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Comment by steve_gh | Hacker News Reader

Long essay.

TL;DR the UK planning system is too restrictive and is stopping investment.

However, some of the comparisons made don't really stack up.

Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.

There are some good points made though. The gold plating of a lot of projects is ridiculous. And don't get me started on the Elizabeth Line. I get it, it is clearly hugely beneficial and I have no doubt it pays for itself. But then you visit places like Maerdy in the Welsh valleys, devastated by the closure of the coal mines, and it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area.

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As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.

I am from a former mining city of Ostrava, CZ. It is not completely dead, and it has been slowly improving lately, but it sorely needs something like high-speed rail to become relevant again. (The location is favourable: almost equidistant from Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and close to Krakow; a major railway hub.)

But the pattern really repeats itself all over Europe. Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechia, Poland - former heavy industry hotspots tend to collapse in a very similar fashion. As far as I have seen, Bilbao (ES) and Katowice (PL) were able to rebuild and reinvent themselves the best. Everyone else struggles or gave up the fight entirely.

You'd think that exactly because it's such a common pattern, there would be best practices how to help those communities overcome. Yet, the only pattern I see is mainstream politics ignoring it, locals struggling, and rightwing winning them over. It's so obvious that you really have to ask yourself whether there's some hidden agenda somewhere in there. Just like mainstream politics ignoring the younger generations - both as plans for them and as ways to communicate with them - and again who's winning? The rightwing. It's everything in the open.

There have been projects that pour money into some of these places but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Modern economies seem to prefer cities.

>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area

Greater London has a population nearly three times that of Wales. So the bang-for-buck in this small area is much greater. I completely agree that we under-invest in areas like Wales. But that doesn't mean that under-investing in the most productive part of the country is a good idea.

> most productive part of the country is a good idea.

In what sense is London productive? What are the products?

In the sense of labour productivity, measured in output per hour[1]. The products could be anything, but I'd guess they're primarily services like finance, technology, media etc.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity...

Tax revenue

Financial services? Software? Scientific research?

It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed. So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.

Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.

Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.

The remedy will probably consist of a combination of legal changes and a change in attitude; YIMBY must become a thing. People respond to social pressures.

> Stronger property rights

Does the UK have stronger property rights than, for instance, Norway that was mentioned by another contributor here as being so much more efficient? Yet Norway has abandoned, for now at least, the south western half of the Oslo to Drammen E18 road upgrade because buying out the owners of expensive houses on the route would be too expensive.

Are you claiming that other comparable democracies have such weak property rights that this significantly affects infrastructure projects? Which ones?

> Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.

If you compare population density maps of France vs the UK, you can see that it's pretty similar - there are clusters of population in certain locations, and wide areas with barely any inhabitants.

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