Why Is Infrastructure So Damn F'n Expensive?

Well, actually, it isn't

From The Times:

Heat networks, meanwhile, might be a great option in areas blessed with a surplus of waste heat and ample space to install them. But the notion that anyone is going to find a fast and cost-effective way to dig a brand new network of pipes through several miles of central London bedrock and use them to transport heat from a completely unproven new energy source around the capital’s most prestigious buildings is frankly demented. Or, as Aecom puts it, in true net-zero parlance, “trailblazing”.

Leave aside that about unproven, new energy source, and concentrate upon the central London bit.

Or, think about why HS2 is costing more than the total economic output of many a country just to shave 15 minutes of the train time from London to Birmingham.

Or, why the Edinburgh tram system was such an orgy of the looting of taxpayers’ money?

Or even this:

Britain’s first fibreoptic telecoms network was built by ferrets. You know, ferrets, the vicious little beasts related to stoats, weasels and wolverines. It really is true that when Cable and Wireless built that first - private sector! - fibre telephone system in The City then did so by strapping cable to a ferret which was then sent through the pipes. We think this is one of those stories that should be regularly repeated so that it doesn’t drop out of the national consciousness.

Why would a telecoms company buy the London Hydraulic Power Company and stick ferrets down its pipes?

Now, obviously, there are reasons why building infrastructure is expensive. One is that politicians have taken unto themselves the power to decide what infrastructure should be built how and where. Therefore infrastructure is built by fuckwits, obvious, innit? We’ve also allowed far too many people to dip their ladle in the gravy - that £300 million planning inquiry into a tunnel under the Thames. And did I say fuckwits already - that £100 million bat tunnel.

But one reason all these things are so expensive is because we’re not doing them on terra nullius. If we start with a bare field a ground source heat pump might well not be that bad an idea. Communal heating systems into an entirely new development, maybe.

But putting ground heat pumps into central London? Can’t do that ‘ere mate, someone’s already built central London right where you want to dig up. HS2 goes right through some of the most expensive - and inhabited by the highly vocal - countryside in the nation. Edinburgh, minor though it is, still has that central London problem.

This also explains why Mercury Comms employed the ferrets. The tubes already existed and fibreoptic could be stuffed down them. They didn’t have to dig up central London, see?

Agreed, this isn’t one of the world’s truly great insights but it is something to keep in mind. The reason building the infrastructure for the next level of civilisation costs so much is because we already have a civilisation. The existence of which gets in the way of the building men….