Quote Originally Posted by TISS View Post
we are always told by the left (Labour) that the right (Conservatives) know the cost of everything and the value of nothing, yet here you are advocating the very same approach. What about lowering pollution, or increasing personal utility and happiness instead of being stuck in traffic jams - don't they count?

The fact is the Welsh Government shied away from investing in something which requires significant investment, citing payback is just not a reasonable excuse. Payback over 30 years is not unheard of for large capital projects. The SSC required payback over 25 years or so, perhaps we shouldn't have built that as it only shaves ten minutes of journey times.

We don't have politicians that are prepared to make bold decisions, until we do then independence is pure fantasy
The SSC should NEVER have taken that long to pay back, only because of the scandalous PPI agreement did it take that long. It cost about 200 million to build yet we ended up paying well over a billion pounds more than that! I genuinely think there should be an enquiry into that deal but that's another point.

The costs for the m4 relief road were already up to 1.6 bn, with some estimates already hitting 2 bn. And the money it generated was pretty low, I can't find the exact figures again, but from memory it was about 25-30 million a year.

If it's 25 million and a 2 billion cost that becomes a payback of 80 years, there are plenty of other things the money can be spent on in south wales that will have a bigger impact. We have limited scope for borrowing and limited resources so it makes sense to spend it on what will have the biggest effect.

The congestion going past newport could be improved significantly by closing half of the newport junctions imo.