Die Labour-Partei wird aufgefordert, britische Straßenprojekte wie die 9 Milliarden Pfund teure Lower Thames Crossing abzuschaffen

>Campaign groups have urged the government to cancel major road building schemes

Campaign groups doing what campaign groups do. This is non-news

All this country does is scrap things.

HS2? Let’s scrap it and divert money to roads.

Roads? Let’s scrap it and divert money to trains.

Trains? Let’s scrap it and….

Do both. We need to move to more rail overall but roads will still be needed and pretending it’s one or the other is just another excuse to be caught in this perpetual cycle of anti-infrastructure campaigning. We need to stop pandering to groups who want to say No.

The Lower Thames Crossing has been needed for a decade already. The M25 anti-clockwise is in constant gridlock. It’s the busiest motorway in the UK connecting the south side of the river, from where European freight traffic comes from, to most of the rest of the country including most of London. A lot of the traffic wants to join the north circular so the idea of this crossing is to take them off the M25 and lead them onto the north circular without going under the Dartford tunnel.

The counterargument to this is usually that traffic increases to fill the road space available so it’s counterintuitive to build roads to address capacity. I would normally agree with this, I would oppose adding another lane to the M25 for example, but we’re talking about a vital piece of infrastructure in one of the busiest areas of the country that uses a tunnel that predates the motorway it serves. It’s a problem that should have been addressed when the M25 was completed in the late 80s or when they built the QEII Bridge in the early 90s.

We should be moving new traffic onto rail and encouraging more existing traffic onto the network but that doesn’t mean we need to neglect acute problems on vital infrastructure just because it’s a road. Let’s have some nuance here and take each project on it’s own merits.

>The campaign groups have both highlighted huge savings from axing parts of what the Conservative government had billed as the biggest road building scheme in a generation when it launched its road investment strategy a decade ago.

Sorry, are we using the same roads? My journey to work is like driving through the battle of Somme.

I fail to see the huge saving is a good thing…

If the government can’t afford/won’t fund it themselves, the lower Thames crossing is exactly the sort of thing our pension funds should be investing in. Large capital investment upfront bringing consistent and predictable long term returns. 

Governments fail to realise that infrastructure boosts the economy and productivity, so look at the initial cost and just can it instead of building the project and benefits. Its short term-ism

Wasn’t this already paid for by the existing tolls? Where did the money go?

By whom?

>Campaign groups have urged….

Right, so no one of any real consequence.

For fuck’s sake, if the government refuses to fund stuff like this can we just hand it over to private investors? Stick a toll on it and let it be.

For god’s sake a modern country needs to invest in its infrastructure. I’m now living in France and the difference in quality and extent of public infrastructure between here and back home is absolutely stark. There are many issues France has that we don’t, but at the very least they’re able to stay competitive on many fronts we struggle to and are better placed to continue to do so into the future.

Fucking build it. Build all the fucking projects and stop cancelling them. Almost two decades of decline now for the UK, cutting spending is the reverse of what we need to be doing on infrastructure – it literally has never worked anywhere.

Cheapest way to clear traffic at Dartford is to ban Lorrie’s from using it and force them round the long way

The UK could have built several perfect metro systems in the south or midlands similar to the north

For the key commercial areas that need them

Unfortunately we are laboured with both a fantasy of technology (we don’t need high speed rail, the UK is the size of a postage stamp – we need affordable options,)

And a government that hisses at the thought of doing anything that will make London look like the decaying shithole it actually *is.*

What have we actually got for about 14 years of “efficiency cuts” ?

The Tories copied the American decrepit state cronyist value system and now all we have is American distrust of “big government”