Hamada Marine "Bridge to Nowhere"
Japan is famous for its bridges to nowhere and highways without traffic but Germany is not immune from this extravagant form of supporting the construction industry and their powerful lobbies.
Der Spiegel runs a scathing attack on the white elephant that is “Stuttgart 21” and Deutsche Bahn‘s CEO Rüdiger Grube:
A multibillion railway development project is going ahead in Stuttgart, despite the fact that it offers hardly any benefits for the rail network and the money would be better spent elsewhere. Experts have been warning against the plans for years, but they were ignored.
Current estimates put the costs of building the subterranean railway station in Stuttgart, the capital of the southwestern German state of Baden-Württemberg, at €4.1 billion ($5.38 billion). An associated high-speed rail line to Ulm, a city lying about 90 kilometers (56 miles) southeast of Stuttgart, is slated to cost another €3 billion.
But what, you might ask, is the payoff for Deutsche Bahn, the federal government or the EU of implementing Stuttgart 21 and building the new line to Ulm? Deutsche Bahn CEO Rüdiger Grube offers one answer: The building project, he explains, will “eliminate the biggest bottleneck on the high-speed route from Paris to Bratislava.”
It would seem that Grube still doesn’t have his facts straight. It might help if he actually took the train from Paris to Bratislava. The roughly 13-hour trip would probably be enough to convince him that this so-called express corridor actually isn’t so express and that boring tunnels through the karst formations of the Swabian Alps mountain range for the Stuttgart-Ulm line is not about to make the connection significantly more attractive.
See map Paris to Bratislava
As Düsseldorf-based engineer Sven Andersen puts it, “Stuttgart 21 does nothing for long-distance travel.” Unlike Grube, Andersen has spent his entire career working in the railway industry, most recently as an expert on operational issues, and is considered one of the top experts on Germany’s railway system.
New Stuttgart station
As Andersen sees it, Stuttgart 21 and the related plan to built the Stuttgart-Ulm high-speed railway line are “a transportation-policy disaster.” Likewise, he adds, the project seems to be based on a complete misunderstanding of Stuttgart’s role in the German and European railway network. “Stuttgart is a destination,” he says. “It’s not a place people travel through to get someplace else. Converting the station into a through station won’t be an improvement on any significant route.” Indeed, all you have to do is look at a map to realize that Stuttgart is not a central location. All fast connections between key economic zones pass through other cities. For example, the Frankfurt-Zurich route runs far west of Stuttgart through Karlsruhe and Basel, while the Frankfurt-Munich route makes a wide arch through Würzburg and Nuremberg, far north and east of Stuttgart.
Full article:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,717575,00.html
The k2p blog 