IanDB said:
I suppose you can put it down to our collective lack of vision and conservative (small c) outlook. Hats off to the French who seem to be able to put together projects and see them through to completion and end up with something usable. Minitel (early internet) was used throughout France to great effect. Their road management information system in Paris appears years ahead of UK. You can see up to the minute maps of road congestion at major airports and train stations. We're beginning to catch up but we seem to be incapable of making the jump between thinking about something and then putting it into practice at a national level.
Yes, I do envy the way that the French can complete such projects, but there is a good reason they do.
When they built the TGV they thought "What is the quickest way between Paris and city B?" well, actually they thought «What is the quickest way between Paris and city B?», cos they like their quotation marks that way
Anyway, what they did was to just bulldoze their way through. The government decided that having really fast trains was a great thing so they flattened everything in the way, hills, villages the lot. But that wouldn't happen here. Why do that when we have perfectly good 200 year old routes. Sure you can only go 140mph instead of 180mph, but you have to weigh the impact of destroying thousands of homes, and disrupting the wildlife, not to mention spending billions against the time saved by building new routes suitable to scoot along at 200mph.
It's the same with motorways. They got into that game rather late, but when we had greens moaning about widening existing 20-30 year old motorways, they were just starting to build theirs. I doubt they would let greens prevent them doing these things.
However, they still don't know how to build an aircraft carrier properly. The Charles de Gaulle keeps true to its name by being larger than it needs to be, incapable of doing its job and being thoroughly ineffective!
