I caught this interesting programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday evening. It examines critically the 'golden age' of infrastructure investment in Victorian Britain and finds many of the same problems we have today.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04g8hrqIt turns out that there were plenty of failures and we are left with a biased sample of the successes. Bent Flyvbjerg says that costing and benefit estimation have been 'steady state bad' for the last 200 years! Andrew Tyrie suggests that the builders of London's sewers may have been putting too much weight on future generations and building gold plated solutions when there were plenty of other pressing investment needs. Dieter Helm suggests that while there may have been individual project failures, overall the investment made by the Victorians delivered the improved welfare we enjoy today and it is the big picture we should look at.
Worth a listen!
