boomer

...and it's never-ending quest to spend massive amounts of money on things that cost a fraction elsewhere?

See Backing for £385m Thames bridge.

We have already seen such madness in the £900M "dome" that nobody can get to, and the as yet unfinished £750M Wembley Stadium whose park-and-ride is at the NEC!!!!

Why on Earth should a "bridge" cost £385M??

For crying out loud - the M6 Toll cost less than a billion quid, so for the same cost as the "bridge" you could have built 10 miles of 6-lane motorway (including buying the land, public enquiries, toll infrastructure, service areas etc.). The M6 Toll itself has quite a few bridges itself, including some pretty big ones at the two M6 junctions and the M42 intersection!

Are TfL having a giraffe???

mb

p.s. and if you follow the BBC links, earlier estimates put the price of the bridge at £450M - so i won't be surprised if the final cost is far more

Chip

Wembley for £750m. No way. It'll end up at around £1billion.

Why do public works always overrun on the cost. Seems like a licence to print money. If they quote £750 thats what it should be.

Look at the Scottish parliament. That is a total joke.Not bad from an original cost of £62m. This has now risen to £430 of British taxpayers money. WHY? We should be told.

Chip.

matt85

would anybody care to give me a brief breakdown of why it costs close to £1b to build a stadium?

the riverside stadium in teesside cost £16m in 1995. now i know it was built a few years ago, its only half the size of wembley, its not in london, wont have 'state of the art' facilities anymore, but where does the other £984m go? by my reckoning you can build 62 riverside stadiums for the price of wembley. that fuc*ing ridiculous!!


its not as though were talking about the 'odd' million pounds here is it? £984 MILLION pounds?

Fat Boy

Matt 85

Even better example is the Millenium Stadium - had to knock down a great big old stadium on the site, it's as big as wembley, with a closing roof, and bang in the middle of a city (not on a wharf ) - around £70m IIRC- £900 and something million quid cheaper ....

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Not ANOTHER free, paid for by the taxpayers, bridge for the whinging Londoners?


Time they stopped pandering to that lot, and made bridges like the Humber and the Severn and Dartford, free.

Where I live, about 20 miles from the Humber bridge, if you need treatment in a BIG hospital, you have to travel to Hull..........nearly £5 return, each and every time you go So don't get cancer, or something like that, round here

But if you have relatives in Hull prison, you can cross for nowt!!!

B@stard lying Labour!!!!!!!!!!


Alcazar

Reffro

The bridge won't be free, it will be a toll bridge.

Scoobydick

The London lot can just **** right off. Why didn't they build their city just to one side of the river instead of right across it in the first place? They already have more bridges than any other town I can think of.

ProperCharlie

and who pays the most in tax? is it all those "industrialists" in the north? err... no.

it's us. we make the most money. we pay the most tax. want to burrow my fork to get that chip off your shoulder?

BMWhere?

Theres nothing outside London anyway, so why waste good money on rural communities when theres far more important things to spend money on in London!

Well, thats what some Southerner told me and I believe him

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Don't talk soft.......just 'cos there's more of you there, doesn't mean you pay more tax than the other cities of the Uk put together

I may have a chip on my shoulder about fekkin London, I hate the place and I hate most Londoners, but I'm heartily sick of seeing them get everything at a subsidised rate, while the rest of us continue to pay through the nose.

Alcazar

Jye

Its cool to pay tax

marky1

I thought we were subsidising all the unemployed single mothers with 13 children up north?

ProperCharlie

what other cities?

i went passed watford once - arrived at a place called scotland.

BMWhere?

I thought London was just a little village (1sq mile?) surrounded by lots of other little villages. Thats why its full of backwards village folk!

Now Preston, that's a real city

boomer

Well after reading http://www.itv-f1.com/bahrain/features/story/20367 i have just got to bring this back to the top!

How can Bahrain build a brand new F1 circuit, from scratch, in the desert, with every facility that you can imagine, for a mere £80M (versus TfL and their three, er, four, er, maybe five hundred million for a pont)?

Oh, and the F1 circuit took a mere 16 months, where-as the bridge is anticipated to take 9 years

I bet you won't be allowed to do an average of 130mph over the Thames Gateway either

mb

planky

Probably too simplistic,but i guess labour rates out there will be much more lower than London rates.

fatherpierre

And maybe, just maybe the cost of getting the heavy engineering there, coupled with the massive cost of buying the land needed and the penalties incurred for the extra congestion the build will cause.

The bridge itself will probably account for less than a 1/4 of the total cost.

Roger Woods

I'm based about 300 miles away from the F1 track and the little Indian lads here in Saudi earn about 30 quid a month for grafting their Knackers off!

THATS why the track was'"cheap"!!!

what would scooby do

I'd guess the land was free also in Bahrain

john_s

iTrader: (1)

Are we really though?... i thought that two of the "qualities" required of a city were a university and a cathedral.

Granted, we have a polyversity, but i've never tripped over a cathedral anywhere in town. Do we have to grow to meet blackburn before we are fully "qualified" as a city?

Have the criteria been lessened these days? Maybe we got "citied" for having the first KFC outlet in the uk or for having the first piece of motorway.



John.