It’s almost like car infrastructure has dogshit durability and longevity and is a massive money sink compared to more efficient transportation infrastructures!
I'm old enough to remember when the roads were fixed as routine maintenance, rather than using infrastructure money for a quick bodge just before an election.
My hometown in the US still does it like that! And they’re stunningly efficient. There was one time we had to go around an enormous detour because the biggest road in town was being redone in like a 2 mile stretch. They did the entire thing overnight in one giant marching construction worker swarm. A few towns over from us did something similar earlier this year but with their local stretch of highway. It was maybe a 15 mile redo all at once took just a few days (they did one lane traffic on one side than the other for that one, small highways). Compare that to where I’m at in Seattle right now Madison has been fucked for like 2 years and I swear none of the roads have actually been resurfaced it is just one construction patch after another when like a pipe needs fixed or something.
I hear it takes weeks to do properly. I’m not a road building expert, but there are many things that go into it, and stuff needs to cool of and consolidate.
To clarify the construction was all done overnight but it hardened/set up for a couple days after and they kept it blocked. Definitely wasn’t weeks though it was like 3 days for people to start driving on it.
Mentioned in the other response construction was overnight and they kept it blocked a couple days after to set up. Very short turnaround though. The only other times I’ve seen so many construction workers on one site is people building towers in Seattle so it was a little shocking to see in a town of 25k people. But also explained why sometimes I would be gone for a weekend and come back to new roads. One of the things is the roads there get obliterated quickly. The winters are somewhat harsh, it is a farming town so lots of big equipment chewing them up, and right on a main highway that people use to get into Washington. They have to be redone often and I think the area has just enough funding and experience to be on top of it.
Pretty sure they built the transcontinental railroad in the time it took my city to add one 2-3 mile auxiliary lane to the side of a road with 2 pre-existing lanes in the same direction and an existing hard shoulder.
Transit projects ALWAYS go over budget and over time. That’s just what happens.
But they are never regretted after they are built. Those expenses are only terrible to people as they are built but as soon as it’s done people can’t imagine how they lived before it. Transit projects always at least break even in the long run. They really are “if you build it they will come”
Also, you know what else goes comically over budget and over time? Car infrastructure projects! But when talking about highways it’s “an investment for the country’s mobility and ultimately its economy” yet with trains it’s “a pointless money sink that will never succeed due to this one very commonly experienced setback.”
(Full disclosure I’m not in the UK, I’m annoyed at him for the people there too, especially since their politicians’ attitudes toward high speed rail seem pretty similar to attitudes in Canada where I am.)
Ah Canada, where 50% of the population lives within the pretty narrow Québec City - Windsor Corridor and yet we don’t have any decent rail service, let alone anything high speed.
I live out in the Maritimes, so this isn’t even something I’d directly benifit from, but it’s one of the most frustrating policy failures in this country for me.
It might sound crazy, but a coast to coast high speed rail line could potentially be conceivable in Canada if we really went all in on rail. We only really have one or two major cities for each of the interior provinces and BC, so just draw a line connecting all of them. There’s not that much in the way outside those cities, and this corridor could connect to the Montreal-Quebéc corridor, and then further on toward the east coast where it again only has to connect a few major cities.
The biggest problem would be BC though, we have a ton of mountains over here which might require some serious tunneling.
Perhaps we could colocate it with the Trans Canada Highway corridor?
Add comment