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Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

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Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#101

Post by gadders »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #22
gadders wrote: post #3

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...…

> 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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#103

Post by jeffrallen »

steve1977 wrote: post #78

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 ;)

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#104

Post by reedf1 »

milesjag wrote: post #70
markus_zhang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#105

Post by Etheryte »

linuxftw wrote: post #74
decimalenough wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#106

Post by markus_zhang »

jamespo wrote: post #69
markus_zhang wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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".

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#107

Post by qcnguy »

loudmax wrote: post #38
Neil44 wrote: post #24

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, t…

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…

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...

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#108

Post by tonfa »

Stevvo wrote: post #73

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)

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#109

Post by tonfa »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #18
dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #5

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…

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…

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 )

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#110

Post by rayiner »

Neil44 wrote: post #24

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, t…

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.
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