The Channel Bridge

This must seem to be a brilliant idea to Boris. What could cap this from him?

To think some people think he would be a good PM.

he,ll probably connect it to boris island airport in the thames,has he finished that yet

after the swamp of course I hope

This would be a really good one if it was April 1st. Typical Boris, likes to get his name in the news.

The English Channel is the busiest shipping area in the world.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong ?

get it up sharpish before it has to slalom between a 1000 wind turbines

I doubt whether a bridge was seriously investigated before. It's only this century that all those bridges of similar or much, much greater length have been successfully completed in the Far East:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_bridges

The tunnel idea has been around far longer. Even the 1880 project got half way there, before the British government pulled the plug (as it were) owing to invasion fears. So the current version is really only the completion of a project first given the go-ahead when the engineering know-how for a bridge wasn't in place.

Yes. The garden bridge was daft. As you say, it wasn't exactly filling a gap in the market. This is different. Nobody would ever look at a 20-mile stretch of water now and consider digging underneath it (hence those 100-mile bridges in China).

The way companies like Carillion are suddenly unable to raise the finance, I wonder whether we've started a debt deflation - the worst sort, where nobody is willing to lend any longer at virtually zero per cent, and all those badly run companies which have survived on cheap lending are going to be found out. I can see governments all over the world being forced to print money on an epic scale for projects like a Channel bridge, just to keep the economy moving and the population in work.

Of course, the end result of that, a decade on, is 15% inflation and 10% interest rates, but at least houses will be half the price they are now.

Go for it, Boris!

Hope Teresa the appeaser doesn't get to hear about this. She'll probably offer to pay for it

never burn your bridges

don cant get it up

^^ apart from ferries and aircraft.

I suppose it will cost us millions into the future just to ensure that France is able to police its borders

I can see problems, French set off over here driving on the right. We set off over there driving on the left...............

Good point, cooperman.

The obvious answer is to build two bridges.

A Bridge Too Far?

^Neither sentence to be taken seriously.

cooperman
20 Jan 18 07:55
Joined: 27 Apr 07 | Topic/replies: 8,727 | Blogger: cooperman's blog
^^ apart from ferries and aircraft.

Good to know we have all that spare capacity sitting around doing nothing if it could cope with the volume of freight going through the tunnel.

If you build it, commerce increases to take advantage of the new opportunities.

To say it's unnecessary, because we currently get by with a tunnel, shipping and air freight, is like saying computers are unnecessary because we have pencils and logarithm tables; and the internet's just a pointlessf luxury, when we already have books and newspapers and a postal service.

But provide the hardware, and people come up with all sorts of new ways to exploit it. As Foinavon said, before you know it, going back to the way things were becomes unthinkable.