Colin Horgan’s roundup of urban white elephants prompted many Guardian Cities readers to suggest some he might have missed, revealing a veritable herd of the things the world over – including some perhaps prejudged. Call them calves.
Olympic stadium, Montreal
Many readers singled out the “the Big Owe”, constructed for the 1976 Olympic Games and plagued with problems ever since. According to CBC News, it cannot be used if there is more than 3cm of snow on the roof, meaning it is effectively out of action from November to March. In the last year alone, the roof tore 677 times – up from 496 times on the preceding 12-month period – and cost C$498,000 (£290,000) to maintain.
Michel Labrecque, the president of the Olympic installations board that oversees the stadium, last month defended the Quebec government’s plans to install a new $250m roof on the steadily deteriorating building by 2023. “It’s part of what we call the patrimoine. My father, your father, paid for it, built it,” he said in response to suggestions it could be more cost-effective to tear the whole thing down. “So it’s impossible, foolish to think about dismantling it.”
Mirabel international airport, Montreal
Montreal made another costly mistake ahead of the 1976 Games. Mirabel airport, about 24 miles (40km) north-west of the city, was intended by federal and municipal governments to replace the existing Dorval airport and set a new standard for North America – it was the world’s largest airport until 1999. But problems became apparent soon after it opened in 1975.
The promised high-speed rail line had not been built, meaning it could take well over an hour to reach the city, and with Dorval retaining domestic flights, connections required a bus journey between the two. Eventually, longer-range jets were introduced, meaning flights no longer needed to stop to refuel in Mirabel.
By 1997, Dorval airport had reopened to international flights and Mirabel had been reduced to handling only cargo – though its vast, sparse surrounds lent themselves to cinema. Scenes from The Terminal, the 2004 film starring Tom Hanks, and the 2013 zombie romance Warm Bodies were shot there before demolition started on the passenger terminal building. The last piece was razed last year.
Mattala Rajapaksa international airport, Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s Mattala airport comes to mind. At a cost of $209 million — most of which coming from China — Sri Lankan government of the day thought building an airport where nobody would fly in was a good idea. The result, it’s the emptiest airport in the world, according to Forbes.
Sri Lanka’s second international airport opened in 2013 to serve one million domestic and international passengers a year. It was built in Mattala in response to predictions that Hambantota, a small town in the south of the island, would be its next urban hub – but it didn’t happen.
Airport manager Upul Kalansuriya told the BBC in June this year it was serving between 50 to 75 departing passengers a day.
The Edinburgh tram line
Edinburgh's £1billion tram line.
Originally supposed to be a network of 3 lines covering most parts of the city, for a total cost of £350million.
Ended up being 1/2 of one line, 6 years overdue and costing £1billion.
This included lengthy contract disputes (which the city council always lost), because the city council didn't read the contracts which they themselves wrote.
Streets which were under roadworks for several YEARS ended up not having the trams running along them, as the money had run out and the route curtailed time after time after time.
After running out of money completely, the single line was due to run for only 1/3 of it's original length, terminating on the very edge of the city centre. The Scottish Government then threatened to withhold the final tranche of funding as they had agreed to a line ending much further into the city.
The city council then took out a massive emergency loan (at 100% interest thank you very much) , which will take 30 years to pay off, at a time when libraries, leisure centres, bin collections, roads and everything else is being cut back.
This half-line is slower and more expensive than the dedicated Airbus express service which runs along the same route, from the airport to the city centre.
The loss-making trams company has been forcibly merged with the public-owned bus operator, with fares rising to subsidise the trams.
The city council are determined to finish the single line at some point in the future.
*The ongoing public inquiry into the farce is also running over time and over budget, a perfect picture of the project as a whole
As Cade notes in his conclusion, the Scottish government revealed last month that the cost of the inquiry into why the Edinburgh tram project was over-budget, established in 2014, has now reached £7.2m.
New Royal Adelaide hospital, South Australia
It might be too early to call it a white elephant, but the New Royal Adelaide hospital opened in mid-August over budget and about 17 months behind schedule. Australia’s most expensive building, it cost more than A$2.3bn after the state government agreed to pay an extra $34.3m to settle a dispute with builders.
Repayments of more than $1m a day reportedly commenced after commercial acceptance was finalised in June, meaning taxpayers spent close to $100m on the building before it received its first patient. When it did finally open, nearly half of the operating theatres were found to be unsuitable for surgery, with pendant lights hanging dangerously low.
As commenter Betfaj pointed out, over in Western Australia, the similarly delayed, billion-dollar Perth children’s hospital is expected to finally open in May – though issues persist with lead contamination of its water supply.
“This is what happens when project management collides with political opening deadlines,” observed DrROFLMAO.
National stadium, Beijing
You can add any olympic games anywhere in the world to this list of expensive white elephants.
The “Bird’s Nest” stadium was designed as the main facility of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Since then it has served mostly as a tourist attraction – and the site of a few conferences – while costing $11m a year to operate and illuminate.
In 2012, Ai Weiwei said he regretted his involvement as an artistic consultant, adding that he hadn’t looked at the stadium since the Games. It is hoped, however, that it will come into its own in 2022, for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics.
The Big Dig, Boston
No mention of the Big Dig in Boston? I thought that was the gold standard for transportation projects going over budget.
Boston’s Central Artery “megaproject” was scheduled to be completed in 1998 at an estimated cost of $2.8bn in 1982. It was completed only in December 2007, after being plagued by delays and cost overruns throughout the design and construction phases.
The ceiling of one of the tunnels had collapsed the previous year, killing a woman. Builders had used the wrong glue to hold the anchor bolts in place, a mistake that would have cost $1.50 per anchor to mitigate. “It’s kind of ironic in a $14bin project,” Deborah AP Hersman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, was quoted as saying.
She was lowballing it. In 2012, a Massachusetts state official put the total cost of the Big Dig at an estimated $24.3bn, making it the most expensive highway project in US history.
Allianz and ANZ stadiums, Sydney
In Sydney, the state government has just announced that it will knock down two sports stadiums (each of which is used about once a week) and replace them with two sports stadiums (each of which will be used about once a week) in the same locations as where they are now. And the cost of this stupid switcheroo? Just a mere TWO BILLION DOLLARS!
You could have four Hotels of Doom for that amount and throw in a Bridge to Nowhere with the change.
The New South Wales state government’s proposal to spend $2bn knocking down and rebuilding two stadiums has proved a hard sell – not least because it has not released a business case for either project. A petition started by a newspaper columnist calling on the NSW cabinet to reconsider its decision, pointing to “ZERO public demand to replace either”, has drawn close to its target of 150,000.
Guardian Australia’s Matt Cleary said the state government was making a transparent attempt to address Sydney sport fans’ lacklustre track record of attendance by “building a couple of whopping, flash new stadiums”. He wrote: “As Marge Simpson often says to Homer: Hmmmmm.”
More Calatrava
Architect Santiago Calatrava, cited by Horgan for his City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, was identified by readers as a repeat offender.
Bilbao's Zubizurri bridge designed by Calatrava is also one of his "oeuvre". Famously, he failed to take into account rain (!) which makes the walkway of the bridge very slippery. Dozens of people broke their legs on it.
Of course we don’t know that Calatrava failed to take rain into account – but the New York Times reported that some 50 citizens injured themselves, some breaking legs or hips, when walking across its glass tiles between 1997 and 2013.
According to the Times, the city of Bilbao laid a huge black rubber carpet over Calatrava’s Zubizurri footbridge in 2011. Ibon Areso, then the acting mayor, acknowledged that the carpet was to the detriment of the bridge’s beauty – “But we can’t keep paying people who slip and fall.”
Commenter Genza65 noted that Bilbao’s airport is also a Calatrava design – and that when it opened in 2000, it lacked an arrivals hall: “You collected your baggage and ended up straight outside, in the inevitable rain.” (Airport authorities later installed a glass wall to shelter them, according to the Times.)
In the eyes of the Guardian’s then architecture critic, Jonathan Glancey, in his glowing review of November 2000, it all served to “put a little mystery and magic back into air travel”.
The Scottish Parliament Building
The Scottish Parliament building. A hideouts mess of a thing that was years late and enormously over budget.
Twenty years ago the estimate for a new Scottish Parliament building was put at no more than £40m. It was finished in 2004, three years behind schedule, with a final bill of £414m.
Two years later, a 12ft-long wooden roof beam swung free in the debating chamber, forcing its closure for two months. Then, in 2011, a granite block came loose from a wall and was left hanging 20ft above the glass roof of the MSPs’ restaurant. There have also been issues with flooding.
According to a Scottish parliament corporate body report, the Holyrood building is currently worth only £304m, and could reach the end of its “useful life” by 2060.
The library of Birmingham
Library of Birmingham anyone? 188 million to build, 2 million a year to run, half the staff dismissed after 18 months of being open to cut costs and opening hours slashed by half. Plus the charitable trust set up to help fund it by Lord Whitby had to be closed down as no one wanted to contribute...
The Library of Birmingham was opened in September 2013 by Nobel-winner Malala Yousafzai to “almost feverish” coverage, according to the BBC, which found it to be a major draw for the city in 2015.
But the Birmingham Mail reported in February last year that running the library cost close to £2m a month, with more than half down to interest payments on the £187m build. Cuts in 2014 saw most of the 188 staff members made redundant, and its opening hours reduced to 40 a week.
And a dodged bullet …
... but not before £37m of public money had been spent on it, without a brick being laid.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here
You forgot some other great white elephants: Montreal's Olympic Stadium that literally falls apart....Mirabel Airport built for billions just outside Montreal to replace Dorval Airport, 30 years later Dorval is still the hub and Mirable handles cargo and charters....Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing....The stadiums that South Africa and Brazil built for the World Cup that sit empty or have 15,000 attend matches in 80,000 seat caverns....Glendale Arena in Arizona which hosts a hockey team no one goes to see and costs $25 million a year to subsidize....Darlington Nuclear Power Plant in Ontario which makes (when it actually works) power they sell at a loss...Key Arena in Seattle renovated for the Sonics who promptly moved and left empty....Linate & Mapensa Airports in Milan splitting the traffic so Milan isn't a global hub despite being a global business centre....Athens Olympic artificial kayaking river....a whole herd of white elephants inhabit cities all over the world....