WHY does everything take longer to finish and cost more than we think it
will?
The Channel Tunnel was supposed to cost £2.6 billion. In fact, the
final bill came to £15 billion. The Jubilee Line extension to the London
Underground cost £3.5 billion, about four times the original estimate.
There are many other examples: the London Eye, the Channel Tunnel rail link.
This is not an exclusively British disease. In 1957, engineers forecast that
the Sydney Opera House would be finished in 1963 at a cost of A$7
million. A scaled-down version costing $102 million finally opened in
1973.…
