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I was on the M42 a couple of times today - not when the 4 lanes were open but I got to thinking ...

I heard that they spent £100M upgrading the hardshoulder so that it could be used as a lane and puting in the refuge areas. It was also reported that to widen the motorway "properly" would have cost £500M.

Like so much other public spending I cannot for the life of me see where money of this magnitude goes to.

The implication is that to put in a new hardshoulder would cost £400M. As the hardshoulder is by definition for emergency use only, surely it needs to be not much better quality than a farm track with some tar thrown on top? There's gypsies round here that would do it for a fiver a metre!

OK that's a bit tongue in cheek, but you could hire 100 workmen for 6 months for £1M

Am I alone in not being able to imagine this sort of money or how it can possibly be justified?

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I share your bafflement. Have done for years.

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Paul Smith
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I recently worked on a 10km dual carriageway in south wales (including a 5oom bowstring arch bridge) that cost about £50m. The M42 stuff doesn't seem to stack up to me either.

Even £50M is not easily imaginable! Any idea how that breaks down? Is it the bridges that cost a fortune?

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A few years ago they put in a new roundabout near me and said it cost £200K. I was completely baffled by that as at the time you could build a sizeable house for half that amount. It seems crazy when a roundabout is just a mound of earth with some kerbstones round it.

A lot of the cost is moving the utilities. I once quoted 4 million to move the telephone cables for a roundabout. All the fibers had to be renewed joint to joint, 2km each. There were about 30. A joint box can cost £400-£1400,
a manhole 3-6K. to lay duct in carriage way is £60+ per meter just for 1 4" pipe. To lower a duct is much more.

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Then there is the cost of all the consultation, public meetings, environmental assessments ...

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Someone's making some serious money out of all this then!

Seems to me the basic problem could be that LAs/Goverment have absolutely no idea regarding procurement & value for money

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Where I live there is much talk of re-opening about 14 miles of disused canal, to link the Lancaster Canal back up with its original terminus of Kendal. The sums of money being talked about are fairly huge, and I get to wondering whether we've actually gained much in terms of engineering cost-effectiveness over the last couple of hundred years.

At the time the canal was originally dug, such projects were done at the drop of a hat, in order to serve business interests that by today's standards would seem fairly minor. As an example, according to local historians when this canal was dug an additional loop (via our village) was put in, and a lengthy tunnel excavated and lined solely in order for the canal to serve one gunpowder works in the next village.

Now wind the clock on to the present. Now we have a "massive" tourism industry that would make much more intensive use of such a resource. We also have a modern, mechanised "efficient" construction industry, yet even though most of the infrastructure is already in place (half the canal is still full of water, virtually all the bridges are in place as well as the aforementioned tunnel) funding just the refurbishment of this is a major issue, and indeed in my opinion seems very likely to scupper the project.

So where are we wasting all the money? We can't really blame labour charges, as we now have machines that supposedly do the work of hundreds of men, so it should be easier to carry out these sort of projects than it was in Victorian times, with a fraction of the manpower. Yet as we look around, most of the enduring engineering landmarks around us were built then, not now.

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Of the £50m ish

about £6m related to diverting utilities.

the big bridge came in at about £11m

The structures in my section were about £3.5m my section in total was about £6.5 (one of 5 roadworks sections)

Traffic Management came in at at least £0.5m

Then start looking at actually building the road. Excavators cost say £20ph so £200 per day. Estimate general operative salary at £100 per day.

Conrete at £50 per cubic metre, blacktop at £50 per tonne, subbase at £8 per tonne it soon adds up.

Having said that I can't see the £100m on the m42. I can only presume that the vast majority is in the electronic wizzardry

How much is palm grease these days...?

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Actually it doesn't though, does it?

For example a thousand tons of tarmac laid on five thousand tons of subbase comes to less than £100k, which is insignificant by an order of magnitude (or maybe two) in the sorts of numbers that are being bandied about.

Why should a bridge cost £11M (say). It's only made out of (relatively) low cost materials, nor is the technology exactly "cutting edge".

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Well I've never estimated for roads, but my job is to estimate for oil & gas industry work of an equivalent nature........(repairing things, upgrading things, modifying thigns etc).

I hand over documents quoting figures like the above daily.

About 1/3rd of the cost in any project is Engineering. Engineers will typically be charged out at £25/hr for graduate positions upwards. Charging out £90/hr for a Process Engineer in oil is typical, although this is beyond the scope of the discussion.

By the time the contractor has taken the rate-to-man (his wages in his hand), added on PAYE tax, added on NI contributions, added on public liability insurances etc etc etc the cost of having that employee is typically 1/3 to 1/2 again as much as the guy's hourly pay.

Anything which has liabilities involved will be subject to full Engineering reviews to eliminate as far as is reasonably possible to any risk of an error.

A typical design will involve one or two Engineers plus a handful of draftsmen being payed almost as much. To draft a bridge...... I reckon you could spend 800~1000 manhours between stress calculations, drawings, reviews etc. Then there's the geological aspects. Surveyors will be paid similar money to office Engineers. They'll spend a good week maybe? surveying the sight to supply the Engineers with the required data to design suitable foundations for the bridge. 2 man team of surveyors will probably cost £600 per day each, call it £1200 for the team x 5 working days = £6000 for what basically amounts to a description of the ground.

Even things like traffic cones must be stored when not in use. This costs money as they must be stored *somewhere*. The council can't just write such monthly expendiature off (at least I'd be surprised if they could) so each cone will have a daily rate of a few pennies per day as a "hire" charge to cover the storage costs of the land etc. This money will be allocated against the project to help quantify the real costs of doing things.

All the vehicles, flood lighting equipment, diesel, bulk materials, logistics (an HGV delivering a single load from close by will cost £100 as a kick-off) etc.....

There are so many things to be done in these projects. Most of the costs are admittedly, intangeable as with oil. Our client will regularly spend £25,000 for us to replace a burst pipe a few feet long.

It's just all the "other" stuff which spirals the costs. The reason why so many public projects run so vastly over budget is because they are never estimated properly in the first place (i.e. nobody sits down and accurately predicts just how much has to be done, rather than how much any given element shall cost).

I know it's no consolation when it's our tax money, but these things DO cost a fortune to do.

That said, I bet cost control has a few areas which could be improved upon too on these projects

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how far do you think 100t of 'tarmac' would go then?

It'd do a good couple of driveways, to be sure.

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I thought that they "stored" them on the M6.

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It's n expensive old business. I reckon about 25% waste in general civils construction.

It's a bit of a bold statement but it's my gut feeling.

But.....it's what i do for a living so at least I have an opportunity to make a little difference.

What really annoys me is we had to suffer for 18 months while they built all this crap on the M42. Now it’s finished the benefits are, erm, well,


Can someone tell me the benefits?


I live close to the M42 and use it every day; I have done since it was built. The journey times are now far longer than they EVER used to be. Using the hard shoulder is an idea from the asylum; it’s just a matter of time before someone gets hurt. Is there such an offence as 'manslaughter by engineering incompetence'?

Must say I haven't been on it when the hardshoulder's open - and don't want to be!

I didn't want to divert the thread from the cost element by getting into what I thought about it but since it's been brought up...

I would dread the thought of breaking down on it, the hard shoulder has always been there for emergencies, whilst not a pleasant place to be at least under normal circumstances moving traffic should not be on it.

As for emergency services - on the jams in the M6 yesterday there was an ambulance using the hard shoulder - it came to a breakdown & had to sit there whilst the traffic moved enough for it to nip into L1 and back again. There's just no way it would get through with no hard shoulder.

Our government make a great deal of "safe driving" but don't seem to hesitate at removing the main safety feature on a motorway to save money (whilst still managing to find the money for the 127 "safety" cameras )

And of course if it's "safe" then why isn't it open all the time?

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I'd have done it for £1M !!

- dig a hole a couple of feet deep, throw in some rubble & cover with tar.
- don't worry about quality because we'll dig it all up again in 6 months time

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