Re: Cutting corners not worth the risk
  Tony Galloway

When the article, as here, is written by the dodgy shills for the gouging contractors who benefit from the overcharging, this is what you get.

The winners here are those supplying the gold-plated, overrated and overpriced services and materials, the losers are those who pick up the tab.

The technique of selling something that promises more than it delivers, at higher cost than it warrants, has been called “brochuremanship”. It exploits the lack of independent expertise and institutional knowledge due to the degradation of the resourcing and independence of the public sector, therefore endemic where neoliberal economic ideology has infected the body politic . UCL professor Mariana Mazzucato has some ideas about fixing this :

Opinion: Build back the state | UCL News - UCL – University College London https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/apr/opinion-build-back-state

The parasitic and greed driven tendencies of the private sector providing these goods and services can’t be resisted if the procuring agencies don’t have the ability to assess what they’re buying, or don’t have a problem with it, as seen with TfNSW.

Tony

(My first posting with my new computer - the old one died of battery atrophy and now I have to recover all my stored data, photos etc from it.)

> On 13 Jan 2022, at 12:45, Mark Skinner emessk@...> wrote:

>

> What is frustrating is this ongoing assumption that the problem was the underestimating of costs, rather than the design and execution being far more expensive than it should have been.

>

> Starting with the position that costs were underestimated leads to the conclusion that tram/light rail is simply uneconomic. Whereas, if a Melbourne style design had been undertaken, and costs had been less than the estimate would lead to the conclusion that trams/light rail are economic, and the system is worth expanding.

>

> Not only could Sydney have had twice the extra length of track and trams, but that very cheapness could have put more extensions on the agenda.

>

> TfNSW's predecessors killed trams, and it looks like TfNSW has put a new tram system for Sydney on life support.

>

> On Thu, 13 Jan 2022, 10:48 am Greg Sutherland, gregsutherland@... mailto:gregsutherland@ozemail.com.au> wrote:

>

>

> https://www.railexpress.com.au/cutting-corners-not-worth-the-risk/ https://www.railexpress.com.au/cutting-corners-not-worth-the-risk/

> refer comments on CSELR

>

>

>

>

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