In 2012 I finished a meeting in Berlin and headed to Tegel airport. Apparently mine was a historic flight, since the airport was to close that very week. Future flights would soon land at the wondrous new Berlin Brandenburg airport, which would be opening ‘within months’.
Seven years later, planes still fly into Tegel. The new airport may open in 2020 or 2021; no one knows. So far, the project has cost €9 billion, triple the original estimate. The roof is 100 per cent overweight. All the electrical wiring may need replacing. The escalators were too short, so end not at floor level but on an ersatz plinth. Underneath, empty trains run daily into a six-platform ghost station to stop the tracks from rusting.
Even Munich — which works well, cost three times the initial budget and opened six years late — is a triumph compared with the new Hamburg Concert Hall. Costed at £70 million, it opened five years late with a final price-tag of £710 million.
With these facts in mind, next time a bold project such as Crossrail runs 15 per cent over budget and opens a year late, perhaps we could not see it as evidence of innate British incompetence. There is a strain of self–loathing in all our news coverage of public works which implies we are uniquely bad at them. If anything, we are good at infrastructure. It’s the bureaucracy which holds things up.
Modern engineering projects are insanely complicated, and delays or teething problems are to be expected. More damaging by far is the relentlessly negative sentiment spread by the media. When Thameslink added many new routes, many more column inches were devoted to delayed and cancelled trains in the first month than to the enduring benefits these new services would bring.
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