Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Is the Elizabeth line worth the cost?

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It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense that we’ve just zipped from Paddington to Liverpool Street in 13 minutes – which if nothing else will be a boon for City commuters from west of London. Moving also in the sense that I’ve been writing about the project formerly known as Crossrail, first in optimism but later in frustration and rage, since its then chairman Terry Morgan gave me a personal tour of the Bond Street diggings back in June 2013. Now that the central section is open at last – even with its Bond Street station still mysteriously closed – it would be churlish not to echo the excitement of the horde of selfie-taking trainspotters (and, I surmised, at least one Chinese secret agent) who shared my inaugural journey.

Everyone knows the Elizabeth line is three and a half years late and so far £4 billion over its £15 billion budget. But is it worth it? The bland architecture, reminiscent of any international airport of the past 30 years, conceals the project’s triumph, which is its tunnel under the capital through so much existing infrastructure and sensitive archeology. The new trains are quiet and airy but not otherwise special – and what they conceal is the project’s crippling disaster, which is the tangle of incompatible signalling software that still makes it impossible to run through-trains from Heathrow to Essex.

Meanwhile, urban-transport boffins say that demand for ‘metro journeys’ is falling as work patterns change and technology evolves, so the new line may never carry the one and a half million daily commuters for which it was designed.

What lessons are there for other infrastructure projects? Avoid over-complexity of design; avoid early hype that says ‘we’re on time and on budget’ when you almost certainly won’t be; and if the thing’s worth building (like the Channel tunnel), get it built anyway, however the economic case may change.

For all its faults, the Elizabeth line is – as I said it would be in 2013 – a mighty feat of engineering as well as an enjoyable ride.

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