This weekend, Britain may be about to have its worst traffic jam ever. Up to five hours of delay for 100,000 drivers or more.
Would you believe me if I told you the reason is because Britain's most hated motorway is too good?
Or that someone had a semi-secret plan to fix that🧵
Michael Dnes
2,911 posts
Killed one motorway; failed to build another; wrote about ones that never happened. Ex-civil servant. Views personal
Outer-London-in-denial
Joined November 2012
- It seems HS2 is going to Euston. Big cheers from the rail crowd. But there’s a much bigger question that hasn’t been answered yet. And it might be the most important question in 100 years of UK railway history.🧵
- This tweet has got a lot of people talking about why Britain seems so short of electric railways. 15 years ago, it was about to be very different. And then things went very wrong. 🧵
- Does HS2 have a future? And why might that question hinge on an unseen government document and a sugar mill in Nottinghamshire?🧵
- The last successful planning application for a reservoir was submitted in 1976 As late as the 1960s Britain typically opened 3 reservoirs a year.
- This is Brezhnev era stuff. When a system is collapsing, the people at the top would far rather it fails on their terms than it is fixed on anybody else's.
00:00 - We have a new report out today. Because we’ve found one weird fact that unites all four constituencies that swung Reform for the first time at the election.🧵
- It seems Britain can’t build. Not houses or hospitals or roads or trains or pylons or reactors or reservoirs or runways or data centres or film studios or factories. But how on earth did we get here?
- Replying to @MichaelDnes1So instead, we did something roads planners allegedly don't do – we got the government to commit to _not_ widen the motorway. And began the long wait to see if anyone cared enough to make it worth developing the alternatives. Which, to this day, they have not.
- I’m tired of hearing about bats. Do you want to hear a story about jumping spiders and the town that disappeared? I think I might be breaking this story – do come be the first to read it.
- The amazing things here are 1- it is 11km 2- built in one of Europe’s most remote spaces 3- costing less than _the_planning_documentation_ for many UK projectsToday, the Faroe Islands 4. sub-sea tunnel opened. This new sub-sea #tunnel connects the islands of Sandoy and Streymoy and is 11 km. An unforgettable experience to sail the last trip between the islands today and be able to drive home. A step forward for the #FaroeIslands.
- Has government just quietly told us that it’s building HS2? I’d better explain.
- After the revival of this old thread on UK infrastructure, I realise that I never followed through on my promise: to explain what might speed it up. Grab a spade, and come with me. 🧵 (thanks to @Sam_Dumitriu and @DavidHenigUK for reminding me)Enjoying the recent @WorksInProgress article by @Sam_Dumitriu on speeding up infrastructure. It made me look back to my time as designer of the UK’s roads programme, and our struggles to speed things up. 🧵 (1/19)
- Replying to @MichaelDnes1Which gets harder when you learn that, during the 1970s, to stop the signalling cables being nicked, they buried them and didn’t bother to write down where.











