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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

#151

Post by kilotaras »

haspok wrote: post #121
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 ;)

> 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 su…

> 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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#153

Post by tim333 »

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…

£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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#154

Post by CraigJPerry »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #28
CraigJPerry wrote: post #25

UK energy supply projects could do with that Swiss approach.

Why isn't that the current CfD / RAB models?

I don't think so. The energy market CFD concept strikes me as just another example of the over-financialisation of almost everything. Like the kind of solution you get from 2A gun aficionados when a particularly horrible event crops up (the answer is always more guns). In this case, more financialisation.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#155

Post by actionfromafar »

qcnguy wrote: post #107
loudmax wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was probably motivated reasoning with the snail darter, but to call it outright fraud is a bit rich. The hypothesis was proven wrong with technology we didn't have access to in 1973. (Re [1])

It's also kind of funny to me that "all academics are far left". I'd love to hear more about that.

Regarding what is critical to preserve, I don't know. Maybe some laws should be changed or amended.

[1]: https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#156

Post by qcnguy »

actionfromafar wrote: post #155
qcnguy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was probably motivated reasoning with the snail darter, but to call it outright fraud is a bit rich. The hypothesis was proven wrong with technology we didn't have access to in 1973. (Re [1]) It's also kind of funny to me that "all academics are far left". I'd love to hear more about that. Regarding what is critical to preserve, I don't know. Maybe some laws should be changed or amended. [1]: https://yibs.yale.…

There's lots of info about academic far leftism out there. This article is a decade old now (the problem is surely now far worse) but the trend in the graph is clear:

https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/professors-moved-left-but-...

That's an average of self reported views, in a culture where everyone tells each other they're totally moderate and neutral. The problem is less serious in engineering subjects. In non-engineering subjects, far leftism is pretty much homogenous.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#157

Post by amunozo »

dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #130
amunozo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if my grandma had wheels, she would be a bicycle.

Obviously each country has their own characteristics and solutions to any of their problems must be adapted. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing to learn from Switzerland just because the UK is larger. There are plenty of reproducible things that can be learn from Switzerland or any other country.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#158

Post by fragmede »

dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #148
fragmede wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All models are wrong, some are useful. In this case, oversimplification to GDP and population, and drawing conclusions from those two things, gives you such a bad model, that, unfortunately, you do have to drown yourself in secondary factors in order to do anything more than make bold dismissing claims that make you sound like an idiot.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#159

Post by dhfbshfbu4u3 »

amunozo wrote: post #157
dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And if my grandma had wheels, she would be a bicycle. Obviously each country has their own characteristics and solutions to any of their problems must be adapted. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing to learn from Switzerland just because the UK is larger. There are plenty of reproducible things that can be learn from Switzerland or any other country.

Sure you can learn things, but it doesn’t mean that those processes will necessarily translate at scale. Just like putting wheels on a human being doesn’t make them a bicycle.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#160

Post by dhfbshfbu4u3 »

fragmede wrote: post #158
dhfbshfbu4u3 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All models are wrong, some are useful. In this case, oversimplification to GDP and population, and drawing conclusions from those two things, gives you such a bad model, that, unfortunately, you do have to drown yourself in secondary factors in order to do anything more than make bold dismissing claims that make you sound like an idiot.

Most of your comments on other posts have the same flavor, so you’re welcome to do the math or keep posting your opinion. I really couldn’t care less.
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