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Your Heathrow numbers are off. Latest cost is £14b, and the price includes re-routing one of the UK’s busiest roads into a tunnel, building a new terminal, and
by peteretep 7y ago
Your Heathrow numbers are off. Latest cost is £14b, and the price includes re-routing one of the UK’s busiest roads into a tunnel, building a new terminal, and purchasing 7,000 of the UK’s most expensive homes, while not disrupting air traffic at an airport which handles take offs and landings every 45 seconds from two runways.
Given that, “for just 1 runway” feels unfair
- mprev 7y agoIt’s not wrong, though. You added some really valuable context but it doesn’t detract from BER being relatively inexpensive compared to other airport projects.
- peteretep 7y ago> it doesn’t detract from BER being relatively inexpensive compared to other airport projects But it does incorrectly describe BER as a "brand new airport", where the reality is: "The northern runway of BER is the southern runway of the old Schönefeld Airport and has been in use since the 1960s." (Wikipedia) and also it's a single terminal. At this point, it's then very similar to the Heathrow project in what's being delivered, except for the added context I gave.
- 13of40 7y agoOff topic, but it's an interesting read how they originally acquired the land for Heathrow.
- peteretep 7y ago"Harold Balfour ... deliberately deceived the government committee into believing a requisition was necessary so that Heathrow could be used as a [military base] in support of the war with Japan. In reality, Balfour wrote that he always intended the site to be used for civil aviation, and used a wartime emergency requisition order to avoid a lengthy and costly public inquiry." British government in requisitioning other people's land shocker.