Factors:
People's labor is no longer so cheap to build stuff, they have more qualifications and alternatives to their labor and they want to be paid more.
Government contracting becomes influenced by political / additional considerations.
The projects get more and more complex and are no longer decided by just a few responsible people but dispersed among multiple agencies each with requirements.
Regulations and standards increase.
There are more people to insert their hands into the revenue streams and extract some value.
Property now is worth something and has to be bought off.
It goes on and on. I don't know if there are any good examples of where an advanced economy was able to avoid this increasing cost of basic infrastructure building, although of course, some countries manage to do it without the same levels of cost as the USA for example.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
So - there's that.
It seems to be, which is really ruining many aspects of society.
One hears all the stories back from the 40s and 50s where a group of neighbors or interested people just got together, bought some materials and built up a club house or community center or pool or any number of things in a few weeks. So towns had all these amenities because they were cheap and easy to build comunally.
Today to build even a small club house for the kids in the community for instance, you'll need to raise millions of dollars to pay off permits and inspections and lawyers and insurance and professional builders (since they won't let you build it yourself). So hardly anything can be done, nobody can afford it.
Arguably sure, the quality of the club house today, if it could be built, is better. But does it matter? How much do we lose by not being able to build hardly anything? That clubhouse from the 50s might be a bit rough around the edges but in most cases it is still standing 70+ years later and has brought joy to counless people.
In the 2000s, most old clubhouses and village halls had to be upgraded for disabled accessibility, or face closure. This usually meant rebuilding toilets, not just adding wheelchair ramps. Grants were available from local government. My father was retired by then, but did the designs and grant applications for several halls in his neighbourhood.
For example we spent 7% of GDP every year on a government agency to build stuff - not because it was needed, just because it created jobs for people at the tail end of the Depression and first half of the War. Perhaps the entire industry that it fueled didn't die overnight and the millions of people they employed made building at scale during the largest economic expansion in American history helped.
Not really. Numerous examples world over of first world countries/ expensive cities managing to get infra done (Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore)
What's really happening in many western capitalist societies, both the rich landowning class as well as the unions dominate and capture the regulatory authorities and use the "system" to increase friction and costs for things that could reduce their own wealth extraction (land being taken away, more efficient construction) even if it's in the broader interest of the nation. Indeed this awesome flex of power of individual or small group wealth extraction over total system efficiency is seen as a highly positive ideology and is not all that far from third world countries where wealth extraction from corruption is seen as just a way of life.
As usual the key is how a society strikes a balance. The Western democracies of the 20th century did know how strike a balance pretty well - perhaps because of the existential threat of first the Great Depression, then the Nazi and then the Russian threat. Perhaps removal of existential threats that necessarily require a society to come together encourages private profiteering.
aka, they are being asked to make a sacrifice for the benefit of someone else. Of course they're not going to agree. No reasonable person will.
I don't see this as being wrong - it's in fact a feature of freedom and a high-rights country.
I bet, even digging by hand, the Victorians did it cheaper.
And in addition to queuing, we also seem to enjoy bureaucracy. There will have been a decade of planning employing dozens if not hundreds of people before a shovel is in the ground.
Then of course every new station has to be ‘special’ in some way. So we pay some architects firm absurd amounts to use Tibetan Yak hair insulated, Alaskan larch clad stations for some weird Green box ticking exercise.
This translates as, you need to dry boreholes along the place, take samples, send the samples to a laboratory, get the data, save the data, store the data, build a system that deals with the data (because different laboratories have different methods) standardise everything, and present the data. You need to do that every month or so.
You need to make sure that the watercourses are suitable for fishes and other animals. 40 years ago, you had a watercourse, you threw a 200mm pvc pipe, call it a culvert and carry on. Now if you really want to preserve the watercourse you need a super oversized culvert that can contain the whole watercourse. But such a culvert is dangerous (people can go inside), so you need to install a grill. Now you need to study the flood risk of the culvert with a blocked grill.
That is in addition to the multiple flood risk assessment that need to be done for a linear project, basically one for each watershed that it crosses. An what if the design changes for whatever reason, like not being compliant with the flood risk assessment? Oh you need to start again, and repeat everything.
Plus in engineering, every time you change something in any of the steps, you need at least 4 pair of eyes to check the change.
So the reason is bureaucracy. These rules are important, but in linear engineering projects, they do impose a high toll on the project price, because you need to make sure they comply on every mile of the project.
That is from my point of view, I am pretty sure there are other stuff that increases the price.
De rigueur for the UK ... even when peoples lives depend on the subject of those contracts.
We're a rotten/ing country.
A partial list: SCS JV: Skanska, Costain, Strabag. Align JV: Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick. EKFB JV: Eiffage, Kier, Ferrovial, Bam Nuttall.
A fuller list: https://www.building.co.uk/focus/which-construction-firms-ha...
What an enormous waste of money on the existing work
Edit: I double it’ll ever reach Manchester. It’ll just be Birmingham to turn it in to a commuter hub and for companies to get cheaper office space. I said this from the very beginning. Leeds was a total joke, Manchester somewhat believable if you are the kind of person to trust and believe London would ever fund such a project in the north lol. And here we are
The current scheme is designed to relieve capacity on the WCML to make way for more local services. I'm not sure that providing local public transport is a "toy for rich people".
> Connecting the last few metres to HS1 at St Pancras would allow trains to compete with air travel to Europe. Taking an eco-guilt-free trip from northern England to Paris is something a normal person might do
You can already get the the train from the north to Paris. You change at KGX/STP.
> even if the rail tickets cost 3x the flights. But not when you have book multiple tickets and drag your stuff between stations in London.
You can book a direct ticket, and dragging your stuff between two stations 50 yards apart is much easier than dragging to/from the airport.
Where in the north are people this rich and lazy?
theres Current a cost of living crisis and this comment is just wildly out of touch. Are you a politician?
I reckon a couple economists could get a bestselling book out of this.
HS2 is too expensive, sure, but the LHC is built next to ~a century of research institutions and took a very long time, whereas trains can actually be on somewhat tight schedules in the places where it actually matters and requiring bulldozing a fuckload of expensive land, houses, and history etc.
How is -£3.7bn a massive underestimate. Usually coming in under estimate is a good thing (outside of govt and consulting, of course)
Britain is a tiny overpopulated island with legacy law and property problems that effectively has serfdom. It got powerful because it had the right ingredients for the Industrial Revolution but all the reasons that made the revolution happen are all reasons that weigh on it now.
It is already a failed state.
I earn poor money relative to a comparative US citizen, but I wouldn't swap places if given the chance.
I walk my kids to school, and local schools are pretty good.
I cycle them a couple miles down the canal to the local sports centre for cheap swimming and recreation. I have many free high quality playgrounds nearby within walking and cycling distance, and streams and woods to play in. As a result my family can get away with a single medium sized car and use it infrequently.
I don't think there are many places in the - especially affluent areas - where this would be the case in the US, but I may be wrong.
I paid little for university and get free healthcare, which has been excellent quality whenever I've needed it (including for the birth of my two kids).
My employer gives me 30 days leave a year, with the option to buy more (and I do). There's no implicit pressure not to. I was able to take 6 months of after the birth of each of my kids on shared parental leave, which my employer had a legal duty to allow me if asked.
There are many beautiful historical places to visit for little money. The coast in any direction is within a day's drive and a varied holidays can be had without flying.
My country has in the pipeline 100GW of wind power, meaning that in a couple of decades energy is likely to be abundant and cheap if on a smart plan.
We do lots wrong as a country, and I haven't listed the negatives, but Britain is far from a failed state.
It can be cheaper of course but never cheap.
I would like to mention something else. I recently sold my car and moved to a place close to the train station because "public transport is great, why should I need a car" and it was working great until a few days ago when I was looking to go somewhere for the long weekend. A simple trip from Stevenage which has great train links to a place like Norwich proved impossible. Best trains I could get were one stop and 2h 30min and most had two stops 2h 30min. But those were expensive, between £90 and £130 for a return is a bit much and I got a warning saying due to strikes trains may be cancelled. National Express had no coaches in that direction, taxi was more expensive than trains and there's not a single BigName car hire company that is available in Stevenage and one that I found was not open on Sunday and Bank Holiday so I wouldn't be able to return the car. Had I rented it, it would be £120 for two days with £700 security deposit. With train strikes and ticket prices I didn't want to risk booking a hotel, so I stayed at home because what else am I going to do. Uneless I go to a local supermarket across the road or live in central London, I need a car.
NHS is also public infrastructure but I'd rather not even get into that. I'll just say that I'm convinced the Gov is letting NHS collapse on purpose so that they can pick it apart and privatise it. It's simply impossible that people are actually that incompetent.
I think you're vastly underestimating just how incompetent the large majority of people are (not just NHS/UK, the world, the dumber you are the more you breed etc) - we're being overrun
The difference I see though, is that much of Eastern Europe hardcore criminalized things which would not amount to a crime at all in Western legal systems, and not pass the extreme standards of proof.
1. Look for nepotism in appointments
2. Illogical high profile job competitions
3. Oversized, omnibus projects
4. Strange demands in procurement tenders, or one intentionally made noncompetitive
5. Income beyond known means of supervising officials
6. Strange project structuring, and legal acrobatics
7. Illogical financing arrangements
8. Long periods of doing nothing to extract more fees
9. Unreasonable fees of intermediaries and third parties
