It's been a solid year for me living in the UK. The honeymoon period has worn off and now there are oddities i see consistantly all around me.
For starters, engineering works take a god awful long time. There's a section of a major arterial road in Oxford that started construction back in July of 2015. This stretch of road is about a mile in length, yet the "estimated completion" signs say it will be finished around September of 2018! Mind you traffic through this section is painful and makes traveling in Boston and LA seem like a dream!
Same goes for this Thameslink program crap. They decided to close down London Bridge Station this month and it won't re-open until 2018! This is one of the busiest stations. I assumed that trains would roll right through and my commute would be cut down. Nope! I'm sitting here outside london bridge now because of "congestion". Make no notice of the fact that trains go right past a perfectly open station platform at London Bridge.
Do you want to hear a joke?
Network rail/Skanska workers working!
You'll never see anybody doing any real work on these projects either. Yet they cost several hundred million pounds.
Contrast this with america, there was 20 mile stretch of i90 that was stripped and re-paved in two months between a very busy stretch of exits where i used to live.
What gives? Does the UK use these projects as GDP boosters over a long period of time to hide lack luster GDP growth? Seems like everyone is getting a raw deal with this.
For starters, engineering works take a god awful long time. There's a section of a major arterial road in Oxford that started construction back in July of 2015. This stretch of road is about a mile in length, yet the "estimated completion" signs say it will be finished around September of 2018! Mind you traffic through this section is painful and makes traveling in Boston and LA seem like a dream!
Same goes for this Thameslink program crap. They decided to close down London Bridge Station this month and it won't re-open until 2018! This is one of the busiest stations. I assumed that trains would roll right through and my commute would be cut down. Nope! I'm sitting here outside london bridge now because of "congestion". Make no notice of the fact that trains go right past a perfectly open station platform at London Bridge.
Do you want to hear a joke?
Network rail/Skanska workers working!
You'll never see anybody doing any real work on these projects either. Yet they cost several hundred million pounds.
Contrast this with america, there was 20 mile stretch of i90 that was stripped and re-paved in two months between a very busy stretch of exits where i used to live.
What gives? Does the UK use these projects as GDP boosters over a long period of time to hide lack luster GDP growth? Seems like everyone is getting a raw deal with this.