Berlin Brandenburg: The airport with half a million faults
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.
The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
Berlin's awful setup results in delays across the region, it's no wonder other airports are reluctant to link there and divert to Frankfurt instead.
This allows you to arrive at almost the exact moment the gate closes because there will be no passengers for other flights in a queue with you. The gate agents can even see you going through security and will wait for a minute or so.
I still like Tegel a lot, as it's very close to the West center of the city.
My worst airport experience has been trying (and failing, twice; on consecutive days) to fly from Tegel Terminal C to Helsinki (EasyJet). My best airport experiences have been flying from Tegel Terminal A (Finnair) to Helsinki.
Unlike Tegel, though, the gate area and the screening areas are open spaces, with glass to separate. Tegel always feels a bit claustrophobic, and as a jet-lagged traveller my first time departing, I admit it took awhile for me to figure out where the hell I needed to go.
source: https://www.changiairport.com/en/airport-guide/departing/sec...
Quite frankly New York has a similar problem. There is rail service to JFK but requires an extra cost ticket and it's a fairly long trip (moreso if you're taking the subway instead of LIRR). I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money. Yeah, Newark has rail (but it doesn't run particularly late).
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
There's a big caveat though: from Midtown. Getting to JFK from elsewhere in Queens (or e.g. Brooklyn) is a pretty circuitous route on the train. A bus could easily do that in less than two hours. On a good day a subway ride into Manhattan might take you half an hour. On a bad day…
I mean, look, I prefer rail, but not by so much that I'd ding Tegel (or Oakland) for not having rail connections. In Oakland the rail connector cost about half a billion dollars and required undoing a bunch of landscaping and road improvements. In the context of Berlin where you're talking about the Brandenberg airport being over budget and oft delayed, I simply don't see Tegel's transit connections as being shameful (or particularly bad).
For a single trip ticket, that sounds about right. If you're going to take any other trips that day a day ticket makes more sense and I think the difference is a bit larger.
The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
The TXL bus takes about twenty minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, and Alexanderplatz is three stops away on the S-Bahn (saving about ten minutes). Transiting to/from the Hbf gives you some extra transit connections as well. And as an added bonus, the TXL bus pretty much drops you at the gate.
Instead of using some sort of announcement system employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.
Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
It turns out the airport hadn’t assigned a crew to unload the plane, and Lufthansa sent an entire plane’s worth of checked luggage to Reykjavik. Cue the whole plane having to be processed through lost luggage. That’s was a long day.
That seems odd. Would a German do the same in the US?
It's among the worst airports, but still my favourite. Super fast public transport from center, with a cheap ticket, and fast security throughput. I need to reserve much less extra time for Tegel than any other airport, and side expenses never exceed the price of the flight itself (which can easily happen at many other European airports).
Depends where in the city you need to go to. Ostbahnhof to Schönefeld is 16 minutes with the RB 14, 17 minutes with the RE 7. A vastly better experience than the TXL bus which is often crowded.
Rather than building new airports, we should be making flying significantly more inconvenient, to discourage this cost to the environment.
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
If you take a taxi or rent a car to Tegel, it's extremely convenient.
It won't go to Tegel, but might be extended to the BER!
https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article215847355/U-Bahn-Der...
You are thinking of the U6 though (see linked article)
Facilities-wise I was talking about lack of seats, lack of spacious and modern and frankly sometimes clean bathrooms, lack of sufficient staff doing things like passport checking and security, lack of physical space for movement of people through the airport, lack of food/drink and shopping quality and variety, particularly past security. All of these apply to both, with Schonefeld being noticeably worse on every point.
Capacity - All I can say is that at both, there are slow-moving queues of people at gates that restrict the movement of people trying to get to other gates. There is more throughput of people now than the airports were designed for - they're tautologically over capacity - if they weren't then this wouldn't happen, as it doesn't at most other airports.
Public transport - this one's subjective and depends on usecase, and I'm not claiming it's terrible. It works, and sure it's relatively quick. But it's exactly those connections (from Tegel) that bring the inconvenience for two reasons - the first is that it's more difficult to navigate to the center having to make connections if you don't know the system (i.e. for tourists). The second is if you have heavy luggage - it's really not convenient at all to lug bags onto and off of connections, especially buses. If you're a local who knows the networks and you're doing a short flight with hand luggage, I agree that in that usecase it's fine.
---
A bit meta now: I think it's amazing and I'm genuinely pleased to see that you're not only disagreeing with my opinions, but coming to the defence of these airports and outwardly saying they're really good, along with other commenters. I worded my original comment quite strongly and matter-of-factly because I honestly thought that 'everyone' would hold broadly the same views. Anecdotally, I've never talked to anyone living in Berlin who disagreed with me on any of this, and I've never imagined whilst being in either of these airports that anyone else there could be thinking 'this is great'. I'm amazed to see how wrong I was, and I love to be exposed to the breadth of opinions that exist out there, through forums like HN, just because the scale of the internet allows them to surface. Always love to have a good debate about such things, it makes me remember the counter points I'm overlooking and/or discover new ones and rethink my original opinions a bit.
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
When I was living there I'd always try to fly to Fiumicino because of that. I can't imagine what impression it must give to tourists on their first trip to the city.
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
It’s still not quite SF or NYC or London prices, but it is much more in line with the rest of Germany now.
It's been my impression from the two or three times a year that I'm in Berlin for a few days that it just works very differently, there's a trade-off between cost of living vs convenience that people accept when they move to Berlin. It's dirtier, a bus or train may just break down, people are generally a bit more rowdy, and you don't expect much from the administration, but then again: you pay a lot less, so it's worth it, like a hostel compared to a hotel.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15738/the-contribution-of-sel...
https://qz.com/753244/berlin-is-the-only-capital-city-in-eur...
Berlin is quite a unique capital in that it's relatively poor and contributes relatively little to the national economy. Apart from its size warranting certain infrastructure with sufficient capacity, it'd be surprising if it had much better infrastructure than it does. Its economy doesn't easily allow it.
Berlin can be cheap relative to other capitals (though this is getting less true) but the extent to which that's the case depends on your personal choices.
Public infrastructure is another matter because it serves everyone and everyone contributes - there needs to be a minimum bar. And yes, if I pay the same taxes as everyone else, I want a comparable level of service and convenience in my infrastructure to what people in the other cities get.
The taxes aren't the same as well - local infrastructure isn't a federal issue, so federal income tax doesn't pay for that. Berlin's tax factor for companies (a major part of local taxes) is 410%, compared to Hamburg's 470%, Munich's 490% or Cologne's 475%. Berliners have decided to go with lower taxes to attract companies away from other cities, so Berlin has less money to spend on public infrastructure, even though Berlin gets a lot of subsidies from other states (2-3bn/year).
It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
It's less than 500m to the terminal A.
If one's really bothered by this (d'oh), they can take the U7+bus, which ends in front of terminal A (in addition to being much more frequent).
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
Game over
For example, an airport has very carefully designed zones: land-side and air-side (after security), Schengen and non-Schengen (after immigration), staff and non-staff, etc., that must be separated. It also has carefully considered passenger flow, escape routes, fire sprinklers and smoke vents, etc.
Then, after all is agreed and construction had started, the airport company requested much more space for retail. That's obviously going to lead to problems.
One thing I must say, though: I am glad that the officials responsible for fire safety are not afraid to deny certification. There was a fire at DUS (Düsseldorf Airport) in 1996 in which 17 people died. So, good job in standing up to the immense pressure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport#Düsseldorf_...
> One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's, dislike of shopping.
> Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible.
> But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
No. That was not the problem. The problem was that they did not properly supervise the architect. Architects are artists. They always have some bias one way or another, some little opinion on how things should look or work. They need to be watched. It was someone's job to ensure that architect's "vision" matched the customer needs. That person should have realized the error and halted proceedings long before breaking ground on anything.
When you don't watch the architect you get things like this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/penis-shaped-church
Sorry, I don't see how that story is relevant to your position.
An architect not delivering on some basic requirements is one thing, not necessarily because they are artists, because art will always only be a part of architecture. Delivering that is completely disconnected from it's use case is simply bad architecture.
Making a major change to a plan half way through is a good way to piss off any designer or engineer though. Especially one as massive and all-encompasing as a huge airport, railway, and hotel complex + retail shopping center. I'm curious how much that had to do with them dragging their feet, in a huff, out of ego or whatever. I doubt the architects simply 'hates' shopping, or maybe they do and didn't know that was a requirement before going in deep into a project.
But somewhere the communication broke down and relationships deteriorated.
In an operational airport this complexity still exists and major airports are in a constant state of flux. They are always building something and there are always contractors on site doing construction or maintenance. The difference is that it can be treated as an incremental improvement. No one can pretend that the entire system will be optimal first time. Of course the requirements will evolve.
6 billion euros is $6.83B. That actually sounds like a bargain for a brand new airport with 2 runways.
For comparison, Heathrow's 3rd runway is estimated to cost £18.6B.[1] That's $23.6B for just 1 runway.
LAX renovation has a projected cost of $14B [2]. That's $14B just to "improve the design, safety and efficiency of the airport." No new runway will be built.
Hong Kong Airport 3rd runway is expected to cost HK$141.5B [3]. That's $18B for 1 runway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport
[2] https://www.gobankingrates.com/making-money/business/lax-air...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_International_Airpor...
Given that, “for just 1 runway” feels unfair
You added some really valuable context but it doesn’t detract from BER being relatively inexpensive compared to other airport projects.
But it does incorrectly describe BER as a "brand new airport", where the reality is: "The northern runway of BER is the southern runway of the old Schönefeld Airport and has been in use since the 1960s." (Wikipedia) and also it's a single terminal. At this point, it's then very similar to the Heathrow project in what's being delivered, except for the added context I gave.
British government in requisitioning other people's land shocker.
And there's also Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie: https://www.ft.com/content/d59a5164-d41d-11e6-9341-7393bb2e1...
Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
Most recent example was the bridge deconstruction in our small town. It was supposed to cost 80k Euros to completely deconstruct it. Actual cost was 150k and we have the pillars still standing around. It's just business as usual here in Germany.
This is nonsense. It's just that infrastructure projects that get delivered on schedule and on budget (or somewhat close to that) don't make for equally pretty HN headlines.
There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if public spending is more often out of budget or behind schedule than private spending like you suggest. But even then, Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case and suggesting that excesses like it are inevitable when politicians were involved is just nuts. There's plenty of competent politicians.
If it involves different political parties or governments (like BER, which had politicians from Berlin and from Brandenburg involved, both local and state, and the federal government too to some degree) then it gets even worse, a lot worse.
So projects merely commissioned by politicians usually do better (go over budget because of the moronic public bidding process, but that's a different issue), while projects not just commissioned but overseen by politicians do far less well.
Of course, because the most of the press doesn't do it's job. Here is a more banal example about public bathrooms in New York: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
>Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case
No, I wager is the rule.
Which you "proved" by carefully selecting a single anecdote?
I CAREFULLY SELECTED a single anecdote... did you miss the part where is detailed why toilets (as in more than one) and other government projects cost so much ant take such a long time to complete? What can I say, keep believing, comrade.
Maybe it's because publicly funded and managed projects have much greater scrutiny, and in many cases are required to respond to information requests. A private company is a black box and can use whatever means they please keep badly managed projects from becoming a story the press would be interested in.
Even the auditing firms are in on the game in the UK, so you really have no chance of knowing the truth until the bankruptcy is announced and the banks are lining up to get whatever assets are left.
> 1000s of projects that are on budget and on time
Ha, ha, ha, ha... Oh, you're serious :(
> A private company is a black box
That's why it's called a PRIVATE company. Is not your money, it's theirs, if they fuck up, they pay the consequences, it's simple.
Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
Disabled citizens are clearly better served by waiting for the oversized "Super Commission of Wheelchair Access" that takes three months to put a stamp on a project that has wheelchair access. You clearly didn't even understand the argument.
>And sustainability? Who needs that?!
Buzzword, three months, stamp.
>Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
I'm not at all surprised you think that.
There is no such commission, no such stamp. What there are, as the video says, is rules (and by the way, the guide shown is for visitors, nothing to do with construction). And yes, maybe disabled citizens are better off with those, because from what I can tell, the so-efficiently-renovated Bryant Park restroom has no wheelchair accessible stalls.
Again: is there waste? Absolutely, and it would have been nice to see some proper journalism covering it.
https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randweg_Eindhoven (Google translated: https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...)
Yet just about every IT, aircraft and building project etc in the private sector comes in on time and under budget. Oh, wait, it barely ever happens there either!
Maybe it's large projects per se then. Maybe there's added risk when politicians and private sector interrelate.
A better approach would be to do what's done more in the tech industry - decide a project needs to be done, then allocate it a permanent percentage of total revenues with close supervision of the details, until it's completed.
I do not think so. There are plenty of previous examples with enough similarities to estimate costs to +/- 20% at most, usually better.
A bigger problem may be that quoting wildly optimistic price is more likely to get a public project started, even though most parties understand that the actual budget and time will be very different. But as long as the project takes a long time those who gave original estimates / started execution have plenty of chances to move away. And then "well, when I was running it, things were different" is a decent defense.
Even a very inaccurate and bad estimation process will yield correct estimates at least occasionally - stopped clocks and all that. But estimate-driven budget allocation is hardly useful if the result is wrong 50% of the time, and to me it feels like it's at least that unreliable. Although this story focuses on Germany, look at CrossRail in the UK for another pertinent example. It was "on time and on budget" right up until a few months before launch, when it suddenly wasn't on time or on budget anymore, and in fact, after churning through some CEOs, eventually they got one willing to admit the truth - that nobody knew how long it would take to complete. But by then they had started shutting down the project, e.g. by laying off their entire internal and external communications team. It'd have been far more effective if they'd admitted up front they didn't know exactly how long it'd take.
I think the modern tendency to seek cheapest bid, rather than best value, makes it far worse. In trying to save money time and again they end up spending far more...
My son talks a lot about a study that showed optimists badly underestimated how long a project would take. So did pessimists, though their estimates were less egregiously wrong.
Basically, if people are involved, you can assume that budgets and time estimates are hand-wavy, ballpark guestimates at best.
Life will get in the way. Even people who truly understand that will fail to accurately predict just how much life will get in their way.
80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? Sounds like a joke.
>After the prescribed date, the bids are opened and assessed, and either the "lowest cost" or "most economically advantageous tender" is chosen. The contract award must also be reported in the OJEU and be published electronically on Tenders Electronic Daily ('TED'). [1]
It's difficult to choose the best offer if you are legally obliged to choose the cheapest one. This has led to a situation where all companies have to make cheap offers. The only way to make money is by invoicing bills for unforeseen work that wasn't covered by the original offer.
The irony of the situation is that there was an offer by the industry to build the airport for a fixed price. But Berlin chose to build the airport by themselves because that was supposed to be cheaper.
Well, Athens chose the other way: [2]
> However, after delays and slow development, the project was revived in 1991 with the then government launching an international tender for the selection of a build-own-operate-transfer partner for the airport project, with Hochtief of Germany being selected.
>In 1996, Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) was established as a Public–private partnership with a 30-year concession agreement.[1] That same year, the €2.1 billion development finally began with an estimated completion date of February 2001. The airport construction was completed five months before schedule, but was delayed opening a month due to surface connections to Attiki Odos not being completed. The airport officially opened on March 28, 2001.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens_International_Airport
It's a known problem no one seems to care about. The Swiss do it better: They throw the cheapest and most expensive offers out and pick a contractor from the middle price range. Seems to work well for them in most cases.
> 80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines?
It was a small bridge for pedestrians and cyclists that was closed about 5 weeks before they took it down, which took the crane just a couple hours.
It was a project as simple as it gets and they still went way over budget while also leaving half the bridge standing. I just wish I could say this was an outlier, but it's commonplace around here.
So it’s not a surprise that we find counter examples in strong democracies. The Gotthard Basistunnel was build faster than projected and about 30% cheaper [1].
I think we are just bad at estimating costs and time.
I don’t think it’s a problem with government. If you want these sorts of public good projects built, you need government to do it. Government doesn’t have the same incentives that private business does, and there are positives and negatives with that. A profit oriented organization would never have taken on projects of this scale.
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/55-workers-died-during-ista...
Not only that, large parts of it remain under construction. I know because I’ve been there two weeks ago. There was raw cement residue sitting uncleared before passport control. The signage is half broken and half incomplete. Instead of signage they have temp workers shouting the names of connecting flights and you have to huddle over to that guy and hope to god he knows what he’s doing.
Oh, and it takes 4+ hours to come to Kadikoy, the centre of the town on the Asian side.
It might be less of a disaster than the Berlin-Brandenburg mentioned here, but only barely so.
My point was about private companies building airports. If Turkish government built Istanbul Airport, would there be no deaths ?
Worker rights definitely make difference. But in the context of new Berlin airport, it looks like the problem is more about being able to organize and being able to manage a huge project.
Sorry to hear about your cousin, though, I hope he managed to get out unscathed.
I'm reminded of that $2M bathroom at a public park in NYC.
This is the video. There's some libertarian editorialization, but the facts themselves are solid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
> And some have even turned this black humour into a business opportunity. Philipp Messinger and Bastian Ignaszewski have invented a board game based on the Berlin airport disaster. The main object of the game is to waste as much public money as possible.
> I pick up a card saying some of the escalators from the train station were built too short, needing very expensive additions. "Everything on these cards," Mr Messinger says, "has really happened."
The manner in which this all unfolded is however a completely different story...
Not sure it is all just about regulations.
1. Very late in the design process
2. After construction had started (!)
I mean, politicians or not, the moment you start making major changes during buildout you’re going to have problems, regardless of what you’re building.
> Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible.
> But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
Yeah, that's gonna do it.
EDIT: </satire>
<h1>No.</h1>
But it IS a pretty good summary of the (publicly known) status.
Yet at its core, an MVP of an airport would be a runway with a building next to it + fuel and security services. It baffles the mind that this can be such a shitstorm. I can only perceive this to be bikeshedding at a national scale.
The big deal is that there is a lot of technology in there which now has to be replaced because it is reaching its end of life without ever being used.
The big deal is that this is a waste of taxpayer money. If this was privately financed I wouldn't care either but it isn't. At this point whoever is working there is just milking us.
ohthehugemanate posted this link and suggested reading the bit on construction delays. If this sort of stuff is considered normal in the industry, that is a big problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
* The fire response system wasn't just broken; it was never built. Siemens (a small/medium sized contractor according to the article) is "still waiting for paperwork" to deliver the software for the smoke suction system, based on hardware which was never even designed.
* The ventilation system turned out to be impossible. The architect didn't want ventilation ducts on top of the design for aesthetic reasons, so air was to be ducted and blown down, and out to vents on the airfield. Pushing warm air downwards many meters is generally not a trivial ask.
* turns out the architect of the fire suppression system wasn't an architect, but only a draftsman.
* The sand lime brick used in the foundations apparently necessesitatss replacing big chunks of foundation, cabling, and concrete.
* The windows wouldn't open when the weather was above 30 degrees Celsius (about 80 fahrenheit). It's 36 in Berlin today.
* 80% (!) of the doors just didn't work as of 2017.
* For the opening in 2012, there were no ticket counters and the escalators did not work.
* Three rounds of bribery and corruption charges in the project leadership
* 5 different project chairpeople and presidents
* By 2017, there were still major problems with smoke control, sprinklers, fire detection, sirens, emergency bulbs, and similar critical systems.
* Big parts of the cable ducting was not waterproof, and now about 700km of cabling needs to be replaced.
* 600 fire protection walls have to be replaced because they were made out of the wrong kind of concrete.
* They had to halt construction at one point because the main roof was going to collapse due to structural issues.
* The railway station serving the airport (built by Deutsche Bahn), and the tunnel to the airport (built by the airport construction company) were incompatible and had to be adjusted.
* When they finally simulated a fire situation (2017) they discovered they needed way more water than was planned for the sprinkler systems... Which therefore needed to be replaced.
The official scheduled opening date remains October 2020, but several official letters have called that info question. Certainly no one in Berlin expects it to open then. It has been delayed 10 times so far.
This is not just bureaucratic bungling. This is incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, AND bungling. Anyone on HN who has a contracting background can tell you: no responsible or capable project management would touch this steaming dumpster fire at this point. It has more warning flags than cabling problems, and that's saying something.
Really, read the Wikipedia section on "construction delays". It's very entertaining:
Is there an issue tracker specific to physical engineering projects?
I'm not sure what architects and engineers use for issue tracking, but they use Procore during the build phase for product submittals, change directives, change orders, RFIs, etc. These are all standard things laid out by the standard AIA contracts.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Central_Polish_Airport [1] https://centreforaviation.com/data/profiles/newairports/new-...
Almost every German comedy series has a jab at it.
[1] it’s harder to work out than I expected.
Yes, and they could meet that standard with 20% less tax revenue, too. There's zero reason that any government needs 42% of anyone's income.
- passive (consumer doesn't spend money)
- fluid (trillions of transactions)
Meanwhile in the market I can decide down to the level of "no, these oranges aren't sufficiently orange-y for me".
I'm no market fundamentalist, mind you. I'd rather find ways to make the public sector more responsive to public feedback than through occasional elections.
For much the same reasons as in the private sector, anyone who can demonstrate a way to save 20% — heck, even 5% — of a national budget would have their idea taken up by any party: a big-government party has more national improvements to spend on (e.g. “let’s put half the country through university!”); a small-government party would want to pay off the national debt.
Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government, without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.
> volume of transactions matters quite a lot
Why? I only see a reason to divide between “lots” and “not much” (a spreadsheet vs a census) rather than anything more fine-grained, otherwise fridge manufacturers would be meaningfully different to Amazon because they sell so much less.
> Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government
I think you’re radically underestimating the scale and difficulty of government. For one thing, governments have to balance the interests of all the businesses which operate in their jurisdiction against not only each other, not only against national security, but also against the interests of those working for those businesses and the consumers and any externalities of the products and services.
> without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.
The figures I’ve seen put German tax revenues at (2014) €593 billion from a GDP of €2.938,6 billion, or 20.2%. I pay more than that because I am well paid, something something whales something, it doesn’t bother me.
Then there’s the matter of what counts as compulsory: Amazon sales fees seem to be “the average seller paying 15%”, but they also have enough profit margin — effectively though not literally a tax on the employees, because it’s wealth the employees created but don’t get — for Bezos to gave his own private space race with Musk.
You might reply that this isn’t compulsory, to save time I repeat: I chose to move to Germany, my taxation in any particular nation is not compulsory because I can move away if I don’t like it. Therefore any argument along the lines that “business fees are not compulsory” also applies to taxes.
Also the fact that the UK has spent the last 9 years trying to cut everything to balance the budget and instead mainly managing to damage the nation.
And BER is costing money every day. It might be cheaper to tear it down and start again from scratch.
I think there is publication by the "society of tax payers" listing all the wasted tax payer money. Too few people read it though.
https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ - I see it is even free. And I have never read it, either. Will order a copy now :-)
I think as long as people are reasonably pampered (enough money left after taxes), they don't care enough.
In my opinion it is also the way the system is set up: taxes for employees are deducted before people even receive their money. So they have less feel for how much is being deducted. Self employed people see it differently.
I had an employed person deny this recently, but I am not convinced.
With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things.
This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.
This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI.
To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.
Until they don't. The last major crisis is less than 100 years old.
And it's also just a tiny fraction of a percent of all the things where money is wasted.
> Most of the money is spent on pensions, education, healthcare and other benefits.
Healthcare isn't a federal expense, you'll pay an additional 15% of income (both parts) for that. Pensions are also an additional expense, the federal government only subsidizes it. 12% of the federal budget goes to the military - which looks more and more to be on a similar level of inefficiency to BER.
To put that in perspective, that's 525 € (597 US-$) per citizen.
(Assuming 82e6 citizens, and a military spend of 43e9 € for the current year.)
In Germany they did many times, for all kinds of reasons (mostly fire response).
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-airport-...
> "It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.