Infrastructure construction in Britain is defective. The most budget UK tramway is more expensive than the most costly french tramway
The British seem to be particularly bad at big infrastructure projects. The computerisation of the NHS was a debacle, for instance. HS2 has fallen massively short. The people in charge don't understand technology and are not good at taking advice.
The people in charge are very good at taking advice. Advice on how to make money off of the tax payer.
I'm not sure if it's a big reason, but one thing I noticed when living in the UK is that it seemed to be much easier for local landowners to block things from being built compared to other countries I've lived in.
I feel like the Thames path through London was kind of representative of that. I feel like anywhere else it would be a normal walking path along the river, but instead it has big gaps, sections that are private, or even some which are closed certain days.
Just the fact that they wanted to make HS2 go UNDERGROUND through large parts of the countryside was a wild idea.
The people in charge of HS2 were the drinking buddies of Tory MPs. It was always rotten.
Yes 14 years of austerity have been great for the country! Can't wait for even more of this shit to be announced tomorrow. #taxwealthnotwork
Woohoo Besançon number one!
That's probably the answer to the question why, property prices in Besançon are nowhere near Manchester's. It might be fairer to compare it with a city like Leicester if they ever decided to get a tram.
There’s always enough money to pay lawyers and consultants.
Why is this the case?
France does more trams, so they have homegrown industry to support them, standard economy of scale. The list is also comparing smaller French urban areas with very dense urban areas such as Manchester, which has higher property prices, more infrastructure to avoid or divert, and so on.
There isn't long running strategic planning for this type of thing and no consistency in the volume of work, so the construction industry can't invest in having the capacity. That and risk contingencies are way higher.
I suspect it's just corruption. As we have seen government works by giving their friends the work at crazy markups with no requirement anything be delivered. The end result is lots of people getting rich off government contracts and low quality infrastructure at best.