it's a totally stupid project from beginning to end
the cost and time over-runs were not particularly outrageous (as in outrageous but not uncommon on infrastructure projects) but the cost of hiring Atkins to do a job that the Council should have done for themselves has ballooned to almost ten big ones. The upcoming court case between the Contractors and the Council will cost the Council something on the far side of five million - surprising, given that Atkins should have ensured that all ambiguity in the contract was ironed out.
As for the rest - it's a bit like prescribing aspirin for a crack habit. The A14 is one of the DfT's most outrageous motorways by stealth. One of Mr. Hammond's first acts as Transport minister was to nix a £1.4bn upgrade, for which we can all breathe a sigh of relief, but the central question, one that governments of whatever stripe are going to avoid at all costs, is how a strategic route, carrying, so I am told, 40% of our trade by bulk, came to be a general purpose would-be expressway, rammed with the cars that are turning Cambridgeshire and Suffolk in to one big suburb. There's a very simple, cheap way forward, and that is to close 30 or more of the junctions, turning the road in to something that serves exporters and importers rather than the retail parks that fester along its length. That's not going to happen under this government, and I can't foresee it happening under the next. So....the taxpayer has coughed up a hundred million quid for something that is, laughably, described as 'sustainable' but, which is entirely the opposite.