I caught a story in Global Construction Review about the decision to expand Chicago’s O’Hare airport. O’Hare was the busiest US airport until that crown was taken by Atlanta and its $1.3bn (£900m) revamp will include a new runway.
This will be its sixth east-west parallel runway and, at 3,425 metres long and 61 metres wide, will cost $650m (£448m) or about half the total project cost. Other works will include a crossfield taxiway system to connect the two halves of O’Hare which, by the way, is only 13 miles away from Chicago Midway airport with its five runways.
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What is stunning, though, are the costs. Heathrow’s estimate for runway three is about £14bn ($20bn), or about 15 Chicago projects, which Sir Howard Davies’ Airports Commission thought underestimated it by £4bn ($5.8bn), or about four Chicago revamps.
“Quite why the cost of an additional runway at Heathrow is so much greater than at O’Hare is beyond me, except that perhaps most of it has nothing to do with a runway but £2,000-an-hour consultants spinning out specious work.”
You have to ask yourself why our infrastructure costs so much and takes so long. Chicago plans to have its new runway in operation in 2020, while Heathrow will not see rubber hitting tarmac until 2030 at the earliest – and with no decision made one way or the other it will probably be much later.
Quite why the cost of an additional runway at Heathrow is so much greater than at O’Hare is beyond me, except that perhaps most of it has nothing to do with a runway but £2,000-an-hour consultants spinning out specious work. More careers will be made in not getting a runway done than in building one. Time is money, as they say.
The proposals for Gatwick hardly fare better, with its proposal being worth £7bn ($10bn) or seven Chicago revamps.
The Davies Commission’s terms of reference were equally uninspiring, namely to have the equivalent overall capacity of one new runway operational by 2030. Checking my sums, that would give us six east/west runways around the “London” area. That compares with O’Hare’s six on the one airport by 2020.
It is worth a reminder that between 1830 and 1850 we put down 7,000 miles of railway when the technology was constantly changing. This compares with the first phase of HS2, London to Birmingham, where 140 miles will be done between 2017 and 2026 – about 15 miles a year. Phase 2, Birmingham to Leeds and Manchester, should finish by 2033, though for the life of me I cannot figure out why anyone would want to go from London to Leeds via Birmingham (trainspotters excepted).
For a country that used to be the world’s best at infrastructure, we seem to have become among the world’s worst. Sad, really.
