Unfinished business - London Crossrail

Crossrail, a 117-kilometer long express rail line connecting the Greater London region from east to west, is the largest public infrastructure project undertaken in the United Kingdom since the Channel Tunnel was completed in 1994. Crossrail was conceived prior to Brexit as a means of maintaining London's global financial leadership by reducing business and employee travel times and improving transport access to middle-income housing. Approved by Parliament in July 2008 at a cost of £15.9 billion after a lengthy planning period, Crossrail was originally scheduled to enter service in 2018. After four years of construction and system testing delays, it is now expected to open in 2022 at a cost of roughly £20.7 billion, a 30 percent cost overrun. Although it is still too early for a definitive account of what went wrong with Crossrail, preliminary reports highlight the use of too many different contractors and a lack of appropriate senior project management experience and accountability pathways. Crossrail's bi-furcated sponsorship structure, combining the UK Department for Transport (DfT) and Transport for London (TfL), served to further magnify these problems. Another mistake was not having a contingency plan in place if Crossrail's innovative but untested train signaling and station control system failed to work as promised. (It didn't.) These project delivery problems notwithstanding, Crossrail makes use of an innovative revenue financing model combining passenger fares, an incremental value capture system, and developer and property-owner contributions.