Why Can’t Britain and the US Build? China Has an Answer
Beijing's rise is the issue of the age for all democratic countries. The engineering state moves fast and breaks things — but also people.
A lesson in planning.
Photographer: China News Service/China News ServiceIt’s long been obvious that something has gone askew with Britain’s ability to build. The planning paperwork for a modest-sized apartment block in London can run to more than 1,000 pages whereas a few decades ago it might have been a handful. The documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a road and tunnel project under consideration since the early 2000s, exceeds 350,000 pages. The planned HS2 high-speed railway has become smaller and smaller, yet its cost continues to spiral to multiples of the original price tag. And so on.
The reality struck home for me when I walked around the vast and moribund HS2 terminus site at Euston in London a couple of years ago. It was remarkable — and dispiriting — that we would rip up such a large tract of central London, disrupting businesses and condemning residents to live beside an eyesore, only to leave it lying fallow into the indefinite future (some skeptics doubt the line will ever reach Euston).