bobinwales - // //I think they are all bad examples.//
On the contray , mine are good examples. Your saying they were needed but you have the benifit of hindsight. //
Obviously I have the benefit of hindsight, but even at the time, the future advantages of the projects you offered as examples were absolutely clear for anyone to see.
The imagined benefits from HS2 - and let's consider the scale of disruption and the sheer costs, never mind the extended timescale, and it's far harder to see that the end is going to justify the means.
Anyone who knows about projects like this knows full well that the projected cost is likely to exceed itself by several hundred per cent.
The project overseers will be blamed, but I believe this is actually not their fault, and completely unavoidable.
That is because, it is only when a major project like this gets under way, that the snags which cannot be predicted are found, as they can only be by actually commencing the project, and finding them one by one and fixing them, with attendent rises in budget.
On this scale, that increase, unavoidable as it is, represents a massive hike in budgets, which frankly makes the vilbility and worth of the end produect even more tenuous than it was when the idea was first raised.