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.
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.
As I understand it, the issue currently is that there's not really a framework for justifying or balancing those costs. Right now, the bat conservation people point out that the route will potentially eradicate a particular subspecies of bat. That gets sent up to the planning team, who now attempt to figure out a solution that prevents that from happening, and figures out how much that will cost. But what you probably want in between those points is someone to decide how much is too much to spend on the bats.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
> have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species
That's not what happened, and your own links fail to support your narrative. It was genuinely believed - before the passing of the act - that the recently-discovered snail darter was a distinct species. It is still disputed whether it's a distinct species, unique sub-species, distinct population segment, or none of the above. The first three of these would still afford it protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Unfortunately what people say they believe doesn't really matter. These decisions are so subjective that nobody can ever prove good or bad intent. And having nice intentions isn't worth much, what matters is outcomes.
The outcome here was the dam was blocked despite being nearly fully constructed, the decision was objected to by the developers who said it was nonsense, the dam builders were correct and the taxonomists were wrong. 100% bad outcome: everyone loses.
Unfortunately it's what you'd expect from a system that allows people who have no incentive to say yes overrule anything they don't like, because if later it's revealed they were wrong they can just say "whoopsie, well who is really to say what is true anyway, times change etc". There's no accountability.
> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.
It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.
> 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), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
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.
> 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.
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
"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.
The laws exist because we, collectively, thought they were a good idea. They can be changed if/when we change our minds.
For this specific thing, the drag while proving lack of damage is the point. Once the road/rail/bridge/whatever is built, it's often too late to simply say "oops". That, plus industry has a well deserved reputation for ignoring the environment when it becomes inconvenient.
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.
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.
Blocking high-speed rail in the name of conservation makes me want to bash my head against a wall. Guess we'll buy 10000 diesel trucks to move goods north-south instead. Car-world isn't good for conservation, rail is. It's missing the forest for the trees. These laws are selectively invoked by interest groups, they don't event serve the legitimate cause of conservationists - there is enough ammo in UK law to block any development.
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
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.
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.
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.
Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.
The WCML is perfectly adequate for that. HS2 is a vanity project for business and general passenger travel, none of which is certain or impossible on the WCML already.
But the WCML is at capacity, so it is not in fact adequate.
"There is no available capacity without significantly impacting performance and
causing a reduction in timetable resilience due to the resulting requirement for
successive services to run on minimum headway"
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.
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.
> 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.
California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law.
Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species).
> 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.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
>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.
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.
Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.
Or like in Vaud and Geneva, if it doesn't work it's because we love it to death, completely overwhelming the limited capacity available with hordes of rush-hour commuters.
But we must admit that Switzerland does not actually have high speed rail at all. So asking how it would build High Speed 2 is a bit of a misleading question. Swiss rail runs on time but slowly, this suits the Swiss culture which is much less centralized around big megacities than the UK so there's less need to do long commutes at high speed.
The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like
"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"
The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.
Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.
Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:
- Increase urban density.
- Make trains fast.
- Build more parking.
- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).
This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Switzerland's public transport is nearly perfect; it can take you anywhere, fast
While I love swiss public transport, I wouldn't qualify it as fast. It's dense/frequent/reliable, but not so fast. If the core lines (e.g. St Gallen-Geneva and Basel-Lugano) where running >200km/h that would be fast.
One reason is that making those fast has a much bigger benefit for cross border travel (non swiss), while a lot of the investments are done to benefit e.g. commuters, but with the enshrined road Gotthard traffic limitation I think we'll need to make Alp crossing more attractive for cross border travels at some point (and hopefully do the same for the mittelland line, zurich to geneva in sub-2h should definitely be possible)
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
There's some truth in what you say, but unfortunately there are also NIMBY regulations in place that delay/prevent infrastructure projects. I would prefer if our direct votes would shield _better_ against those mechanisms.
However, I think the bigger cultural norm at play here is that public infrastructure is very cherished. We publicly own (at least 51% of each of) our energy companies, public transport system, telecommunications system etc. Long term planning and investment is also ingrained into our culture.
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.
But in terms of trust: I think that's earned over time. Swiss people believe in decentralization of power, direct democracy and steady improvement, because it has proven to be stable. Inherently the Swiss are rather distrustful and cautious.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's an easy problem to solve if you want to use government levers: Raise the minimum wage inside London. Keep raising it until businesses start moving to other cities.
This is a considerably worse solution with unknown knock-on effects, especially when compared to a well understood solution of making a few stations handle more capacity.
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.
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.
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.
I think one key point why things are this way for CH, is that they decided to move to Takt scheduling (clock face scheduling) in the 70s. Integrated country-wide scheduling, makes doing those long term planning much easier.
(e.g. you know there's no point making some connection faster, because the lines still have to sync at 15m/30m/1h points. So you can focus on the places where you can go from a trip taking 40m to one taking 30m, because those are the one that will have a massive impact.
Right, but the only reason the Swiss system works is precisely because they are smaller. Fewer factions and more money to spend. It makes the process work.
I lived there for several years and I know exactly what you are talking about. There are a billion parties (or it seems like it) while the UK tends to have more factions grouped within larger parties. That said, as an outsider, I always saw this playing out a little differently in terms of national cohesion. Die Zauberformel tends to enforce that by design.
> As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there
I found British culture so depressingly defeatist that I stopped trying to argue for improvements and ended up moving away.
Switzerland isn't perfect but for day to day life it's just much easier to live in. I believe that's partly being a higher trust society but also higher ambition to make infrastructure and town planning improvements.
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.
In a bigger country, it is hard to maintain political cohesiveness over the long term. This means that big projects tend to get so large they can’t be terminated by the next round of government without major blowback. This leads to bloat and delay. The only way around this is total control (like China) but that leads to other issues.
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
You’re very close to the answer with Gotthard. The only reason this works is because the country is small enough to maintain political cohesion and rich enough to afford projects like this.
They're less unified than the UK. Also less unified than just England, which is where HS2 is entirely located, much to the annoyance of Wales who still has to pay for it.
> their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high
2x per capita * 1/6 the population = 1/3 the available money
Gotthard is longer than all the tunnels in HS2 combined. Total cost: CHF 9.560 billion as of December 2015 (it opened 1 June 2016), about £6.5bn at the exchange rate at the time.
As of 2020, the budget envelope set out by the DfT is £98 billion. HS2 is not fifteen times longer than GBT, it is (currently) four.
People think they are less unified because there are so many parties but die Zauberformel (magic formula) tends to toss that out the window in practice.
That's very reductive. Famously Switzerland has difficult terrain and many of the large infrastructure projects happen in the alpine region. Some of those projects are quite challenging and require international effort and coordination. GDP per capita being higher is an advantage, but it also makes everything more expensive domestically.
The approach outlined in the article, is also not applied generally to all infrastructure projects. It's specific to transport. It works because the process is sound and long-term oriented and not because Switzerland is small and rich. Perhaps your comment even inverts the causality.
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.
When the country is big enough, every “successful” project has to be too big to fail. Otherwise, it gets cut when the next lot come in to run the place. It’s a different way to look at the planning mechanism.
It is true that the Swiss have more money to spend on rail, but this makes a compelling case that we aren't spending our money as effectively.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time (accurately) pointing out how badly HS2 has gone and why. Very few people have pointed out a viable and concrete alternative.
The issue is that in many large countries, the project _must_ be enormous or else they’ll get cut as the political winds shift to and fro. The result is that they become highly inefficient and expensive. The only real solution is political cohesion.
You might think that saves a lot of money, until you drive around Zürich (think: M25), and realise that about 80% of your drive was through tunnels... and Zürich is not even mountaneous.
Be more impressed if you said you were a civil engineer. Living in a house didn't tell me what makes them expensive.
So, Zürich: you remember the tunnel that comes out half way to Adliswil, under Uetliberg?
What did it cost as a tunnel, what would that have cost as a surface road in reality, and what would it have cost as a surface road if the area had been flat? *That* is why you're being called out by loads of people for "a smaller geographic footprint".
Are you talking about the A3? If I recall correctly, it was like CHF 1B? That’s at least 20X more per km than a surface road? but it’s also more than just a car tunnel.
As for call outs, who cares? Some people will find a reason to nag on any day that ends with a y.
China builds everything at a scale that makes no sense anywhere else in the world. They have total political will, lower cost labor, and lax environmental standards (though that last on is changing). Also, their technical ability to terraform is insane.
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.
The national debt in Switzerland is so low because of a constitutional rule that limits spending to match revenues since 2003. In practice, this has led to lower debt.
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.
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.
Last time the proportion of the Federal Council was changed was 20-ish years ago, not over 50. But your broader point still stands as it's roughly the same parties (the "magic formula" is roughly proportional to the proportion of parties in the national council)(but also takes into account gender and language/region).
This reads as "the political parties in the UK are fully dysfunctional since they cannot plan for checks notes a decade ahead in country where average life expectancy is checks notes 81 years and the country itself has been around for checks notes 1500 years"
If, when claiming two things are sufficient, you have to introduce a third thing (political structure) to qualify them, you're clearly oversimplifying it too much, leading to an erroneous conclusion.
Of course it’s a simplification, but so is E = mc². A good model strips things down to the variables that matter most for the point you’re making. GDP and population, viewed through the lens of political structure, give you a workable baseline without drowning in secondary factors.
Thanks. I think that a perfectly reasonable question to ask. I answered a similar question up thread a bit. To expand, I think the main reason the Swiss method works is because the country is relatively small and well-aligned. The alignment comes from political cohesion (again it’s a small county) and excess wealth. Once you get to a UK-scale country, the rules change quite a bit. There are more factions and the pace of governmental change tends to flip every few years. As a result, infrastructure projects tend to become enormous as a means of self-preservation. Otherwise, they are just too tiny to survive the political turmoil. You see this in the UK, France, Germany… it’s crazy in the US. A standout exception is China and while they have their own problems, there is a iron-clad unity on really big projects.
> To expand, I think the main reason the Swiss method works is because the country is relatively small
I don't think that's relevant, as there are many small countries with the same problems as the UK and the UK is only medium-sized.
> and well-aligned.
That's the crux of the issue and it's not because of population size. Small countries are no more aligned than large ones (or medium size like the UK) in general.
Why is Switzerland more aligned politically than its peers? Why is social cohesion higher?
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.
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.
As I understand it, the issue currently is that there's not really a framework for justifying or balancing those costs. Right now, the bat conservation people point out that the route will potentially eradicate a particular subspecies of bat. That gets sent up to the planning team, who now attempt to figure out a solution that prevents that from happening, and figures out how much that will cost. But what you probably want in between those points is someone to decide how much is too much to spend on the bats.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
> have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species
That's not what happened, and your own links fail to support your narrative. It was genuinely believed - before the passing of the act - that the recently-discovered snail darter was a distinct species. It is still disputed whether it's a distinct species, unique sub-species, distinct population segment, or none of the above. The first three of these would still afford it protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Unfortunately what people say they believe doesn't really matter. These decisions are so subjective that nobody can ever prove good or bad intent. And having nice intentions isn't worth much, what matters is outcomes.
The outcome here was the dam was blocked despite being nearly fully constructed, the decision was objected to by the developers who said it was nonsense, the dam builders were correct and the taxonomists were wrong. 100% bad outcome: everyone loses.
Unfortunately it's what you'd expect from a system that allows people who have no incentive to say yes overrule anything they don't like, because if later it's revealed they were wrong they can just say "whoopsie, well who is really to say what is true anyway, times change etc". There's no accountability.
> nobody can ever prove good or bad intent
You're certainly happy to throw about assumptions.
> The outcome here was the dam was blocked
It was slowed but not "blocked". The dam exists!
> the taxonomists were wrong
Still in dispute.
> There's no accountability.
Academic reputation is a surprisingly strong form of accountability, and even more so in the 1970's.
> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.
It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.
> 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), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
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.
> 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".
* 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.
> If you don't like it change the law
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
"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.
> "But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.
Some folks don't have morals and so legislation is enacted to act as a floor for bad behaviour.
you've outsourced your morals to the legislature
That's basically the whole point of a representative government, no?
>That's basically the whole point of a representative government, no?
That attitude is the problem. They're supposed to represent you (or some approximation thereof) not tell you what to think. It's in the f-ing name.
So vote for somebody else.
The laws exist because we, collectively, thought they were a good idea. They can be changed if/when we change our minds.
For this specific thing, the drag while proving lack of damage is the point. Once the road/rail/bridge/whatever is built, it's often too late to simply say "oops". That, plus industry has a well deserved reputation for ignoring the environment when it becomes inconvenient.
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.
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.
Blocking high-speed rail in the name of conservation makes me want to bash my head against a wall. Guess we'll buy 10000 diesel trucks to move goods north-south instead. Car-world isn't good for conservation, rail is. It's missing the forest for the trees. These laws are selectively invoked by interest groups, they don't event serve the legitimate cause of conservationists - there is enough ammo in UK law to block any development.
Thank you for that non-caring contribution
It's more like caring for prosperity and long-term growth instead of getting scared and inventing a huge amount of red tape.
We probably won't agree with each other, though. We definitely have different definition of "care".
Be careful when getting irate about aledged "Health & Safety" or "Ecological" oe other money wasting. The facts are often different than they first appear: https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-...
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
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.
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.
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.
Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.
The WCML is perfectly adequate for that. HS2 is a vanity project for business and general passenger travel, none of which is certain or impossible on the WCML already.
But the WCML is at capacity, so it is not in fact adequate.
"There is no available capacity without significantly impacting performance and causing a reduction in timetable resilience due to the resulting requirement for successive services to run on minimum headway"
https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/om/wcml-capacity-...
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.
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.
If you have little information, it's a decent rule of thumb.
> 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.
Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?
California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law.
Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
Likely they were side effects that nobody thought of until people started using them after the regulations were created.
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species).
> 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.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
£216 million bat protection tunnel I'll have you know https://ccemagazine.com/news/hs2s-hidden-wildlife-costs-clim...
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.
> £100M gets spent to resolve the issue
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
My guess is the tunnel will become the preferred roosting spot for the bats.
>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.
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"
Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.
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”?
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...
Also all the data is open: https://opentransportdata.swiss/ and is continually being expanded with more data.
So you can build things like I did: https://www.stationdisplay.com/
Recently also all the Swiss Weather data has been opened and you can create anything you want with it (no commercial restrictions)
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).
[1] https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/1-2bn-spent-on-l...
[2] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/lower-thames-crossi...
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.
> 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
Honestly, it's as much the waste of time as the money.
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.
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
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.
I watched this video from TLDR last year and found it easy to understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPFlDGQah4
Absolutely. Asocial behaviour in the West comes at far too low of a price. For example, here's how NIMBYs are dealt with in places like Serbia: https://n1info.rs/vesti/porodici-iz-kragujevca-investitor-za...
If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
I personally love the look of wind turbines so am happy for them to be visible from my back yard.
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.
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.
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 ;)
> Even when it doesn't work
I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.
https://www.blick.ch/schweiz/zuerich/feuer-in-zuerich-zug-am...
> I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans
Being casually racist on the other hand is a time-honored pan-European tradition, proudly upheld by Swiss.
There is always room for improvement. If you don't stay on top of things you end up with what Germany has now for public transport infrastructure.
Or like in Vaud and Geneva, if it doesn't work it's because we love it to death, completely overwhelming the limited capacity available with hordes of rush-hour commuters.
But we must admit that Switzerland does not actually have high speed rail at all. So asking how it would build High Speed 2 is a bit of a misleading question. Swiss rail runs on time but slowly, this suits the Swiss culture which is much less centralized around big megacities than the UK so there's less need to do long commutes at high speed.
The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like
"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"
The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.
Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.
Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:
- Increase urban density.
- Make trains fast.
- Build more parking.
- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).
This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.
Somehow following the rabbit hole led me to this list of infra megaprojects around the world [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects
> "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.
In Europe, a defense megaproject.
"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.
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!
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.
Yea NIMBYs (including "what about nature" or "what about bats" and "what about the scenery) are a huge waste of money and oxygen
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.
If the failure was not a failure, but instead an amazing success, then it would have been more successful than this exceptional success.
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.
It’s not really survivor bias if the article is about why projects fail. Then it’s just an “example”.
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.
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.
> Switzerland's public transport is nearly perfect; it can take you anywhere, fast
While I love swiss public transport, I wouldn't qualify it as fast. It's dense/frequent/reliable, but not so fast. If the core lines (e.g. St Gallen-Geneva and Basel-Lugano) where running >200km/h that would be fast.
One reason is that making those fast has a much bigger benefit for cross border travel (non swiss), while a lot of the investments are done to benefit e.g. commuters, but with the enshrined road Gotthard traffic limitation I think we'll need to make Alp crossing more attractive for cross border travels at some point (and hopefully do the same for the mittelland line, zurich to geneva in sub-2h should definitely be possible)
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.
> 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!
The difference in this article rhymes strongly with the difference between project and product mindsets in software development.
> 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.
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.
There's some truth in what you say, but unfortunately there are also NIMBY regulations in place that delay/prevent infrastructure projects. I would prefer if our direct votes would shield _better_ against those mechanisms.
However, I think the bigger cultural norm at play here is that public infrastructure is very cherished. We publicly own (at least 51% of each of) our energy companies, public transport system, telecommunications system etc. Long term planning and investment is also ingrained into our culture.
UK energy supply projects could do with that Swiss approach.
Why isn't that the current CfD / RAB models?
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.
The scale is certainly a challenging factor.
But in terms of trust: I think that's earned over time. Swiss people believe in decentralization of power, direct democracy and steady improvement, because it has proven to be stable. Inherently the Swiss are rather distrustful and cautious.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
It's an easy problem to solve if you want to use government levers: Raise the minimum wage inside London. Keep raising it until businesses start moving to other cities.
This is a considerably worse solution with unknown knock-on effects, especially when compared to a well understood solution of making a few stations handle more capacity.
It's always just a few stations. Driving up the property values of the landlords in the cities. It's a never ending cycle.
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.
[flagged]
> Swiss vs. UK approach to major _tranport_ projects
The ‘s’ in tranport stands for security.
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.
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.
I think one key point why things are this way for CH, is that they decided to move to Takt scheduling (clock face scheduling) in the 70s. Integrated country-wide scheduling, makes doing those long term planning much easier.
(e.g. you know there's no point making some connection faster, because the lines still have to sync at 15m/30m/1h points. So you can focus on the places where you can go from a trip taking 40m to one taking 30m, because those are the one that will have a massive impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
(iirc that video covered it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y9hGofgy9c )
Right, but the only reason the Swiss system works is precisely because they are smaller. Fewer factions and more money to spend. It makes the process work.
If you think Switzerland doesn't have lots of factions, I don't think you've spent a lot of time in Switzerland.
I lived there for several years and I know exactly what you are talking about. There are a billion parties (or it seems like it) while the UK tends to have more factions grouped within larger parties. That said, as an outsider, I always saw this playing out a little differently in terms of national cohesion. Die Zauberformel tends to enforce that by design.
> As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there
I found British culture so depressingly defeatist that I stopped trying to argue for improvements and ended up moving away.
Switzerland isn't perfect but for day to day life it's just much easier to live in. I believe that's partly being a higher trust society but also higher ambition to make infrastructure and town planning improvements.
100% I love Switzerland and I wish I was still living there.
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.
You sort of answered your question yourself…
In a bigger country, it is hard to maintain political cohesiveness over the long term. This means that big projects tend to get so large they can’t be terminated by the next round of government without major blowback. This leads to bloat and delay. The only way around this is total control (like China) but that leads to other issues.
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
You’re very close to the answer with Gotthard. The only reason this works is because the country is small enough to maintain political cohesion and rich enough to afford projects like this.
They're less unified than the UK. Also less unified than just England, which is where HS2 is entirely located, much to the annoyance of Wales who still has to pay for it.
> their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high
2x per capita * 1/6 the population = 1/3 the available money
Gotthard is longer than all the tunnels in HS2 combined. Total cost: CHF 9.560 billion as of December 2015 (it opened 1 June 2016), about £6.5bn at the exchange rate at the time.
As of 2020, the budget envelope set out by the DfT is £98 billion. HS2 is not fifteen times longer than GBT, it is (currently) four.
People think they are less unified because there are so many parties but die Zauberformel (magic formula) tends to toss that out the window in practice.
That's very reductive. Famously Switzerland has difficult terrain and many of the large infrastructure projects happen in the alpine region. Some of those projects are quite challenging and require international effort and coordination. GDP per capita being higher is an advantage, but it also makes everything more expensive domestically.
The approach outlined in the article, is also not applied generally to all infrastructure projects. It's specific to transport. It works because the process is sound and long-term oriented and not because Switzerland is small and rich. Perhaps your comment even inverts the causality.
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.
If the country were as large as the UK, it wouldn’t be run the same way. Not even close. The Swiss are very aware of this.
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.
When the country is big enough, every “successful” project has to be too big to fail. Otherwise, it gets cut when the next lot come in to run the place. It’s a different way to look at the planning mechanism.
If we could only deliver 1/12 relative to Switzerland it would still be a huge improvement on the current baseline.
> They have a smaller geographic footprint
you seem to forget their famous mountains
I lived there. The number of trains that go over the top of the mountains is basically zero.
Exactly
It is true that the Swiss have more money to spend on rail, but this makes a compelling case that we aren't spending our money as effectively.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time (accurately) pointing out how badly HS2 has gone and why. Very few people have pointed out a viable and concrete alternative.
The issue is that in many large countries, the project _must_ be enormous or else they’ll get cut as the political winds shift to and fro. The result is that they become highly inefficient and expensive. The only real solution is political cohesion.
> They have a smaller geographic footprint
You might think that saves a lot of money, until you drive around Zürich (think: M25), and realise that about 80% of your drive was through tunnels... and Zürich is not even mountaneous.
I lived in Zürich for two years and I’ve traveled extensively in the country.
Be more impressed if you said you were a civil engineer. Living in a house didn't tell me what makes them expensive.
So, Zürich: you remember the tunnel that comes out half way to Adliswil, under Uetliberg?
What did it cost as a tunnel, what would that have cost as a surface road in reality, and what would it have cost as a surface road if the area had been flat? *That* is why you're being called out by loads of people for "a smaller geographic footprint".
Tunnels are expensive: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220621-what-if-roads-we...
Are you talking about the A3? If I recall correctly, it was like CHF 1B? That’s at least 20X more per km than a surface road? but it’s also more than just a car tunnel.
As for call outs, who cares? Some people will find a reason to nag on any day that ends with a y.
But then how is China (much bigger) able to build incredible public transport systems?
China builds everything at a scale that makes no sense anywhere else in the world. They have total political will, lower cost labor, and lax environmental standards (though that last on is changing). Also, their technical ability to terraform is insane.
UK has a much higher population density.
Not really (274 vs 227), especially if you consider that ~40% of the land is unusable due to being mountainous.
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.
The national debt in Switzerland is so low because of a constitutional rule that limits spending to match revenues since 2003. In practice, this has led to lower debt.
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.
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.
It’s not a coalition in the true sense. It’s a consensus based executive branch that includes all major parties.
Coalitions are a thing in competitive democracies where you might need it to form a government.
The council members are also typically moderates and are selected in part based on their ability to work across the isle.
Last time the proportion of the Federal Council was changed was 20-ish years ago, not over 50. But your broader point still stands as it's roughly the same parties (the "magic formula" is roughly proportional to the proportion of parties in the national council)(but also takes into account gender and language/region).
This reads as "the political parties in the UK are fully dysfunctional since they cannot plan for checks notes a decade ahead in country where average life expectancy is checks notes 81 years and the country itself has been around for checks notes 1500 years"
<Laughs in Brexit>
True :) That's the perfect case for the laugh-cry emoji
> and GDP per capita is twice as high.
And why do you think that is?
Most people will point to banking and finance, but even the industrial sector is highly specialized with much higher margins.
Looking at GDP and population, without considering any of the other relevant details is also a bit simplistic, wouldn't you say?
Not in the least. Those two variables are enough to set the baseline for what’s possible given the political structure of a country.
If, when claiming two things are sufficient, you have to introduce a third thing (political structure) to qualify them, you're clearly oversimplifying it too much, leading to an erroneous conclusion.
Of course it’s a simplification, but so is E = mc². A good model strips things down to the variables that matter most for the point you’re making. GDP and population, viewed through the lens of political structure, give you a workable baseline without drowning in secondary factors.
> The Swiss method works because their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high.
Not to be rude, but have you considered that you may have causation backwards here.
Thanks. I think that a perfectly reasonable question to ask. I answered a similar question up thread a bit. To expand, I think the main reason the Swiss method works is because the country is relatively small and well-aligned. The alignment comes from political cohesion (again it’s a small county) and excess wealth. Once you get to a UK-scale country, the rules change quite a bit. There are more factions and the pace of governmental change tends to flip every few years. As a result, infrastructure projects tend to become enormous as a means of self-preservation. Otherwise, they are just too tiny to survive the political turmoil. You see this in the UK, France, Germany… it’s crazy in the US. A standout exception is China and while they have their own problems, there is a iron-clad unity on really big projects.
> To expand, I think the main reason the Swiss method works is because the country is relatively small
I don't think that's relevant, as there are many small countries with the same problems as the UK and the UK is only medium-sized.
> and well-aligned.
That's the crux of the issue and it's not because of population size. Small countries are no more aligned than large ones (or medium size like the UK) in general.
Why is Switzerland more aligned politically than its peers? Why is social cohesion higher?