tim's experiment

So we are going to get an express rail station after all. This is not all bad news. The question is not whether we want to be linked to the national express rail system; the question is whether we wish to be linked in the most expensive way that human brains can devise. I was impressed by the people who went to the trouble of producing an alternative, cheaper, plan. But this seemed to me a sad waste of their time.

The relevant bureaucratic manoeuvre in cases like this goes as follows: You criticise their plan. They chide you for only being destructive. You produce an alternative plan. The massive resources of the government are then devoted to pulling it to pieces, usually on the grounds that it is incompatible with some other plan which you haven’t been told about.

The official critics set about this task with such enthusiasm that by the official final debate some supporters of the government’s plan were arguing that it was “technically impossible” to put the station in the NT. Come, people, impossible is a big word. What would have happened if, a few months ago, Donald had sprung Archimedes-like from his bath with a cry of Eureka and announced that the government could solve all its problems by building the station in Taipo. Does anyone doubt that brains would have been stormed, shoulders put to the grindstone and noses to the wheel, imaginary problems would have been discovered to be illusory and real ones solved, so that we could all be told that this was the best of all possible plans, as the one the government currently favours always is.

So I stick to the sort of calculations you can do on the back of an envelope. These go more or less like this. The expense of the line is roughly proportionate to its length. So it would cost half as much in the NT. Putting it underground is at least twice as expensive as running it along the surface. So we could half the price by eliminating the tunnel — which if the station was in the NT we would not need anyway. This does not actually mean that three quarters of the vast sum voted by the Legco Finance Committee last weekend will be wasted. That would be unfair and inaccurate. Actually, all the money voted by the committee will be wasted, because the line could be built for a quarter of the real cost, which will come later.

The new line will not actually cost $66 billion. This figure was achieved by drastic massaging after the official total – which rose steadily through the planning process as such totals usually do – passed $80 billion. Sundry parts of the project which willl not actually have trains running on them were then transferred out of the total on the grounds that they were infrastructure which “would have to be built anyway.” They will, of course, still have to be paid for. Still in the future lie the cost overruns. Major public works tend to run over budget and those involving long bored tunnels tend to run massively over. A decent cheap connection could have been built from the money which legislators will be asked for later to make up for the optimism of the figures so far announced.

All this is the inevitable result of the foolish decision to merge the two railway companies. When we had two companies a project of this kind attracted two proposals, each of which had been prepared by a tesm which knew the win was likely to go to the cheaper one. Now we only get one proposal, for a sort of railway Concorde: a marvel of technology and a financial catastrophe.

The other interesting – though unoriginal – conclusion we can draw from all this is that the Functional Constituencies are not working as advertised. Remember all that highly-educated expertise and extensive professional experience which we were supposed to have installed in Legco through this system? It may be there, but it is not doing anything. There are members from technical, engineering, financial and business organisations and this was their chance to shine by asking searching questions about technology, engineering, finances and the business plan for the line, which seems to have come from the people who planned Disney. Instead they were staunch and dumb supporters of the official project. It is in the interest of professional and business groups to be beloved by the government and that takes priority over such trivia as exercising thedir specialised skills in the scrutiny of official extravagance. But we already knew that.