Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

freewheeling.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 161 posts

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#31

Post by consp »

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…

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#32

Post by zabzonk »

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#33

Post by throw0101a »

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…

> 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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#34

Post by kypro »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #16

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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#35

Post by MichaelZuo »

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…

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”?

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#37

Post by raverbashing »

moomin wrote: post #36

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

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#38

Post by loudmax »

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, 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.

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#39

Post by ta1243 »

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…

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"

Re: Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects

#40

Post by glenstein »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN