tube improved noticeably under new labour, during my tory era upbringing (and having visited new york) i had assumed such positive developments were not even possiblebeen trying to think of something interesting to say about this today. the uk doesn't look particularly conducive to high-speed rail coz of the population geography. i don't know about anywhere else but france and spain are spread out, all the population at the edges of the countries and a massive load of nothing in between.
there's a way of looking at infrastucture in general in the UK as being part of the general feeling that it hasn't kept up with modernity. anything related to the state feels like its stuck in a perpetual 1995 (in england at least). but then the only transfomative government since then was the austerity government, so that seems like a logical outcome.
nyc infrastructure wise makes more sense if you think about it as everlasting 1950. places get stuck like that i think. i'm not sure exactly if its the 80s or the 90s that is the equivelent point for england.
This is the long and short of it.
The tragedy, apart from all the money that's already been spent, is all the houses and pubs and whatnot that have already been compulsory-purchased and demolished, the ancient woodland and meadows that have been torn up, and so on. What a fucking shit-show.
This additional bit of detail is mind-boggling
Yeah man, fuck those selfish dickheads not wanting their homes to be demolished for rail projects that may never be built.It's probably the case that UK is currently the worst place to be in the world for NIMBYism.
Oh just scrap the connection and tell people to move south, oh wait, what the sq ft price around London again?Yeah man, fuck those selfish dickheads not wanting their homes to be demolished for rail projects that may never be built.