Many British cities suffer from poor connectivity because of bad public transport and car congestion at peak times. This can be a severe break on the economic potential of our large towns and cities. If we are to get all parts of Britain growing then we must have cost-effective investment options. However, Britain has some of the highest transport infrastructure costs in the developed world. On average, the UK pays 65% more per unit of infrastructure than comparable countries26. This translates into around £8.3 billion a year wasted, or £122 per person, due to spending failing to deliver equivalent infrastructure. Costs are consistently higher across all modes.
We compared 121 road projects, 224 rail and tram projects and 36 nuclear projects. UK road projects cost 23% more than in peer countries, while rail projects are even more expensive at 93% more.
These figures are not raw comparisons of how much is spent. We control for project size, tunnelling share, station and junction counts, urban or rural location, population density, construction duration, and the technology used. For instance, we compare a British rural motorway to a French rural motorway; a London metro to a Paris metro; a UK nuclear plant to a Korean one of similar size.
Without those controls the headline figures would look different by type of infrastructure. UK road and nuclear costs would appear even higher than reported, because UK projects in our sample are concentrated in dense urban areas (road) or use smaller, older reactor designs (nuclear). Rail moves the other way: without controls, UK rail looks cheaper than that of peers, because our sample is tram-heavy, and trams cost less per kilometre than the metros and heavy rail that dominate peer samples. However, when we compare like with like, tram to tram and metro to metro, we find that there is in fact a 93% UK rail premium.
All this means that Britain’s headline investment figures are misleading. Although the UK spends around 0.95% of GDP on transport, the infrastructure we actually get is equivalent to just 0.57% of GDP, if it had been spent at European cost levels. This helps explain why Britain’s roads, railways, and urban transport systems tend to be worse than those in countries like France, Germany, and the Netherlands, despite higher spending.