Thursday, January 10, 2008
FORTH TUNNEL COSTING - HERALD LETER
A different letter about the bridge this time & my first on the subject in the Herald. Online comments& the other letter show a uniform disbelief that a crossing has to cost anywhere near the £4.2 billion the government are insisting on.
"Nick Dekker (Letters, January 9) asks why a Forth tunnel has been estimated at £4.5bn when Glendoe can be built for a small fraction of that. Having asked for a breakdown of this cost, I can confirm that it is made up of a remarkably round £1bn for the actual tunnel and all the rest being for "optimism bias" (no, I don't know either), "contingency fees", "inflation at 7.5% annually", access roads, unspecified "capital charges" and so on.
The cynical might suspect that this price has been ramped up to make the cost of a bridge, at £4.2bn (itself up from £314m in today's money for the last bridge), look good. This view is reinforced by the fact that, over the past two decades, the Norwegians have built 704km of tunnels at £3.5m-£10.5m per km.
This would mean that they could cut a Forth tunnel for one-hundredth of what we can. Let's hire the Norwegians or Germans."
Here is my October article giving a breakdown of my FoI enquiry into the tunnel costing
"Nick Dekker (Letters, January 9) asks why a Forth tunnel has been estimated at £4.5bn when Glendoe can be built for a small fraction of that. Having asked for a breakdown of this cost, I can confirm that it is made up of a remarkably round £1bn for the actual tunnel and all the rest being for "optimism bias" (no, I don't know either), "contingency fees", "inflation at 7.5% annually", access roads, unspecified "capital charges" and so on.
The cynical might suspect that this price has been ramped up to make the cost of a bridge, at £4.2bn (itself up from £314m in today's money for the last bridge), look good. This view is reinforced by the fact that, over the past two decades, the Norwegians have built 704km of tunnels at £3.5m-£10.5m per km.
This would mean that they could cut a Forth tunnel for one-hundredth of what we can. Let's hire the Norwegians or Germans."
Here is my October article giving a breakdown of my FoI enquiry into the tunnel costing
