Originally Posted by
pax britanica
While the M25 is extremely important to LHR a huge number of passengers come and go from central London and do not use the M25 at all and most of them use the two rail links available from London to the airport.
I am not saying further expansion will not put more rpessure on the roads but the issue id London needs a hub airport to continue to compete with Paris FRA AMS of those only Paris has two airports but there is little need to ever transit between them . LHR on the other hand has a huge amount to transit pax and needs them to support route development . And this si the problem , expanding LGW or STN does nothing at all to meet that need. Expanding Gatwick just allows more Easyjet and bucket and spade travel and does nothing for business. Stansted is Ryanair world , enough said.
So the Govt -oddly enough the Tories again- putting party before country -faff around forever about expanding LHR because of fear of loss of a few west London seats mostly in safe areas. pitiful.
as for cost overuns it never ceases to amaze me how this happens, for most of my career I ahve been involved wioth projects costing 500M to 1Bn USD so not gigantic but not small . Most have cost overruns but of the order of 5-15% , the kind of ones we have on Uk projects of x times the estimate are unthinkable and it is astonishing to me and many of my colleagues that any infrastructure project can suddenly end up costing three, four or five times the estimate and then the same contracting and implementation team goes on to get another major contract. Can't all be backhanders and freemasons surely
One of the weaknesses in the LHR business case is the relatively small boost to the world route network and frequencies which R3 is predicted to offer. One of the big questions is what the capacity will actually get spent on in 2030, 2040, 2050.
I guess we can all agree that the current state of Government and Parliament is one of the worst scenarios imaginable for getting a controversial scheme through the hoops. But I don't think it's mainly about Putney and Richmond, I think it's more about the cost of the scheme, whether the customers collectively will be willing to pay the price to them, and whether the scheme is deliverable. If you read the Select Committee report you can see the nervousness about a number of features of the scheme. These include whether moving the facilities to the west of the M25 have been fully planned and costed and whether disruption on the motorway network during construction has been fully costed. It's not so much a matter of cost overruns, although years of legal cases are obviously a big source of planning risk. But at this point it's more a matter of whether we actually have a fully itemised cost estimate, particularly outside the fence, and who ultimately is going to pay what.
It's one of those schemes where it feels like it should be a no-brainer until you start looking at the numbers and whether they add up. Then you begin to wonder if the scheme is just too ambitious.