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HS2's Candid March Update: Building Trust Through Transparency
41 Plays28 days ago
Join Jason and Carlos in this special in-person London recording as they tackle three hot topics in construction and infrastructure:
🚄 HS2 Reset Strategy: Examine the significant changes coming to the UK's ambitious high-speed rail project under new leadership. With Mark Wild stepping in as CEO following his Crossrail success, discover what this means for Britain's largest infrastructure project and the future of its delivery.
📦 The Package Size Debate: Does size matter in infrastructure contracts? Explore the fascinating dilemma facing mega-project planners when deciding between large consolidated packages versus smaller, specialized contracts, and the ripple effects these choices have on project outcomes.
🏙️ Bradfield City Center: Critical analysis of Australia's newly announced "first city in 150 years" adjacent to Western Sydney's new international airport. Is this truly a city-scale development or something else entirely?
Key Timestamps:
00:00 - Introduction & Episode Overview
02:55 - HS2 Project Discussion
16:05 - Package Size in Infrastructure Projects
28:30 - Bradfield City Center Development
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Transcript
Project Management: Large vs. Small Packages
00:00:00
Speaker
So we had opened up this thought process or conversation around is you know, does size matter? I'll try and get that one in again. um Big packages in mega projects is fewer big packages better than lots of small ones.
00:00:15
Speaker
like Like a small number of big packages or a big number of small packages? Both seem threatening. um So you said both seem friendly. Threatening. Oh yeah.
Introduction to 'Offsite' Podcast
00:00:34
Speaker
Welcome back to the offsite podcast. I'm Jason Lansini joined as always. Well, back in the driver's seat by Carlos Cavallo. Welcome back mate. Today we are going to dive into three fascinating in person in London topics.
00:00:51
Speaker
ah We're going to start with, if you're in London, you're not going to talk about anything else, h s two ah The super ambitious high-speed rail project recently came none and under new leadership. Mark Wild, who previously led the successful turnaround of Crossrail, has stepped in with a bold reset plan.
00:01:09
Speaker
that I think offers some valuable lessons for major project delivery. Then we'll examine a critical question in infrastructure delivery that we raised in a previous episode around big packages, small packages, does size matter in packages, the Paris Metro's evolution um in how they deliver the most recent lines gives an interesting case study to dive
Bradfield City Centre: Substance or Fluff?
00:01:34
Speaker
into. Finally, going to look at Australia's first city in I think 100 and something years. I'll get the facts by the time we get to the main topic, but Bradfield City Centre, and we'll see if this is development rooted in substance or is it, I'm going to lead the witness here, marketing fluff. Carlos, welcome back, mate. How are you? I'm good, thanks. It's weird being sat on the end of a very long table face-to-face. It's like a sort of Tudor banquet.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, to maybe set the scene for anyone listening, we're kind of like a ah ah very, very, very long table and we're sat at either end of the table. Now, some would say it's because of something to do with sound and podcast, but I also feel like it's because we normally record this many hundreds of ah miles away.
00:02:19
Speaker
going to get too close. You want to keep some separation. Yeah, yeah. Boundaries. ah It feels like, you know, when you get like, ah they'll have like um a period drama and there's um the like Lord and Lady of the Manor and they sit at complete opposite tim victoria yeah complete opposite ends of the banquet table. yeah that's For those listening, that's what's basically going on right now. Well, we're in London together recording this in person for the first time in months.
00:02:44
Speaker
And as a double bit of good news, we might even sneak ah a bit of ah a beverage in after. So if this feels like better better spirits than normal, that'll explain why. That's the excitement.
00:02:55
Speaker
ah Cool. Well, let's dive in straight off the top. I'll set the
HS2 Project: Ambition and Challenges
00:02:59
Speaker
scene a little bit. The High Speed 2 project is one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in British history. It's a 140 mile, that's ah effectively one glass city in the desert long. high speed railway designed to transform connectivity between London and the West Midlands.
00:03:17
Speaker
Originally conceived as this long Y-shaped network that goes all the way up to Manchester and beyond. The project itself is, has faced a bunch of, I'd say almost crisis and some controversy.
00:03:32
Speaker
ah The most significant setback came in October 23 when the then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelled the Northern Lakes to Manchester and Leeds. In December 2024, there was a change of leadership on the project amidst all of this controversy.
Mark Wild Takes Charge of HS2
00:03:50
Speaker
A gentleman named Mark Wild stepped into the role of CEO of HS2.
00:03:54
Speaker
with, I guess, a clear mission to break the cycle of cost increases and schedule delays that had played the project to date. And he recently released a March 25 update video where he offered a fairly candid assessment of the situation and outlined his strategy for getting the project back on track. Carlos, before we dive into the ah the content of what Mark's update said, is there anything you'd add on the background of the project and the the scene setting so far?
00:04:23
Speaker
Yeah, obviously, um it's I can't remember a time when it wasn't constantly in the news and it's just been this raft of constant negativity based on program and cost for the last 10 years now.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like, ah obviously we'll talk about the switch itself, but it feels like a real like hands up moment of, look, we're not in a good spot. We're not hiding anything. ah Let's be honest about where we are.
00:04:47
Speaker
It feels like they're tearing up some really bad news because if he's saying we need to stop it, that means he's going to kind of make a statement that the next number will be the number and the program will be the program and we can actually deliver that.
00:05:00
Speaker
So um I'd imagine it's, a yeah, it's going to be quite a significant jump and then it will be maintain. Yeah, to give, I guess, a final piece of context then. So for those that don't know Mark's background, this approach to resetting HS2 is probably heavily informed by his prior experience turning around Crossrail, which is now the active Elizabeth line, which faced similar scope of challenges before his and during his intervention.
00:05:25
Speaker
When he took over Crossrail in November 2018, it was 37 days from its scheduled opening date. thirty seven days from its scheduled opening date Yet it had all bunch of ah critical system work remaining complete, a whole bunch of structural work incomplete, a bunch of stuff incomplete and a budget that was basically i'm unbelievable.
00:05:46
Speaker
So he is credited with turning around the Crossrail project, he implemented a transformational owning the whole philosophy, moving project beyond solid collaboration to this kind of integrated system ownership.
00:05:57
Speaker
He also transitioned from this big bang opening idea to kind of staged opening and phase commissioning. In many of the locations of Crossrail, they took direct ownership of the tier two and three supply chain um and in some cases booted out tier one contractors. and then started implementing some ah shared incentive schemes with the delivery the delivery partners on on the project.
00:06:19
Speaker
So that's his background. He is just gone over, I think, 100 days in the role at h s two And as I said, his update was, and as you kind of alluded to, Carlos, pretty candid.
00:06:31
Speaker
These are the things that he said. After spending his first three months visiting teams across the route, he identified three fundamental issues undermining the project's performance. This is HS2. First, HS2 had suffered from immature design development with construction proceeding before designs were sufficiently advanced.
00:06:49
Speaker
I've got some thoughts. Second, construction activities have been mis-sequenced with civil engineering works progressing before critical systems contracts like track and overhead line, et cetera, were finalized.
00:07:01
Speaker
This kind of disconnected civils and system integration works in the schedule, which which was something that happened at Crossrail. And then third, the governance framework and lack the rigor necessary for a project of this scale with insufficient accountability and transparency. So pretty cutting for Europe and and the UK's biggest infrastructure project that's active at the moment. Is this him setting, you know, capturing the basically rebaselining expectations to deliver on top of or or or is there a lot of
Types of Project Directors
00:07:31
Speaker
truth here?
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think um if we think about, ah we saw it at Crossrail, he's very much ah like a practical, let's be realistic, let's actually, he seems like someone that will actually sit in the dirt with everyone and actually work their way through it.
00:07:44
Speaker
He's a bit of a, like obviously a problem solver and has been brought in because of the issues that they're having. I think it's a good thing they brought him in now because technically we're quite early on in the construction phase. 40% roughly complete, I think.
00:07:55
Speaker
Rather than 30 days from opening. 37 days. It's definitely early. That is for sure. I don't know. Yeah, some people might consider the 40% somewhere near the middle, but yeah, it's it's definitely much earlier than 30 days from the scheduled opening date, for sure. But I've always found there's kind of two types of, like in my experience, project directors. You've got the early sort of um polished...
00:08:18
Speaker
sort of very good at customer facing very much. You're in that growth phase. Everything's happy. ah You're growing the teams, you're doing work. It's all positive in the news. And then you've got your hard times, project directors.
00:08:31
Speaker
Contractors go through similar cycles of they bring them in. They're very, very strong on change. They're very sort of diligent and almost military in their delivery. So it feels like a natural arc that client organizations and contract organizations go through to ensure they're actually delivering what they should be delivering. So if we think about the public perception of Crossrail now, it's very positive.
00:08:57
Speaker
People don't remember it as this over budget thing that took it um years to open. It's the best tree blind in London. In fact, if you this is a topic for another time, but um in the US, there's a lot of conversation at the moment ah happening in California around the high speed rail project. And there, you know even in a recent book released there called Abundance, they're talking about Europe and and the UK as having the like this history of successfully delivering mega projects compared to California.
00:09:28
Speaker
Engineering wise is a massive success story. Like it is. um Yes, it was, it was late and over budget, but everything is. And unfortunately we were in this cycle of, If you want something approved, you've got to undercook it. We get the overruns and everything else that comes with it.
00:09:43
Speaker
So are you making the kind of case that I guess there's this conversation or there's this ah paradigm that happens in companies where people will kind of classify people as like peacetime CEOs and wartime CEOs? Are you saying there's like a similar thing in in kind of project directors?
00:09:57
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. I think there's the the corporate faces that are good times at the beginning. Yeah. um And then you've got the in with the trenches, been there and done it, highly experienced problem solvers that are the sort of wartime that they come in and actually get the jobs done.
00:10:13
Speaker
There were definitely a couple of things in here that i that I just from looking at what Mark wrote and said that I i kind of reflected on and thought about if you know I was in the same boat, what I would do and what I had seen previously and in in my time on construction projects.
00:10:31
Speaker
ah He definitely has a really compelling way of ah framing the story of what they're trying to achieve and creating this best for project type attitude. Because ultimately on projects, what you're trying to do is to take a whole range of people and companies that all have their own incentives and their own things that are driving some of their behavior and point them on the same direction and incentivize them to the same outcome. And there's a really incredible way through both like storytelling and I guess through just open and transparency of driving this best for for project approach, which is yeah I think a really big takeaway for me. And I think for anyone that's like in that spot of leading a major project, it's very tempting to go and fight your corner to you know capture every dollar and change, but you end up trading off this combative relationship that I think in the end hurts everyone.
00:11:27
Speaker
And he also has the, because he's new, he can come in and paint the picture of how bad things are yeah because he's new. You can't do that if you're three years into a job very easily. So I think there's going to be a significant.
00:11:39
Speaker
He's going in there blam they're blaming everything blaming everything on Biden. and the the but but In the video. So there was a YouTube video that he announced just for context. um He did a bit of an update.
00:11:52
Speaker
This is the state of play and this is what I'm here to do. Yeah. um I think, yeah, some of his wording was quite interesting. He sort of the way he described making sure the schedule is in the right order and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Little things like, yeah.
00:12:08
Speaker
yeah you know make you not hold the title You sure? Yeah. Making making show that there's no dummies. you know ah But that is the other thing was he mentioned like return on investment within the community and and everything that's being built around it. And it's all London focused. So he's going to get some heat off of that, I would guess.
00:12:28
Speaker
That's where the train line being built, man. So, like, it's not really his fault. If they had built the train further to the north, I'm sure he would talked about it. Yeah, but there was no mention of Birmingham things like that. Oh, is it going to Birmingham?
00:12:40
Speaker
Yeah, okay. You should go to Aldo, come in Houston. So, yeah, I think um he's he's relatable. He's he just a pretty honest speaker. He's been there and done it.
00:12:50
Speaker
You would expect him to grind out the delivery of we're going to have a rough probably a few months when real information emerges. I'm pretty sure he ah you'll probably say i'm wrong, but by memory, was it the rest of the year to get the schedule right? He said in the video. Possibly. Yeah. it's not a quick turnaround.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, really interesting to see how he manages that. But I would expect an honest end result. one of the um One of the key ah things that he implemented at Crossrail and he's talked about on HS2, which I'd be interested in your take on, just to trigger some planners now, this idea of ah using windows, not dates.
Planning Windows vs. Fixed Dates
00:13:27
Speaker
And i think to quote, he was like he said, programs of this size should plan in windows, not singular dates. I think there's a, I personally believe that there, yeah, there's a lot ah that I would agree with there.
00:13:40
Speaker
Probably most significantly, I think about that idea of transparency and getting this one team approach. Cause it's very easily to feel comfortable that there's a date, but no one, everyone knows that's not the, that's not the fucking date.
00:13:54
Speaker
And if it is, it's luck. Yeah. Yeah. Or manufactured. yeah Yeah. Right. When you're talking about a date, Every time that date moves, it kind of forces a conversation about why did the date move, which then forces a conversation about whose fault is it that the date moved, but the date isn't the date. This is probably like five years away, six years. So it's probably, I don't know what the end date is now.
00:14:16
Speaker
We get to find out a hundred days to find out or something. Yeah. Yeah. but I think this idea of like windows and almost probabilistic windows is more helpful than we've been there, right? You do the monthly schedule review where the project director is like, why is that moved by one day?
00:14:33
Speaker
You know, it's in in two years time. Yeah. Yeah. That could be one second added to every task. Like it's, it can move through almost nothing. when And also the the concept of a window is nice because,
00:14:44
Speaker
You would expect the window to shrink as time moves on. So you're getting more and more likely of what that date would look like. Yeah. um And yeah, as you said, you can drive some bad behaviors by saying that's the date.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah. Whether it's reporting or people's bonuses or whatever is tied to those dates. A window makes a lot of sense. And it's not like it's a not the Olympics. There is a hard end. If there's a window of a year, ten years out, yeah probably sits better than we've lost a month. Yeah. and And like the date, not only does it drive this like accusatory, not, you know, this accusatory culture of like, why did the date move? Whose fault is the date move?
00:15:21
Speaker
It also then that the consequence of that is if I'm showing the date moving by a day or a month, should just make that go away? Yeah. yeah Right. And so suddenly you get people like, you know, the classic, I can make any, so I can make any business look good in a spreadsheet by just tinkering with, you know, with the numbers here and there.
00:15:39
Speaker
I think that's what happens. And, and, and it's this like comfort and precision. Oh, wow. The date didn't move. That's great. You know, there's probably 500 planners on that job. Imagine they all sneak in a day or Yeah, yeah, exactly. Three years out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:15:54
Speaker
i So I think there's a lot to be learned from what Mark's approach to kind of resetting. I think we should keep a really close eye on it and maybe circle back in the next update.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah. Jumping on from one mega project to another, we had the conversation about Paris Metro.
Paris Metro Extension: Contract Management
00:16:13
Speaker
ah We talked about line 15, which was the most recent extension to Paris Metro that is kind of just starting off or or in the ground at the moment.
00:16:23
Speaker
One of the key takeaways and one of the things that we dug into on ah in that prior episode was a review that was ah done by the the government rail authority in France that uncovered that in prior sections of Paris Metro,
00:16:40
Speaker
And I will find the quote. Yeah, so the findings ah from the the Rail Authority said that the southern sections were divided into small lots involving, i think, six or so kilometer length tunnels and Sully structures packages. So they had like line-wide contracts. that were broken into smaller pieces, which led to coordination gaps. So multiple contractors managing adjacent sections of the kind of the same scope. And then a whole bunch of system integration risk with interestingly calls back to the crossrail problem, basically. yeah yeah
00:17:16
Speaker
um And so we had opened up this thought process or conversation around this, you know, does size matter? I'll try and get that one in again. um Big packages in mega projects is fewer big packages better than lots of small ones. like Like a small number of big packages or a big number of small packages?
00:17:36
Speaker
Both seem threatening. um So you said both seem friendly. Threatening.
00:17:44
Speaker
Yeah, there's, I mean, it's an interesting question. conversation because there's a load of pros and cons for each.
Large vs. Small Contracts: Risk and Accountability
00:17:50
Speaker
So if we think to cross route, relatively big packages, you had stations and a tunnel, but they still had the super complex systems integrations issues, as you would expect.
00:18:01
Speaker
Tideway, that's a really clean project because there's siloed sites. And the only thing connected them is a tunnel, which is for water. There's not even there's no system. So that's that that worked out really well. Dumb tunnel.
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah. Poo tunnel. Poo tunnel easier than train tunnels. Yeah. So you can see why you're if you're thinking as a client, you've got one pressure, which is how much you're spending and It's tempting to go for big contracts because the administration of those contracts is small.
00:18:31
Speaker
They'll think they're passing on all the risk to the contractors or most of the risk. It's not going to sit with them. Albeit, depending on the form of contract, that might go back to them in at least a shared sort mechanism.
00:18:45
Speaker
um But then you lose competitiveness because the pool of contractors is small. yeahp You can go for multi-billion pound contracts. yeah um You're going to be paying fee on fee because they're still going to use the specialists ye um because they don't self-deliver or most of them don't largely self-deliver.
00:19:05
Speaker
um So it feels like a de-risked situation. Your overheads are smaller. Your overheads for the client side as well. Administering these contracts is heavy.
00:19:17
Speaker
So there's that there's that one side, which is go big, stay sort of lean and try and push the risk onto the contractor yeah and have a contract. That means that you're not going to see too much of the cost come back.
00:19:30
Speaker
And then you've got a model which you could say, right, let's go with like systems rather than sections so we can hire the specialists, um which will ultimately mean lots of smaller contracts, which means super admin heavy, massive client team.
00:19:46
Speaker
Not only is it like an administrative task, you still want specialists because you're man marking people that really know what they're doing. yeah um So you need to really hire up um or hiring serious teams to to take control of that.
00:20:01
Speaker
You're not getting fee on fee. So you're kind of shifting. and And just to translate for people playing along at home, fee on fee meaning because you've got this tier one that might hire a tier two that you might have directly hired yourself.
00:20:14
Speaker
You're going to get the tier two making their profit margin, and tier one making their margin on top of the tier two's margin, which is kind of like feeon fee on fee. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So each ah each side is like concentration of accountability, concentration of risk, how you want to balance it and what feels right.
00:20:30
Speaker
Big swings, ultimately client driven what is their appetite for risk and how much ownership do they want. There's kind of the hands on and hands off. And there's so many ways you can take this, right? So you can say, what's the appetite for risk? I think there's a strong argument, which says at the end of the day, if the goal is to open a rail line and get revenue from a rail line, and the risk that you're actually taking as the client is only a small amount of that is recoverable through your penalties for your contractors. If the bigger packages doesn't actually remove the interface risk, then
00:21:04
Speaker
even though you don't hold that, like you technically contract some of that risk, you're not you're not protected for all that risk ah through the penalty on the contractor. So you can kind of put some of that risk conversation over here and and put it separately because you can if you can accept that your risk exposure is much larger than what you recover in your contract from the contractor,
00:21:24
Speaker
You ultimately need to go, what's just going to get the project delivered quicker? So then if you bound that conversation, there's there's these different approaches where i think a lot of it comes down to ah how do you want to tackle design development?
00:21:37
Speaker
Because actually the big de-risking is how progressed is design. Yeah. And then even... Let's say you swing towards the big contract version. It's really hard to do early contractor involvement with specialists because each of those will go with their own.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then it's your to the detriment of the works information rather than a specialist making a call on a system. you're going to have different specialists all trying to do their own thing with the little bit of information that we actually give them at the beginning of the process. Yeah, you end up going, you end up down a path of going very, very big, which is like give one pe person all of the stations, yeah for example, as opposed to Crossrail where there were different people at each station.
00:22:15
Speaker
you would have been better you would have that you take that idea further you go one person has all the stations which is interestingly like what city city metro is doing there's a in the next package that's upcoming it's one one contract for all of the stations uh melbourne metro or suburban rail loop they're doing three stations and three stations i think when you get the buying gains of yeah you get the buying game yeah it's like yeah yeah And then you don't have, you don't like you take Crossrail as an example. You have every contract having the same conversation about what's the spec on this door. And then the spec on the door gets clarified to one contract. And then you have to go and tell 10 other contractors who then go, Oh, I wasn't planning to do that. Here's a compensation event.
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah. but I mean, obviously you can have like a strong PMO team, like a consultancy, like a mace could come in and be that sort of intermediate who's trying to do a lot of the tying everything together job. Yeah.
00:23:06
Speaker
But then they're not really going to see much pain if it doesn't go well because. Yeah. That's like, again, Crossrail is a really good example this, like the Bechtel role in there Yeah, exactly. I think there's a world where you get pushed. You can make an intellectual argument which pushes you to very, very big, very big packages where you're going to lose on. you You're basically knowing you're paying on overs because you're going to have only so many people that compete for it.
00:23:30
Speaker
You're going to pay fee on fee on fee probably. Yeah. um but all of the like ah interface risk is, you know if you package them right, all the stations or all the system-wide or something, then that you minimize your interface risk.
00:23:42
Speaker
There's another world which is like, well, maybe we don't need to start digging a hole tomorrow and we can actually develop the design further ourselves. And now we can go down a path of maybe we buy all of the doors.
00:23:54
Speaker
Maybe we buy all of the escalators sounds like modern methods of construction maybe we buy all of the all of the standardized components and we let much more it might might there might be some still designed to do but you're innovating a lot of the the stuff down think there's an argument that that's going to be cheaper and probably quicker in the long run but yeah you you end up doing a lot of that work yourself But then you've got to balance the expectation from supply chain. So it's like like if you hire a plumber to do your bathroom and then you but free issue the materials to them, they get pretty pissed off because suddenly their fee is quite small. They'll still do it.
00:24:30
Speaker
ah Yeah. They'll still do it. When you're talking, you know, Paris Metro or or ha just two the the they'll dog do whatever the scope you want. Yeah, yeah.
00:24:42
Speaker
Do you think there's an issue, though, with, and let's say, these smaller contracts model that the client organization are very aware that they're probably going to be the ones that are blamed because they're more accountable?
00:24:54
Speaker
ah It depends. i think the whole thing depends on where you slice these smaller contracts. I think if you think about how you would break up a project or how contracts get interfaced, there's like physical interfaces. So tunnel meets station box, for example.
00:25:08
Speaker
Then you have kind of like technical interfaces where like uh my fan in my station integrates with your system you know your air system yeah yeah exactly then you've got kind of like organizational interfaces which is where we let two sections of the tunnel to two different people i think you would probably want to avoid them in that in that reverse order like i don't think i can't see a lot of case for yeah you know, similar objects on the same project being different contractors. If you go down that approach of like putting a lot of the design risk on the hard thing with like, if you think about cross round and tunnel vent, because they were happening at the same time, there's probably few contractors that could actually, cause it's like a, it's like a huge spike of like the biggest projects in all of your work happening in a small window. But if you do the design earlier yourself before in the contracts and you pre-buy all those components and then you've got a delivery schedule and then you're putting that into the... Like Vents is a perfect example. I had exactly this on Crossrail where...
00:26:13
Speaker
We were developing the design at the same time as like seven other stations were developing the design. We're all asking the same questions to different parts of the client team. One would get an answer. And then over the next month, that answer would kind of ricochet across the rest of the stations. You didn't have a Reddit feed to share. There's no Reddit.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, we just did. We didn't even have Microsoft Teams then. So... But yeah, it's just like it was like the biggest China. And then we'd hear, okay, this team's got the go-ahead, start buying something. but And then it was like a mad rush to buy all the same thing. i think I think where where you have similar components, where there's like physical, where you've got technical interfaces, there's a strong argument for like either develop that design further or put that in one package.
00:26:57
Speaker
Yep. I don't think we resolved it. I think there's pros and cons. That's the answer. Yeah. um But it'll be interesting to see. Maybe there's a case study of of the before and after for Paris Metro.
00:27:09
Speaker
Back to the, um just to finish the, like if you've got a large volumes of items, yep I think there's a massive case for the client organization to purchase and free issue. Certainly.
00:27:20
Speaker
whether they even design to assume that standardization is that goes back to design actually there's like a theory there's this concept of theory of constraints right probably the best thing you can do on a contractor design development is to say there's not 15 escalators that you can choose from this is the escalator just make this one fit yeah you know because like i think part of the problem redesign concrete easier than a lift shaft Yeah, I think like when you leave so many options open, that's when the design development just takes forever.
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, but but designers make loads of fee on design work. so Correct. Yeah. So I think there's a really strong argument for even if it's not the best escalator, choose one. Yeah.
00:28:01
Speaker
say that's the escalator and fit it into there and buy it and have agreed dates because the design, the, the, the options for the, the opportunities for the design to just take forever as we option here, 50,000 different escalators is just going to be removed.
00:28:18
Speaker
I do it for everything. right. We got to an answer. Right. Final topic. We might keep this one. and we just sell it to the construction industry. ah From the armchair. Backseat driver. Yeah.
00:28:31
Speaker
Okay. So the last bit of news is Australia. Large village. No, no, no. It's a city. It's a big city. uh australia is planning to build its first new city in man i thought i had the date it was like 110 years it 150 years australia is planning to build its first new city in approximately years with recent approvals for bradfield city center which is a 114 hectare development strategically positioned adjacent to one of the under construction Western Sydney International Airport, Sydney Metro rail stations.
00:29:11
Speaker
Let me say that again in way clearer terms. There is a new airport being built in Western Sydney. There is a rail line built from Sydney to that new airport. And along that route, there are some stations and there is a station that is in some would say in the middle of nowhere.
00:29:26
Speaker
And There is now been approved for a 114 hectare new city, which when development has ah plans to generate 20,000 direct jobs to create 10,000 new homes and has already got apparently committed a billion dollars from the Australian off of the New South Wales state government.
00:29:48
Speaker
ah First question, Carlos, is is this a city? Second question. Is is this news or is this a marketing fluff?
00:29:58
Speaker
This is marketing fluff. um job done i think we can wrap this for anyone who's from the village of Bradfield and near Reading. It's about the same size. but did she lived um Yeah. 100 hectare site with 10,000 homes.
00:30:14
Speaker
It's a bit punchy to call it a city. But yeah. Yeah. If you took that to like Saudi Arabia, they call that a hotel. ah yeah Yeah, it's a bit like Vauxhall in London, which is one tube stop and 10,000 flats. yeah Yeah. Yeah. The thing that actually surprised me all was 150 years.
00:30:30
Speaker
Everyone always thinks of Australian cities as being relatively new. Yeah. um So if you told me that most of the cities were less than 150 years old, I'd probably believe you. Yeah. But ah yeah, I was quite surprised to see that.
00:30:43
Speaker
I think there's there's a story here that I think that I'd like to tell, which is kind of like the ah you know economic development creates this new city, but but blah, blah, blah, blah. I think what I read when I ah saw this thing was ah it it it just felt a lot like there's you know these big visions of new cities, you know and these examples of them a bunch in Saudi Arabia with, say, Neon at the moment, where...
00:31:07
Speaker
People have got this big vision. They want to try and drive people's behavior to go move there or invest there or whatever it might be. And so it requires some over indexed marketing hubris and and pizazz to kind of get it into the news, get people talking about it. And ultimately, I think, drive interest and and investment.
00:31:30
Speaker
I definitely read that. That's not with any inside knowledge. um Yeah, that said, on the new city front, um looking into the longer list of new cities being built at the moment, there's some pretty wild ones.
00:31:43
Speaker
um But there's one called Madinah Al Harir in Kuwait. who Give that a Google. It's massive. um I get the spelling. instance It's a full on city, Dubai style, everything brand new, over the top in terms of scale, 600 billion dollars.
00:32:00
Speaker
dollars But having said that, I'm the biggest fan in the world of like transport orientated developments. I think the idea of like using like rail development to spur growth and, you know, take an example back to London of HS2 and Crossrail and the Park Royal or the Common Development. Yeah. I think it was like 25,000 apartments or something, which is like two and a half times this city. So we should call that the city of Park Royal. Yeah.
00:32:30
Speaker
um Yeah. And why why build a city somewhere and then try and go for funding to build the infrastructure around it? um Yeah. And and and just sit in cars with ah you know traffic, which is what, you know for those that don't know Western in Sydney, is like traffic central.
00:32:48
Speaker
It can sometimes take hours to get into the city center. So you know having a development sat basically on top of a rail connector, i'm I'm a biggest fan of the world there, but... ah it's it's it's a couple of towers was uh australia's croydon you labeled it as the other day i didn't i think you said that that and no one in australia will know if that's insulting or not um uh i'm a south london guy that's not uh isn't croydon south london yeah oh so okay so you said it yeah yeah i'm allowed to say it because i'm south london
00:33:21
Speaker
I think it's more insulting to Australia. um Yeah. Luckily it's the new city. So no one's from there yet. Yeah. Yeah. yeah The two farmers. you currently have The three of land. that gar ah On that note.
00:33:38
Speaker
I think we've run out of time. Oli looks stressed. So thank you very much for tuning into today's show. If you did enjoy today's episode, please do think about liking this video or following us on your chosen podcast platform.
00:33:49
Speaker
We really appreciate your support and we'll catch you next week. Off for a drinky poo. Bye bye.