In late July The Guardian highlighted the UK’s inability to deliver major infrastructural projects for a reasonable price by asking “Are these the world’s costliest roadworks ?”–a reference to £2.9 billion budget allocated to the widening of the M6 motorway along a 51-mile stretch between Birmingham and Manchester. To hammer home the feeble ratio of expenditure to output, the journos calculated that the project works out at around £1,000 per inch of road.

That piece emerged from the back of my mind after reading today’s Irish Times story by Frank McDonald on the estimated bill for the much-bruited Metro North line connecting St. Stephen’s Green to Swords via the airport:

“Although all monetary figures in the documents are blacked out, it is possible to discern that the estimated cost of the 17km metro north line was put at €4.58 billion in 2004 prices. With construction inflation and additional expenditure, it would now be well over €5 billion.”

A quick back-of-the envelope calculation (perhaps similar to the kind done in the Rail Procurement Authority), dividing budget by line length, yields a cost of around 2,942 euro per centimeter (or, in old money, slightly over five grand sterling per inch).

You might argue that the comparison between British roadworks and the Irish metro line is unfair, as the latter includes some underground tunneling and stations. But a difficult sod might then ask why the Swiss, for example, were able to build a 33-kilometer rail line (running 6,500 feet below the surface of the Alps) for around 2 billion euro less than the hardly-as-breathtaking engineering project destined for north Dublin?