For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn.
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
As I understand it, the issue currently is that there's not really a framework for justifying or balancing those costs. Right now, the bat conservation people point out that the route will potentially eradicate a particular subspecies of bat. That gets sent up to the planning team, who now attempt to figure out a solution that prevents that from happening, and figures out how much that will cost. But what you probably want in between those points is someone to decide how much is too much to spend on the bats.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival.
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […]
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
"But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
There is definitely a long gap between "Don't care about env at all" and "Preventing everything being built because it hassles some small animal". I'm afraid and you and many people are biasing towards the other end even if you believe you are a white knight.
I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary
When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
From my abroad ivory tower it just looked like the torries were trying to extract as much money for their friends as possible and got away with it too. But that's just my personal, likely biased, observation.
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species).
> There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
>There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.
I live in Switzerland since 10 years and I am always - not only amazed to read about how the Swiss gov / people tackle things, but experience it first hand in my daily life.
Above all the train system is very interesting. From the smooth timetables to even the smallest details (E.g the acronyms sound or music notes in trains is based on the railway abbreviations SBB / CFF / FFE). I even made a post about it when creating a "Swiss train world": https://medium.com/@franzeus/building-an-interactive-colorin...
I think the Lower Thames Crossing will make HS2 look like a model of efficiency by the time it is completed.
£1.2bn spent without even a shovel of dirt being removed. [1] Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2] (which may be admirable in themselves, but bribes to shut local communities and charities up shouldn't be part of the project).
The bribes are looking much worse for overhead lines. Just giving people money (off their bill) for doing no work and making no real sacrifice. People will either be insulted by the low amount or insulted at the bribe. It will change no minds.
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
Compensating local communities for the impact of national infrastructure is a simple approach. Wouldn't surprise me if longer term that would lead to no-win-no-fee consultants trying to extract more money from the process thus breaking it.
Nimbyism needs to be shut down at the earliest opportunity when a project is mandatory for the economic growth of the country, people moan about their energy prices but also moan when a wind turbine is within viewing distance of their house.
I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though.
This is a big reason why most modern Western large-scale infrastructure projects get delayed and cost overruns. People making decisions treat construction as if it was cloud computing: just pay for how much you need, when you need it. Some sectors are highly specialized and if their future use is not predictable, they must charge a high premium for that uncertainty.
Basically they are acting like the sort of third world country that does grandiose vanity projects.
Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
Being Swiss, there's a lot of things I think we could do better. Public transport is not one of them though, I really have to say we got this nailed down pretty well.
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.
Or like in Vaud and Geneva, if it doesn't work it's because we love it to death, completely overwhelming the limited capacity available with hordes of rush-hour commuters.
But we must admit that Switzerland does not actually have high speed rail at all. So asking how it would build High Speed 2 is a bit of a misleading question. Swiss rail runs on time but slowly, this suits the Swiss culture which is much less centralized around big megacities than the UK so there's less need to do long commutes at high speed.
The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like
"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"
The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.
Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.
Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:
- Increase urban density.
- Make trains fast.
- Build more parking.
- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).
This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.
I wonder how much of this difference is attributable to Swiss direct democracy, which teaches people to participate in the decision-making process, but it also teaches them that losing in a vote is natural, and that you in fact should have at least some position towards bigger projects, instead of ignoring 99 per cent of what is going on, because your position actually matters when the ballot is being counted.
NIMBYs and other special interest groups are usually non-majority, but used to getting their way over the wish (or, more often, tired indifference) of the majority, which the Swiss system makes a bit harder.
There's some truth in what you say, but unfortunately there are also NIMBY regulations in place that delay/prevent infrastructure projects. I would prefer if our direct votes would shield _better_ against those mechanisms.
However, I think the bigger cultural norm at play here is that public infrastructure is very cherished. We publicly own (at least 51% of each of) our energy companies, public transport system, telecommunications system etc. Long term planning and investment is also ingrained into our culture.
"They pick a year in the future - 2045, say - and ask: what should the national train timetable look like then, if we want to meet our national objectives as a country"
The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.
What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.
Readit News
There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work:
> A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species".
> It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed".
* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
There is currently a bill going through Parliament to simplify this stuff - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3946 - though not going so far as to remove all protections.
The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing as like 99.9% of projects are effectively compliant from the get go and the bulk of the time wasting consists of circulating correspondance and nit picking to this effect.
Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.
It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered.
Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker.
Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
> There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured.
Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
As someone who lives near a train line with people, pets and wildlife all seeming unbothered by the train line, I'm not sure it's really necessary.
>The project required more than 8,000 permits, each needing surveys, consultation and legal sign-off.
Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway.
The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected".
And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people.
And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
So you can build things like I did: https://www.stationdisplay.com/
Recently also all the Swiss Weather data has been opened and you can create anything you want with it (no commercial restrictions)
£1.2bn spent without even a shovel of dirt being removed. [1] Instead they have spent money on shite like this [2] (which may be admirable in themselves, but bribes to shut local communities and charities up shouldn't be part of the project).
[1] https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/1-2bn-spent-on-l...
[2] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/lower-thames-crossi...
Half a million at most out of 1.2 billion.
> To date, 55 projects have been awarded grants of up to £10,000
Running community benefit projects as mitigation for other harms does make some sense when the cost of an engineering solution is much higher.
Otherwise it's
1) Don't build national infrastructure
2) Ignore local opposition
I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though.
I watched this video from TLDR last year and found it easy to understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPFlDGQah4
If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you, not others
Having lived in one that went through a phase of that (Sri Lanka) it strikes me that this is yet another way in which the UK is becoming more like Sri Lanka (all bad ways - not the things that are good about the latter). I see it in education too, for example.
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
I was genuinely surprised last summer, when a locomotive standing still at a station spontaneously burst into flames, during the busiest commuting period. Had I not been WFH that day, it would have been a major inconvenience, as the whole station closed down for a couple of hours... I thought that this kind of experience was reserved for Eastern Europeans, but the Swiss proudly followed suit.
https://www.blick.ch/schweiz/zuerich/feuer-in-zuerich-zug-am...
Being casually racist on the other hand is a time-honored pan-European tradition, proudly upheld by Swiss.
The article does agree that Switzerland wouldn't have built HS2 to begin with, and the point about continuous development over occasional megaprojects is a good one. But it goes off the rails when it starts saying like
"They'd have identified core intercity links that are far too slow: typically not to/from London, but some of the second-tier city connections that are extraordinarily slow:"
The UK doesn't need these things. What it needs is much more capacity in and out of the center of London. That's where people actually need to go and go fast. The author seems to think that British transport planners are inexplicably stupid but the depressing reality of British transport is that it's dominated by the problem of moving people in and out of the center of London at peak times. Economically nothing else generates a return on investment and there's nothing the planners can do about that. Swiss planners would reach the same conclusion.
Given that there's already a lot of physical rail going in and out, and there's no good way to add more or expand stations due to the insanely high value of the land around them, that means increasing speeds on existing lines or massive tunnelling projects. Hence, Crossrail and High Speed Rail 2.
Switzerland has a unique solution to this problem of people wanting to work in city centers. It just ignores it! Zurich is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, and sometimes literally the most expensive, whilst also having a big living space problem. It got that way because the Swiss refuse to do any of the following:
- Increase urban density.
- Make trains fast.
- Build more parking.
- Allow a free housing market so workers can move in. (Zurich is run by socialists who buy up tons of housing to stop "rich" people from renting it, which then makes what little remains even more expensive for everyone else).
This strategy kills the cities and makes life worse for the people who actually generate the economic value, who find their high salaries barely stretch to even a student-sized apartment and for whom an 11km commute takes 30 minutes.
NIMBYs and other special interest groups are usually non-majority, but used to getting their way over the wish (or, more often, tired indifference) of the majority, which the Swiss system makes a bit harder.
However, I think the bigger cultural norm at play here is that public infrastructure is very cherished. We publicly own (at least 51% of each of) our energy companies, public transport system, telecommunications system etc. Long term planning and investment is also ingrained into our culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megaprojects
At our current pace a public toilet will soon qualify as a megaproject.
The agile way. You end up getting nothing you really wanted done but everything is on time vs the method where you get everything you want at some unknown point in time.
What if it was done waterfall style where you put in as much in the time frame and released at random marketing moments.