The Invention of the Traditional System of Project Delivery
In the Sweden case, I contrasted the emerging UK-influenced norms of infrastructure project delivery, which I called the globalized system, with the way Nordic procurement was previously done, which I called the traditional system. This explained Nordic trends well, in which Stockholm went from having construction costs so low in the second half of the 20th century they were at times even lower than those of Spain to having rather average costs for Europe. But elsewhere, calling the set of good project delivery practices reliant on an active, expert, apolitical public sector traditional ended up obscuring too much. In the United States, for one, the traditional practices did not work like that at all. In Italy, the project delivery practices are thoroughly traditional in the Nordic sense, but go back to mani pulite in the 1990s.
That said, this procurement system represents an evolution of prior norms of state-led planning, and is less of a break from them than the globalized system is. It’s best viewed as a system based on transparency and good government insights from the second half of the 20th century, rather than on giving up on good government and privatizing to the private sector as the globalized system does. In either case, it has little to do with traditional or emerging American practices, the former based on the good government practices of the early 20th century and the latter an adaptation of the globalized system in an even worse context. Regardless, its benefits are extensive, with interviewees in New York and increasingly London finding various wastes in the process of their own project delivery that can double the cost or even worse.
Good procurement practices: a recap
Good infrastructure megaproject delivery – at least subways, but also likely road tunnels as far as we can tell from small data – requires an active public sector that can supervise consultants and contractors, learn within its own institutions, and assume risk.
In Southern Europe today, and in the Nordic countries until recently, this means the following:
- Technical scoring: infrastructure contracts must be awarded primarily on the technical score of the proposal (50-80% of the weight of the contract) and not on the cost (maximum 50%, ideally about 30%)
- Itemized costs: contracts must have a bill of items, priced based on transparent lists produced by the state, with change orders using the same itemized list to reduce conflict
- Separation of design and construction into two contracts (design-bid-build), rather than bundling into design-build contracts
- Public-sector planning, with the decisions on the type of project and technology made before any designers are contracted
- Flexibility for the builders to vary from the design, so that in practice the design only covers 60-80% of the design, as 100% design is impossible underground until one starts digging
- Moderate-size contracts (tens of millions of dollars or euros to very low hundreds), to allow more contractors to compete
- Limited use of consultants, or, if consultants are used, regular public-sector supervision
This is not entirely in pure contrast to the globalized system, which centers the needs of large multinationals. The large multinationals prefer large-size fixed-price design-build contracts with early contractor involvement and extensive reliance on consultants, but they also prefer technical scoring, which makes them feel like racing to the top rather than the bottom.
This is also not always traditional. In the United States, for example, there is no tradition of technical scoring, itemization of costs, or any flexibility for builders to vary from design. This is because American procurement laws and traditions go back to the Progressive Era, when lowest-bid contracts were thought to be a good government innovation; as it is, American law permits technical scoring as the law states lowest responsible bid, but it’s almost never used, and never to the full extent, so the tradition remains lowest-bid.
The evolution of project delivery in Scandinavia
Traditional Nordic subway infrastructure project delivery was largely in line with the above outline of good practices. However, two variations are notable, one small and one large.
The small variation is that Nordic governments have been happier to outsource operations and even some construction design to private contractors than governments in the rest of Europe; in Finland, project delivery was largely done by private consultants, but under public-sector supervision, with institutional knowledge retained in government agencies even in an environment of privatization.
The large variation is that the risk allocation did not, in practice, permit flexibility for the building contractors. The traditional implementation of design-bid-build assigned the risk to the build contractors if they made any change to the design and to the design contractors if the build contractors made no such changes. This led to defensive design: the build contractors never varied from the design, and the design contractors knew this and prescribed some overbuilding to account for risks that could be discovered later in the process, for example grouting tunnels that might not be necessary. It’s this conflict, driving up costs in Oslo, that contributed to the acceptance of design-build in Scandinavia.
But it wasn’t just the failure of one of the features of the otherwise good project delivery system. It was British soft power, and the perception that English-speaking multinational consultants with extensive experience in megaprojects that use consultants knew better than the Swedish or Danish or Finnish or Norwegian state. There was limited attention in the Nordic procurement strategy to largely traditional Germany, which does not exert this soft power on countries that are richer than Germany and speak English and not German, let alone Southern Europe, which Northern Europe constantly looks down on.
In this sense, Sweden has not been too different from France. France, too, began implementing globalized system features under the soft power of English-speaking multinationals; for all of their frothing at the mouth about France’s superiority to the UK and US, the top 1% of France wish they were the top 1% in a higher-inequality country like the US, and are happy with privatization. And in both France and Sweden, the process is being halted as its poor results are visible; Swedish public transport watchers are already noticing how the emerging system is based on the needs of large multinationals and not those of society, and in France, the delivery of Grand Paris Express in a UK/US-style single-purpose delivery vehicle (SPDV) turned into a permanent institution to build suburban rail extensions throughout France.
The invention of itemization in Italy
Italy is the only case I’m aware of in which there was a large systemic reduction in the cost of subway construction. This occurred in the environment of mani pulite, in which outrage over the endemic corruption of the Cold War-era Italian state led to massive, mediagenic investigations, forcing former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi into exile, putting half of parliament under indictment, and destroying all major political parties. The remnants of the communist party (PCI), the largest and most moderate in Europe, formed the new center-left, the present-day Democratic Party (PD); on the right, the dominant element in the coalition was previously nonpartisan media mogul Berlusconi and later the coalescence of fringe far right parties into more serious conservative blocs, currently Fratelli d’Italia (FdI).
In Italian historiography, mani pulite is rather bittersweet. Berlusconi himself was openly corrupt, and used his media influence to shut down the investigations before they could get to him as he entered politics, since he too had been involved in the corruption of the 1980s, including influence peddling with Craxi. I analogize it to civil rights in the United States, in which by the late 1960s, early-1960s optimism about ending racism was dashed, and the civil rights laws and court rulings led to a backlash symbolized by the election of Richard Nixon on a law-and-order platform. But just as the racial wage gaps in the United States markedly fell in the 1960s-70s, so did Italian infrastructure corruption levels markedly fall in the 1990s due to the legislation passed in the wake of mani pulite.
The history of itemization in Italy goes back to those post-mani pulite reforms. By the 1990s, it was clear that fighting corruption required extensive sunshine, as well as a proactive apolitical state willing to put people in prison; this was the same era of prosecutors and judges putting Cosa Nostra leaders in prison, with some being assassinated during trial and many of the others having to hide out for the duration. One can’t privatize the state in face of the mafia. The upshot is that instead of American-style rules and traditions aiming to solve the problems of the late 19th century, Italian public procurement law aims to solve those of the late 20th century.
Implementing good project delivery practices
If there’s a common theme to the various elements of Southern European (and largely also French and German) urban rail procurement norms, it’s that they require an expert civil service. Teams of engineers, planners, architects, procurement experts, and public-sector project managers are required to manage such a system, and they need to be empowered to make decisions.
This empowerment contrasts with American public-sector norms, in which to a small extent in law and to a very large extent in political culture, civil servants are constantly told that they are dregs and cannot make any decisions. Instead, they are bound by red tape requirements that can only be waived if a political appointee wants to take the risk. The United Kingdom is similar, except without the political appointees, so ministerial approval is required. Everything below that level is designed to avoid change and avoid any decisionmaking. The role of the public-sector engineer in these societies is to prostrate before the political advisor who went to the right elite universities and went through the right pipelines. The idea of listening to engineers and planners is denigrated as siloing, whereas generalist managers with little knowledge are elevated to near-godhood. Much of the growth of the globalized system in these environment comes from the fact that in privatizing planning to multibillion-dollar design-build contracts, the only public-sector decisions are made at the level of a top political leader, such as a governor, without having to deal with civil servants.
In contrast, it is less important how many civil servants are hired to supervise contracts than that they have the authority to make judgment calls and that they do not have to answer to an overclass of generalist managers. Italy and France use very large bureaucracies of planners and engineers at Metropolitana Milanese and RATP respectively, but Nordic planning always used smaller teams with more use of consultants under client supervision. In this sense, the fact that a Swedish procurement civil servant who didn’t know me was willing to tell me on the record that functional procurement doesn’t work speaks louder than any organization chart; in the United States, civil servants would never criticize their own organizations’ plans so openly.
Once the civil servants can make decisions and supervise contractors, they can look at bids and score them technically, or delve through itemized lists, or oversee changes and make quick yes-or-no decisions as the builders are forced to vary from the design. With such tight project management, they do with one dollar what 10 years ago New York procurement did with two, and what today New York does with more than two, making this the most significant single intervention in reducing infrastructure construction costs.
Pedestrian Observations 
Very interesting, and kind of depressing.
In your conversations with policymakers, civil servants and other stakeholders in the English speaking world, do you see any hints of improvements or movements toward the traditional system, or at least recognition of the failures of the globalized system?
Do you think a movement toward, or the sustainment of, a traditional system depends upon a motivated constituency willing to deal out punishment at the ballot box, or is it more of a behind-closed-doors thing because of the complexity of the subject matter?
None. At best, we’re seeing some contractors say that they don’t want to take American design-build contracts since they’re only making the acrimony that design-build was supposed to solve worse. But on the client side, things are getting worse, and Janno Lieber and others keep pushing further privatization of project planning into ever-larger contracts, with progressive design-build, preferred bidders, and overall practices that are considered criminal corruption over here.
Thank you for your reply, even though 😦
You wrote: “At best, we’re seeing some contractors say that they don’t want to take American design-build contracts since they’re only making the acrimony that design-build was supposed to solve worse.”
Do you know if this why the MD Purple Line consortium walked, back in 2018?
My quick back-of-envelope math indicates about $250M/mile for this system, including rolling stock.
I don’t know, we never looked too deeply into the Maryland Purple Line. Best I can tell is that costs had an overrun and the consortium figured that walking away was less bad for its bottom line than eating the overrun.
Well, if you ever do decide to look into it, you will not have a more interested reader than I.
I second JG’s interest in this project. Also, the Baltimore Red Line, which has doubled in cost since it was revived after being cancelled and 2015.
I second JG’s interest in this project. Also, the Baltimore Red Line, which has doubled in cost since it was revived after being cancelled and 2015.
Well Purple line was a DBFOM which is a band aid on design build to provide additional flexibility and to push build cost into ops to potentially avoid some of the gold plating that occurs in typical FTA new starts.
Red Line cost I have no info on but FWIW the FHWA Hwy Construction cost index has doubled since 2015, so a transit project only doubling isn’t bad. My concern would be that the project’s refreshed preliminary estimate will increase another 50%-100% when the project completes further study.
The Red Line has doubled in cost after adjusting for inflation. $3bil -> $8.6 is the increase in nominal cost, a 187% increase. The highway cost index increased by ~90% over the same period.
Sigh. The pretzels we contort ourselves into to avoid building state capacity, even in supposedly technocratic places like DC-suburb Maryland.
I don’t think it is sate capacity that is the problem – it is a symptom. there are a serious undervaluing of experience in general, and you see it in both the public and private sector. They want humans to be interchangeable cogs who can do any job. There is some understanding that education is needed, but the senior engineer who can design a building could do a road. Thus there is no need to keep people on the same job for long term.
The above makes sense where you won’t be doing something often. The military isn’t at full scale war most of the time (even the US while always at war hasn’t had significant wars since Vietnam, and that was less than WWII), so you have to be willing to develop capacity if/when you need it.
You can do much better though if are going to be doing things long term to develop that expertise. Get people who have been doing that job for a decade and thus know all the shortcuts. Give them incentive to invest in tools/equipment that won’t pay off in this one contract.
Design-build can work great for – for things like an office building. You only need such a thing every 20-50 years, but since someone is always building an office the construction companies right people on hand. They should learn the right questions to ask so that you get enough restroom space (if you don’t have enough now you will ensure the next does, but if you have enough you probably won’t think about it). The important part here is we build so many office buildings that there are dozens of contractors to choose from and you can check reputation to see which hit their bid and which have lots of change orders. (change orders should be rare because they know the things that are likely to change and so will ask up front)
However rail is not like that – only one entity is building rail in an area. If they decide not to build all the experts have nothing to do and so they find a new job. Then when you want to build again they are gone and you have to build up new experts. If you want to do this privately (instead of state capacity) you need to keep the contractors busy, which means you are building enough that at least 3 different contractors have work to do (this can be small projects, but there needs to be enough of them to constantly stay busy). If one is incompetent you can quit using them – but then you need to build up a new contractor (who will be more expensive and slower while they develop expertise and equipment) . Likewise if a contractor merges – you need to give contracts to someone new so there is a pool of competition. If you can’t do that you lose the benefits of competition. State capacity is thus going to be cheaper for most everyone because you are not going to build enough rail for that to work out.
I’m reasonably sure the above contradicts some management best practices that manage managers learned in school. Though business schools have changed a lot, and so much of this is those in power now went to school 40 years ago and never bothered to keep up with newer thinking.
@henrymiller74
I’m not sure I follow. State construction contractors work on a variety of projects. Absent a general recession or depression there is plenty of labor around to competently pour concrete, lay ballast and track, wire catenary, etc; although there is opportunity to improve there.
State capacity doesn’t exist in the US for the management of large projects (or is not particularly competent), which is why the Purple Line was a DBFOM. The state effectively privatized the entirety of a public work from tip to tail. Alon has gone through the reasons why in many posts, but I think they hit the nail on the head when they said in the past that the absence of state capacity the state can reduce taxes to substitute private for public consumption. (I think I got that right.)
> there is plenty of labor around to competently pour concrete, lay ballast and track, wire catenary,
Concrete is concrete – there are plenty of people who can do that. I’m not sure if there are plenty of people who can do ballast and track – if not it will take you 6 months of low productivity to train up a crew.
The capacity to manage large projects don’t need to be state, but if you don’t have it you will need several years to build that capacity, and those years will be low productivity. The US private sector has plenty of experience building mega projects – making a new car is a mega project (probably bigger than CAHSR, though I don’t know how you would compare) – but that capacity is dedicated to the projects they are already working on. When someone comes in asking for a new project the existing capacity is already dedicated to the other projects. Worse – and this is my point – there are a lot of differences between building a new car and a rail line and so even if you could take all the people who know how to make a new car and assign them to making a new rail line it would be still many years before they could do the job well.
We need a better name than “traditional system”. It isn’t traditional in the US, but when you say traditional people here will think of what was done in the past even though it isn’t the same as what you mean.
Names are important, but also hard. Traditional is bad because there are several different traditions. Scandinavian is bad because some Americans look down on anything done elsewhere. Even if those who are willing to look elsewhere, with Scandinavian we are likely take that has hire consultants from Scandinavia who will tell us what we want to hear instead of change the system.
This is a thoughtful and timely analysis. The distinction between the “traditional” and “globalized” delivery systems really helps clarify why infrastructure costs exploded in regions adopting the latter. Emphasizing technical scoring, separation of design & construction, public sector supervision, and transparency offers a strong blueprint for reform. Hope more policymakers take note—change in project delivery could make a big difference.
“Las Vegas” (the famous part, not the actual Las Vegas municipality part) shows that it is entirely possible to privatize the state (or at least, the municipal government) directly to the mafia itself, and have it turn out surprisingly alright. Among a number of other things, they understand that the “municipal” shared public space is …well, exactly that, and that it is a valuable (consumption) amenity. (Normal municipal governments maintain parks, so they have institutional fossils from which this principle could be rediscovered, but the explicit knowledge has temporarily been lost.) Thus unlike ordinary municipal governments, they know how to keep a leash on architects, to prevent them from designing things such as Boston City Hall (the seat of the municipal government itself!), or the various Gehry’s teratomas, or the open abdominal wounds (Paris’ Pompidou, London’s Lloyds), or …and so on, all examples of degradation of this public amenity. No, the mafia understands that not only do they directly make their money from their own casino/mall/etc. buildings looking appealing on the inside, but that the way they look on the outside also puts an externality on their neighbors’ businesses, and they aren’t going to tolerate interference in that whether it is deliberate or stems from ignorance.
Otherwise, it is something of an American peculiarity to have likewise not created an integrated independent civil(?) service for the military (i.e. a European-style General Staff) either.
I will hear no criticism of Lloyds architecture. If you don’t like the City’s architectural mix you’re just a snob who hates diversity.
Best governed part of England because the renters are in charge.
The question of governance is largely separate from the question of aesthetics.
Allow me to bring as counterexample the Gherkin. It’s newer than the Lloyds building, unique, while looking good rather than bad, and as a result of the latter two it is widely liked. It turns out, most people with no or little (as I have) knowledge of architecture are, as you put it, “snobs” inasmuch as they tend to like and dislike broadly the same buildings. (And as you can see from the counterexample, positive judgment isn’t limited to old styles or small/short buildings.) Which has consequences for development. Perhaps the sharpest case of this is the Tour Montparnasse, which was the one bad project to poison the idea of putting skyscrapers not just somewhere outside Paris (La Défense) but also within it.
How is the Tour Montparnasse any uglier than the gherkin, other than simple context which would have just as well doomed a gherkin lookalike? Anyways, it’s quite clear that the bourgeois aesthetic is rapidly diverging from the traditional in many ways (compare McMansions to proper American colonial homes, or Brutalist architecture which I generally like to say Beaux Arts public buildings. It may be worth considering cost/benefit to, say, ornate Moscow Metro traditionalist stations versus utilitarian modern ones or fancy modern ones such as Calatrava’s WTC station. To tie things back to transit.
Also, it seems ridiculous to say that Vegas’ pastiche is any better than the Centre Pompidou aesthetically.
There are any number of polls on people’s aesthetic tastes, or anecdata about how many newlyweds choose their photos to be taken at e.g. the old city hall of Boston vs. the new (brutalist) one. But you can partly back this out from theory. Vegas and McMansions are under economic pressure to look at least somewhat nice, unlike the Pompidou, so they do. They are not flawless or anything, and occasionally fashions end up in odd places, but they are fundamentally subject to ordinary people’s bullshit filter, because how they look is a reasonably important part of their function. Turns out, most people don’t like the gray/grey/szürke slabs.
I have another comment downthread about how metros don’t need as much ornament as the Moscow metro to look nice, and that indeed, technical features cost much more than basic aesthetic niceness.
Particularly Montparnasse vs. Gherkin? The latter has those helical bands on it, and from any point you will always see parts of 3-4 bands, in the subitizing range. I think the convex curved shape also causes a feeling of “it is exactly the size it is, it wouldn’t be an intact whole if made smaller or larger (in a way that isn’t a scaling around some axis)”. It also has a top part that looks different from the rest of the building. Whereas the Montparnasse has the stripes and floors collapse into “yes it’s patterned like that”. It’s just a single block with one single visual feature (the lines*floors pattern), which just …ends at some arbitrary place.
(Quick disclaimer, this — a ubiquitous feature of the International Style — merely makes the building extremely insipid. Near-zero aesthetic value is below the average to such a degree that it’s worth remarking on, but at least it isn’t negative. By contrast, the buildings that set up a pattern like this only to deliberately break it (e.g. this one) are actively uncomfortable to look at. Likewise, I keep bringing up Boston City Hall because — unlike most brutalist buildings — it goes beyond being boring, which most people describe with words such as “lifeless”, and is outright hostile.)
Of course beauty and ugliness is in the eye of the beholder, though it is equally true that it changes in the mind of the beholder over time. At the time the Eiffel Tower was constructed people were still hung up on classicism so the totally foreignness, combined with impact of its size we moderns cannot appreciate (and it remained the tallest human-built structure until the Chrysler building 42y later; London’s Shard is still not as high), made it very difficult for people to understand.
I understand (or think I do) the original hostility to the Eiffel but don’t exactly understand the continuing hostility to the Pompidou (though suspect it is a minority). It is not ugly in the way many brutalist structures overtly are, especially when they have aged (and they all age horribly; fungoid raw concrete is surely no one’s ideal, especially in giant blank walls of the stuff). In the flesh, standing in that plaza the Pompidou has an unarguable imposing presence. And more people visit that plaza than any other public place in Europe. Some of the original and continuing hostility is to its perceived traducement of the Parisian locale. I happen to think the ultramodern works uncannily well within the historic fabric. Indeed I think it works better there than in any totally modern environment or jumbled mess like the Lloyds Building in London, though have to admit the HSBC building works extremely well in HK (though perhaps diminished over time as other hi-rises loom over it).
Then there is some misunderstanding about the Montparnasse tower. It is not ugly and in fact quite impressive in its austere stature, and certainly one of the better ones in the international style which generally don’t age well. Look at the others built around then, the very drab Palais des Congress/Porte Maillot and the Tour Pleyel (in Olympic suburb St Ouen). It hasn’t aged poorly. Again the main objection is its scale and traducement of the local environment, and this time the criticism was correct. People who disagree with this are simply those who have an irrational grudge against Parisian success in creating great urbanism (which was put at risk by this monster) and the fact that Parisians got it right by relegating the “modern” financial district to La Defense. It is also true that, like most hi-rise, at ground level it is not overly impressive especially the sin of huge blank walls of its giant shopping mall podium. Likewise La Defense is impressive at a distance but somewhat drab and unimpressive up close, as are most hi-rise districts. There are reasons why the Pompidou plaza gets the world’s biggest crowds at ground level and not Montparnasse or La Defense. The plaza around the old WTC twin towers was a windy bleak desert. I imagine they tried to counter that with the Occulus.
Then there is the “trying too hard” aspect to much ‘modern’ architecture and particularly to brutalist stuff like London’s South Bank, and certainly Boston City Hall which is so mannerist it provokes one’s inner critic to ask WTF? There is no real logic to it, and it has been designed to conform to notions of brutalism rather than anything related to function. For aesthetics (form married to function), null points. Criticise the Pompidou all you like but it functions magnificently as the world’s largest modern art museum and with the best voluminous spaces (the art world claims, not me).
I do think brutalism is pretty universally disliked. Other architectural forms are more popular.
If an auto-centric hellscape of casinos is your idea of “alright”. Financing by vigorish from out of state and out of country gamblers isn’t an option for most places.
According to Wikipedia it was completed in 1968. The decision makers who made the bad decisions are all dead. Dead people have little if any decision making power today. They made their decisions back in the halcyon days of heroic technocrats making logical rational decisions unencumbered by today’s restraints. And well before Saint Ronnie of Reagan convinced a large fraction of the population that government is bad and turned it over to the private sector.
Pompidou out here catching strays. I understand why it doesn’t appeal to everyone but it’s an art museum, not a transportation facility or other primarily functional rather than cultural public use facility, and therefore in my opinion eligible for aesthetic and architectural risk, challenging the zeitgeist or what have you.
I am surprised of the examples you picked you did not include Calatrava’s Oculus. The sight, the name, and the architect evoke visceral fury from me because of Port Authority incompetence, the architect’s bombast, and the waste of public monies. A $4 billion PATH station with marble floors that can’t stand up to Northeast footwear. Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, calls it a “kitsch stegosaurus.”
(Hilariously, for some asinine reason, the Times tasked him with writing about high speed rail in America back in April, and the article failed to do even the slightest bit of relevant research or quote academia. The Times continues its decline into mediocrity and irrelevance, and it has no idea how to write about passenger rail or transportation in general. I could fill my own blog about the failures of that paper…)
Splattering marble everywhere didn’t cost 4 billion dollars. Splattering marble doesn’t cost that much more than splattering other kinds of tile.
Yes, marble would have to be meters thick for that. Even the Wikipedia article gives the flavor of the actually costly things. (“We already built a thing, now it has to be changed so that trees can be put on top”, basically building a bridge over another agency’s underground turf, the full-size concourse, etc.)
And though I don’t like it either (generally starchitects have poor ideas), I find I have much more lenience toward the Oculus that toward the Pompidou, because it is obvious that with the former, the architect was trying to make a thing that at least some people find pretty, whereas in the latter case the architect was deliberately trying to make something ugly.
Compare — ignoring the difference in age — Budapest’s M1 and M4. The former is cut-and-cover under a wide avenue, technologically a tram adapted to a gnomish loading gauge (possibly making it the world’s first low-floor tram), covered with glazed tile (much as many other metros were in the period). It looks nice, but has the technical features that would make it cheap to rebuild. (Uh, a large part of its route should have been a surface tram, because the outer part of the avenue is amply wide enough. It was a political decision to make it a subway instead, though I suppose in that alternate world late-20th century carbrain may have ripped out the tram part.)
Contrast this with the post-2000 era’s M4. It was intended to replace surface transit along its route (ignoring how vertical circulation delay makes this impossible) and thus has an extremely short station spacing, with three pairs of stations less than 400m from each other. It was designed from day one for driverless operation, but makes no use of the possibility to use high frequency for shorter platforms. Unlike M2 and M3, very typical Soviet Bloc metros, most stations of M4 adopt the contemporary Western style and have a large box excavated down from the surface. Altogether a vast amount of digging (plus corruption, plus betterments, plus some work done along the predicted phase 2 of the project which didn’t happen) made the project extremely expensive.
Having built several cathedral naves underground at great cost, in most cases with the escalators at one or both ends, giving passengers an excellent view of the space, did they use this expensive “opportunity” to make something beautiful? No — mostly what is on show is concrete and concrete and some more concrete. Generally speaking, the stations give the impression of an abandoned factory. Some manage to be outright dark.
This despite both the original construction of the M2, the phased construction of M3 (the regular drumbeat of extensions stopping in 1990), and the renovation of M2 a short while before M4, all managing to create visually pleasing, and for M3 also distinct-from-each-other stations with the simple and dirt cheap solution of decent-quality plastic paneling. (The most recent, the reconstruction of M3, resulted in a few clear WTFs, though.)
Yet LV continues to densify, to the point allegedly they (the mafia doing the municipal government) are mooting the idea to pedestrianize the Strip. (Incidentally, the combination of the friction inherent in physically traveling to Vegas and the well-established “cultural antibodies” that gambling particularly in LV is something that morons do makes LV quite tolerable from a public welfare perspective. Lotteries on phones, much less so.)
Maybe they want to be the Americans, because they definitely aren’t learning from us about the things like all day service, decent frequency on branch lines, cross country service and sensible track access charges that we do better.
Did the French state have the expertise for such a big project though? Not saying that smaller projects shouldn’t be done by the state – but then that also happens in Britain.
It didn’t have the capacity for a 200 km project, no, which led to early cost overruns and schedule slips. They stabilized by forming the GPE SPDV, but then realized that they shouldn’t let the new institutional capacity go to waste and announced that GPE the agency would stay on after GPE the project was completed, with a mandate of planning and designing suburban rail expansion in the main provincial cities.
And re frequency on branch lines: the TERs are a meme, but individual commuter lines connecting to the major cities are better. Menton-Nice-Cannes has decent frequency, with 4 tph and 20-minute gaps midday (it’s not on a Takt – France only collaborates with Germans on the Holocaust, not on better rail service).
You said that France should be learning about UK’s sensible track access charges. What are they and how do they cover maintenance costs? The only ones we discussed (HS1) were exorbitant.
An alternative to France learning about UK all day train service and branch frequency is learning basic geography. France and the UK have similar populations and budgetary constraints. However, France is much larger, whether one looks at area (544 000 vs 244 000 km2) or rail network (29 000 vs 16 000 km). Unless France’s population doubles, Regions find some magic money tree, or the TER network is drastically shortened, it will be difficult to match UK’s train frequency outside of densely populated areas like Cote d’Azur. In summary, France and the UK are too different to be compared whole but urban areas and regions could be compared.
There is a plan to run more trains in the Oxford area, so I did some analysis.
Broadly (infrastructure dependant) stations either get 1 train every 2 hours, 1 train an hour or 2 trains an hour. A few of the really big ones get more but often they aren’t evenly spaced.
Broadly stations below 70k passengers a year get 1 train every two hours, between 70 and 200k a year they get one train an hour and above 200k a year they get 2 trains an hour. Perhaps above a million they get more than 2 an hour.
Lets take Brive-la-Gaillarde to Cahors on the old Toulouse line.
Brive has 1.3m riders a year
Souillac has 179k riders a year
Gourdon has 165k riders a year
Cahors has 520k riders a year
Now those stops are around 20 minutes apart so they are approximately the same sort of time apart as the Cross country stations – and the current service level is 8tpd which is roughly two hourly. In Britain clearly those stations would justify half hourly service – especially as such a service improvement would also bring much improved ridership.
You are back at your favorite pastime, comparing apples with oranges, namely Oxfordshire, a relatively densely populated area (283/km2) in commuter rail territory, 90 km from London, with rural Correze and Lot departements (40/km2) some 500 km from Paris. In both countries, one can find stations with similar numbers of riders. That French stations served by long distance Paris-Toulouse trains reach their numbers with less frequent but larger trains should not surprise anybody. It goes with the territory. There is nothing there that SNCF can learn from trains around Oxford.
You said earlier then France should learn about “sensible track access charges that we do better”. Track access charges and their counterpart, annual maintenance cost per km or mile, can and should be compared because they are a major driver of costs but you are not providing any data. I know these comparisons are difficult. A few years ago, after looking at DB and SNCF annual reports, Alon argued that SNCF needed to learn from their German counterparts who were doing the job at a lower cost. The Germans are now saying that years of insufficient maintenance led to the current DB meltdown with the finance ministry allocating 22 billion Euros for rail infrastructure in 2025, and more than 100 billion until 2029. Whether you find them sensible or not, France’s higher track access charges are meant to avoid such a scenario.
It is difficult to argue that the ridership wouldn’t be even higher if there were more services. Do not forget Lot is a tourist area and tourism boosts ridership. For example Penrith in Cumbria which is smaller than Cahors (16k vs 19k people) has 775k passengers a year using it vs 520k above.
Brive has 1.3 million riders a year in an urban area of 75k vs 1.9 million in Lancaster which only has a population of 52k.
Do not forget the French probably have lower fares typically as well compared to us which also helps with leisure ridership, as do the road tolls.
Here is the fixed costs that the train operators were charged by Network rail for running their trains in 2023/24.
Here are the variable per-train carriage costs that the train operators were charged by Network rail for running their trains in 2023/24. It is the variable ones that are extremely low which encourages more services to be run.
Thanks for the UK data. You said that the low variable track access charges encourage more services to be run. That seems intuitively true but is it really? What part of the generous train schedule is a commercial decision of the train operating company as opposed to the base service specification required by the Secretary of State when the franchisee was selected?
With variable track access charges measured in pennies/vehicle-mile what is the excuse for short and overloaded cross country or regional trains?
I think criticising the British for running their trains too short is fair and I am not sure who is to blame.
I am not criticizing the British. I am just describing the situation. In November 2023, Great Western Railway’s managing director was questioned about the issue. He said that GWR had to make significant cost savings in order to meet the financial challenge set by the National Rail Contract Annual Business Plan negotiation with the DoT. They cut their fleet instead of trimming the schedule. Having some overloaded trains appears to be part of the plan. France’s counterpart is SNCF needing about 25% of its TGVs sold out in order for Yield Management to fill up its coffers while managing scarcity. The counterexample is Spain where the competition provided by new entrants on AVE lines eradicated scarcity, profitability and, according to some train drivers, safety.
Apologies, the second link is the supplements to this.
@dralaindumas, I am not sure the British have standing passengers on 25% of our long distance services and even if we do that is better than not being able to travel at all on 25% of services. People prefer standing to that.
Looks like for all peak trains about 1% are in excess of capacity – which for longer distance services would mean standing passengers – https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rail-passenger-numbers-and-crowding-on-weekdays-in-major-cities-in-england-and-wales-2023/rail-passenger-numbers-and-crowding-on-weekdays-in-major-cities-in-england-and-wales-2023#passenger-crowding.
Seriously? I know you Limeys like to sneer at French love of Grand Projets but surely it would be obvious that it builds exactly the expertise you wonder about. There’s also a tad ambiguity in your statement. The state of course doesn’t do the actual building. That is done by the usual suspects like Vinci who is the main contractor of GPX and whose portfolio includes Crossrail, HS2, Thames Tideway East and Bouygues (Channel Tunnel, Pont de Normandie, Stade de France, maybe HS2 northern bits), Eiffage (#5 in Europe; Channel Tunnel, Millau Viaduct, GPX, HS2). Other than some tunnels under the Swiss Alps these were the biggest infrastructure projects in Europe in their day; obvs. GPX is currently the biggest.
As for the 1% the French don’t look to Americans for what is a simple universal human attribute of greed. Indeed with Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg et al one would say the Americans all want to emulate the Sun King. But unlike Louis XIV it is arguable whether they will leave much of durable worth behind them. In fact they might deliver the anti-Enlightenment. For all his greed I doubt France’s and Europe’s (occasionally the world’s) richest man, Bernard Arnault of LVMH is quite so malign (or stoopid).
It’s basically doubling the length of the Paris metro, so yes seriously impressive but also much longer than the initial RER network which was less than 25km of new track or the post 1930s metro extensions which were all small.
Arnault absolutely is that malign and so are the hundreds of thousands of non-billionaire members of the 1%. Germany is the same thing – the rich really do think we have immorally low inequality and should be more like the US, complete with the Musk salute.
I am not sure the patriotic millionaires agree to be honest.
Alon,
To your knowledge, does there exist good examples of specific laws which pertain to and/or codify the topics mentioned in this post (planning, delivery, scoring, bidding, etc.)? Could you provide examples if so, particularly with reference to future posts on this or related subjects and examples of infrastructure planning and project delivery. What is the legal precedent for specific reforms to improve such within a state or nation’s capacities?
This about the UK is interesting I think – https://railnews.mobi/news/2025/10/20-wasting-money-on-a-goldplated.html
Do you believe those figures? I don’t. I was living in the UK at the time and numbers like that would have been outrageous. The slam doors were terrible, a Victorian hangover, but 20 deaths per year? Makes me wonder about the writer …
It’s probably casualties not deaths for the slam doors.
Actually it looks like the author is right – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/4163768.stm
I remain sceptical. That is almost as many as died in the Kings Cross fire. In fact, suspiciously it is the same year cited 1987.
31 died in that so I am not sure they are related.
@Michael, I did some more digging. See page 58 of https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20190603122758mp_/https://orr.gov.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/1661/railsafety0102.pdf
Those figures in the BBC article look spot on.
That’s a big report. You’ve read it so can’t you summarise it for us, and point to a single table etc that has the relevant data.
If true, didn’t it surprise even you as a Brit train geek? TBH, I was a bit irritated that you didn’t produce data for, say, every year of the 1980s (I have trouble stirring the energy to do anything w.r.t. UK.)
This would appear to be well hidden, I suppose by virtue of being isolated incidents spread across the vast network and over the whole year. (I am assuming the stats don’t include suicides which are relatively common on big rail networks.)
The other question is: what of other rail nations, say France? Plus, WTF have BR or whoever been doing to reduce it? The Kings Cross disaster at least led to major changes so it should never happen again.
@Michael, I didn’t read it all – I did a search for the word “falling” and there were four hits including that chart!
Oops, apologies, that is exactly what I wanted to see. Somehow didn’t register it in your earlier post!
1987 was a big year (26) followed by 4 years of 19 each, then a serious decline began in 92/93 until it averaged 2 to 3 from 95/96 to 01/02. I understand part of the decline is due to phasing out the slam-door carriages but for such a sudden decline I suspect it was also a management focus on the problem. Not before time. It was also in 1993 that HSE published a report on slam doors.
Probably it’s both/and. Looks like they had lots of new rolling stock as well – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_stock_of_Network_SouthEast