With still three years left to go before the M6 Junction 15 to 13 is finally completed it comes as no surprise to us all that use this stretch that costs are spiraling out of control.
One of the areas under scrutiny by independent auditors is said to relate to steeply rising costs on the earthworks package, which is understood to have soared from around £5m to £48m.
In the end it will have taken over five years to do the job when in fact it took only two years to build this original stretch from scratch back in 1961/2.
Why are we even surprised anymore.
Everything goes over budget and opens late.
I can’t think of one project be it a road a rail building etc that’s beem.completed ontime in budget.
As for time it takes.
In them.days as well was all manual labour no machines like today’s lot use.
All.they probably had was a shovel and wheelbarrow.
edd1974:
Why are we even surprised anymore.
Everything goes over budget and opens late.
I can’t think of one project be it a road a rail building etc that’s beem.completed ontime in budget.
As for time it takes.
In them.days as well was all manual labour no machines like today’s lot use.
All.they probably had was a shovel and wheelbarrow.
M6 J15-J13 didn’t even need doing in my opinion, it’s an upgrade for the sake of an upgrade. Don’t remember ever having any traffic problems through that stretch.
The M6 has had major works on it since I moved back to the UK in 1990 .
The current work won’t be finished before the next upgrade will be required.
We have governments and civil servants that clearly haven’t got a clue on estimated costs or project management.
It comes as no surprise to me, every major roadworks in the country has miles upon miles of cones the end of which 5 men are watching one man doing next to nothing we are the least productive country in Europe most of this is down to the riduculous farce that is health and safety and nonsense environmental impact studies and the silly time it takes for the design and planning process.
In the the 1960’s we just got on with the job and huge construction and infrastructure projects were finished in a remarkably short period of time.
One prime example Llanwern Steelworks at the time the biggest integrated steelworks in Europe, started on a greenfield site in 1959 and was opened by the Queen on the 25th October 1962 the place was huge and employed 10,000 people by the end of the 1960’s
Fast forward to 2018 and Galliford Try started construction of a new junction for the M49 which is desperately needed for the area and it now looks likely it won’t open until the end of the year at the earliest.
The British for whatever reason myself included seem to spend longer and longer in work doing less and less.
theres so much corruption and backhanders these days id wager youd not find 1 honest contractor out there. In my own area the biggest has all new gear all hired out on piffling small jobs that on the surface wouldnt pay much.
if ever theres an accident in my area the roads closed for hours, the situation is time -milked by highways and so on
mike68:
It comes as no surprise to me, every major roadworks in the country has miles upon miles of cones the end of which 5 men are watching one man doing next to nothing we are the least productive country in Europe most of this is down to the riduculous farce that is health and safety and nonsense environmental impact studies and the silly time it takes for the design and planning process.
In the the 1960’s we just got on with the job and huge construction and infrastructure projects were finished in a remarkably short period of time.
It’s not all to do with modern methods. Some of it is simply because the roads, once open, have to stay open.
If I remember right from looking into it in the past, the cost of remedial or additional works on a motorway, like an extra lane, is about 100 times the cost of building, because you have to knock things down as well like bridges and gantries and retaining walls, and you have to do it all with traffic zooming past metres away, whereas the fellas who built them fresh were just sending the bulldozers forward across farmland.
And it wasn’t all plain sailing with new builds either. All those urban elevated sections of the M6 and M5 around Birmingham, they threw them up in the late 1960s, but within 20 years they were falling apart at the seams, and iirc some construction bosses were eventually sent down for criminally substandard quality.
A lot of this “smart” motorway nonsense is just a cheap fix, rather than spending money to solve problems once and for all.
Due to H&S, vehicles can’t pass other workers, working on hard shoulder, meaning it can hours for vehicles to get to point they are needed, regularly see queues of eight leggers on M62 (Jcn 10-12) trying to tip or load.
Could also have something to do with the fact they don’t work weekends, don’t work past 5pm, have a night shift consisting of a quarter strength of the day shift and as mentioned, 5 people watching 1 person dig a hole and scratch his arse [emoji106]
just a thought. theve done all these smart motorways upgrades.
but I don’t know why they didn’t fit under road heating.
I know we don’t get much ice and snow as we did but while there digging motorways up wouldt add to much extra to the bill.
then when we do get an artic blast al least some of the motorways will be passable.
they wouldnt need gritting. meaning a saving there. plus no grit means no salt eroding away the tarmac resulting in less repairs needed.
edd1974:
just a thought. theve done all these smart motorways upgrades.
but I don’t know why they didn’t fit under road heating.
I know we don’t get much ice and snow as we did but while there digging motorways up wouldt add to much extra to the bill.
then when we do get an artic blast al least some of the motorways will be passable.
they wouldnt need gritting. meaning a saving there. plus no grit means no salt eroding away the tarmac resulting in less repairs needed.
Unless the heating broke, which would involve digging the road up…
mike68:
It comes as no surprise to me, every major roadworks in the country has miles upon miles of cones the end of which 5 men are watching one man doing next to nothing we are the least productive country in Europe most of this is down to the riduculous farce that is health and safety and nonsense environmental impact studies and the silly time it takes for the design and planning process.
In the the 1960’s we just got on with the job and huge construction and infrastructure projects were finished in a remarkably short period of time.
One prime example Llanwern Steelworks at the time the biggest integrated steelworks in Europe, started on a greenfield site in 1959 and was opened by the Queen on the 25th October 1962 the place was huge and employed 10,000 people by the end of the 1960’s
Fast forward to 2018 and Galliford Try started construction of a new junction for the M49 which is desperately needed for the area and it now looks likely it won’t open until the end of the year at the earliest.
The British for whatever reason myself included seem to spend longer and longer in work doing less and less.
edd1974:
Why are we even surprised anymore.
Everything goes over budget and opens late.
I can’t think of one project be it a road a rail building etc that’s beem.completed ontime in budget.
As for time it takes.
In them.days as well was all manual labour no machines like today’s lot use.
All.they probably had was a shovel and wheelbarrow.
The Panama Canal: “France began work on the canal in 1881, but stopped due to engineering problems and a high worker mortality rate. The United States took over the project in 1904 and opened the canal on August 15, 1914.” It’s a MEGA complicated project, I recently watched a docu on its expansion in 2016
I find it hilarious that converting an existing m-way to a ‘smart’ one takes longer than to build the thing from 0, the benefits are questionable and the costs - astronomical and all this using supposedly new or improved or ‘groundbreaking’ technology.
Sixties boy:
A lot of this “smart” motorway nonsense is just a cheap fix, rather than spending money to solve problems once and for all.
Due to H&S, vehicles can’t pass other workers, working on hard shoulder, meaning it can hours for vehicles to get to point they are needed, regularly see queues of eight leggers on M62 (Jcn 10-12) trying to tip or load.
The problem is though mate, the powers that be CANNOT solve the problems once and for all. The population size is the problem, and that’s going to be irreversible sadly. The whole transport system and infrastructure in this country simply can’t cope with the amount of people living here
Now all the gantries are in place, won’t be long before all trucks in UK have toll boxes in cab like most of Europe, pay as you go. Could even charge more for “dirty diesel” and less for “clean electric”
