If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy.
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.
Tegel is one of my favorite airports in Germany since I can reach it from central Berlin in 20 minutes by public transport and in the main terminal most gates are less than 5 minutes away from the entrance, so you could in theory arrive 40 minutes before your plane departs.
The building is very old of course and you can see that it far exceeds the capacity for which it was planned, still in terms of convenience it's hard to beat, and I'm not looking forward to having to fly from BER sometime in the future (though I'm pretty confident it won't fully open before 2025, if ever).
I can only assume you've never been in a > 2 hour security queue during peak travel time due to Tegel's small departure gates / security staff / screening capacity, with a flight leaving in 40 minutes.
Sure I have but that's mostly a problem for terminal C in my experience, as the budget airlines fly from there and they seems to have a different ratio of personnel to passengers. Airlines that mostly serve business travelers usually have better gate positions and more staff.
It's not personnel, they have to stop the queues from moving through security in order to prevent over crowding in the gate rooms which, are always over packed full of people.
Berlin's awful setup results in delays across the region, it's no wonder other airports are reluctant to link there and divert to Frankfurt instead.
You must be mixing up the airports. Tegel is unique in that it has security and passport controls for each individual gate.
This allows you to arrive at almost the exact moment the gate closes because there will be no passengers for other flights in a queue with you. The gate agents can even see you going through security and will wait for a minute or so.
My worst airport experience has been trying (and failing, twice; on consecutive days) to fly from Tegel Terminal C to Helsinki (EasyJet). My best airport experiences have been flying from Tegel Terminal A (Finnair) to Helsinki.
if you happen to arrive at tegel ahead of time or even worse your flight is delayed, you are screwed. Once in the security area there is little to no decent food nor shopping option.
Singapore's airport also does right-before-gate screenings at 3 of its 4 terminals.
Unlike Tegel, though, the gate area and the screening areas are open spaces, with glass to separate. Tegel always feels a bit claustrophobic, and as a jet-lagged traveller my first time departing, I admit it took awhile for me to figure out where the hell I needed to go.
Unless a plane is delayed or cancelled at the last minute, which in TXL's case is frequent. This results in a gate full of too many people and a slow down moving anyone anywhere.
Agree, I once had a trip door to door between Berlin Prenzlauer Berg and Haidhausen (Munich‘s Prenzlauer Berg...) in 3 hours and 10 minutes. Everything worked beautifully and by chance I hopped between different modes of public transport in no time... Compare that to a trip from London‘s city center via Heathrow. In 3 hours you might just have worked your way to entering the plane.
If you're worried about security lines why not fly out of London City? Yeah it's all the way out on the east end, and yeah DLR is pretty gross, but getting from the train to the gate takes about 10 minutes.
Schönefeld requires an extra cost ticket, the Tegel bus works on your normal AB ticket (day pass or single ride). Having watched the addition of rail service to OAK (and SFO), I don't really see the attraction. In the case of Oakland, the bus was faster, half the cost, and dropped you off closer to the airport. With Tegel, the bus is relatively quick (around 20 minutes from the Hauptbahnhof) — my only complaint is the lack of ventilation and cooling onboard (which is often a problem on trains too).
Quite frankly New York has a similar problem. There is rail service to JFK but requires an extra cost ticket and it's a fairly long trip (moreso if you're taking the subway instead of LIRR). I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money. Yeah, Newark has rail (but it doesn't run particularly late).
> I'd be willing to take a bus if it got me there quicker for less money.
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
It won't get you there quicker. A hypothetical non-stop direct bus route from most places in Manhattan to JFK would take around an hour under ideal conditions, about the same as the train already does. And in non-ideal conditions (around rush hour) and with multiple stops along the route, you would be looking at something like 2 hours, and worse on bad days.
There's a big caveat though: from Midtown. Getting to JFK from elsewhere in Queens (or e.g. Brooklyn) is a pretty circuitous route on the train. A bus could easily do that in less than two hours. On a good day a subway ride into Manhattan might take you half an hour. On a bad day…
I mean, look, I prefer rail, but not by so much that I'd ding Tegel (or Oakland) for not having rail connections. In Oakland the rail connector cost about half a billion dollars and required undoing a bunch of landscaping and road improvements. In the context of Berlin where you're talking about the Brandenberg airport being over budget and oft delayed, I simply don't see Tegel's transit connections as being shameful (or particularly bad).
And that extra ticket costs what, €3.50? The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
For a single trip ticket, that sounds about right. If you're going to take any other trips that day a day ticket makes more sense and I think the difference is a bit larger.
The Airport Express can get you from Alexanderplatz to Schönefeld in 20 mins, it takes almost twice that to get to Tegel.
The TXL bus takes about twenty minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, and Alexanderplatz is three stops away on the S-Bahn (saving about ten minutes). Transiting to/from the Hbf gives you some extra transit connections as well. And as an added bonus, the TXL bus pretty much drops you at the gate.
Last time in Tegel my flight was an hour and a half late because there were insufficient personnel assigned to passport control causing half of the passengers to miss the boarding time. Not fun standing in a line 100% certain you're missing your flight because there's just one guy checking all the passports.
Instead of using some sort of announcement system employees would just yell at people at German, so once I had to yell back at them to speak English.
Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
My Tegel story: Just landed after the last leg of my trip (originating from western Canada) waiting for luggage. Time passes. People start to become visibly annoyed. More time passes. Still no luggage. The next plane starts disembarking. Still no luggage. People beginning to get heated, lots of angry german being tossed around.
It turns out the airport hadn’t assigned a crew to unload the plane, and Lufthansa sent an entire plane’s worth of checked luggage to Reykjavik. Cue the whole plane having to be processed through lost luggage. That’s was a long day.
I am traveling in Eastern Europe right now and I have definitely seen instances in airports where both the airport personnel and the the traveler were obviously not native English speakers however English was the only way they could communicate. It seems that English is the international language of air travel. At least for now.
Given that most European countries all speak different native languages but also speak widespread English as a common, second language, it seems a reasonable thing to request in an airport in a European capital where there are likely travelers from many different, non-German speaking countries.
> Just 2 things to remember from Tegel, by far the worst airport I've ever been to.
It's among the worst airports, but still my favourite. Super fast public transport from center, with a cheap ticket, and fast security throughput. I need to reserve much less extra time for Tegel than any other airport, and side expenses never exceed the price of the flight itself (which can easily happen at many other European airports).
I flew from and to Tegel once or twice per week on average last year. I find Tegel to actually be quite ok. Getting there on the TXL is quite convenient from many places in the city, and most importantly doesn't take very long (as opposed to Schönefeld/BER, which is rather far out). The interior could use a remodeling, but the layout is convenient because it has a security checkpoint per gate. I'm sure that is more expensive to operate than the single checkpoint per terminal model that is common these days, but it is quite efficient for getting to your gate.
Depends where in the city you need to go to. Ostbahnhof to Schönefeld is 16 minutes with the RB 14, 17 minutes with the RE 7. A vastly better experience than the TXL bus which is often crowded.
Surely the bus named after the airport will continue to run to the airport? I think it will no longer go up to Alexanderplatz, and instead end at Hauptbahnhof.
> and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially)
This is false. Both are accessible with a trip on the metro U7 (which cuts the entire city NW<>SE) plus a tiny/short (depending on the airport) bus trip.
We're talking about 30/45 minutes, the large part of whom is on a very frequent metro line. By airport connection standards, this is very convenient (besides being cheap).
> awful, way over capacity, bad facilities
"awful" doesn't mean anything in this context.
Capacity is not so immediate to assess. While terminal C has a standard structure with two security checkpoints, terminal A has checkin and gates directly connected, which makes them very efficient (checkin queues develop in a corridor, essentially, but due to the checkin/gate efficiency, they don't last long).
Facilities are not "bad" - they're not modern, which is different (ie. computing stations). This is obviously a pain for people who need to be plugged 24/7 to a socket, but there's plenty of airports with an old structure.
I'd say it's fair to call the transit situation at Tegel inconvenient. You have to figure out what bus to get on, buy a ticket, haul your luggage onto a bus, haul it off, get off the bus, then walk outside and down to the subway platform. This takes 20 minutes and is uncomfortable. If the U7 went to Tegel as was planned, you'd just take the escalator to the subway platform and get on in the direction towards the city.
If you take a taxi or rent a car to Tegel, it's extremely convenient.
This is obviously subjective and just my opinion, but let me add more depth to justify why I hold that opinion a bit more.
Facilities-wise I was talking about lack of seats, lack of spacious and modern and frankly sometimes clean bathrooms, lack of sufficient staff doing things like passport checking and security, lack of physical space for movement of people through the airport, lack of food/drink and shopping quality and variety, particularly past security. All of these apply to both, with Schonefeld being noticeably worse on every point.
Capacity - All I can say is that at both, there are slow-moving queues of people at gates that restrict the movement of people trying to get to other gates. There is more throughput of people now than the airports were designed for - they're tautologically over capacity - if they weren't then this wouldn't happen, as it doesn't at most other airports.
Public transport - this one's subjective and depends on usecase, and I'm not claiming it's terrible. It works, and sure it's relatively quick. But it's exactly those connections (from Tegel) that bring the inconvenience for two reasons - the first is that it's more difficult to navigate to the center having to make connections if you don't know the system (i.e. for tourists). The second is if you have heavy luggage - it's really not convenient at all to lug bags onto and off of connections, especially buses. If you're a local who knows the networks and you're doing a short flight with hand luggage, I agree that in that usecase it's fine.
---
A bit meta now: I think it's amazing and I'm genuinely pleased to see that you're not only disagreeing with my opinions, but coming to the defence of these airports and outwardly saying they're really good, along with other commenters. I worded my original comment quite strongly and matter-of-factly because I honestly thought that 'everyone' would hold broadly the same views. Anecdotally, I've never talked to anyone living in Berlin who disagreed with me on any of this, and I've never imagined whilst being in either of these airports that anyone else there could be thinking 'this is great'. I'm amazed to see how wrong I was, and I love to be exposed to the breadth of opinions that exist out there, through forums like HN, just because the scale of the internet allows them to surface. Always love to have a good debate about such things, it makes me remember the counter points I'm overlooking and/or discover new ones and rethink my original opinions a bit.
I'm not much for travelling, but Tegel is one of few destinations I look forward to.
It sure feels like a bygone era. A luxury in the small. Like cheating out on all the hateful things about flying. Exit the gates and enter the city.
It's understandable that it won't last, but until then anyone can get a taste of how convenient flying must have seemed when you weren't shuttled out to a remote location and held for hours in a Gibsonian dystopia without the tech until finally left to move on.
Unless you’re coming in from outside Schengen (annoyingly, due to the Common Travel Area, Ireland is outside Schengen). Last time I was there, there was exactly one person at passport control; took about an hour to get through.
Berlin is different from other European capitals in that it is the political and cultural center of the country, but not economically. It is also surrounded by low-density countryside, and located nowhere close to the geographic middle of the country.
As a result, air traffic is somewhat low with about 33 million passenger p.a. Heathrow alone gets almost three times as much.
The reason for having two (and, previously, three) smaller airports instead of a single, large one are obviously historical: both East and West Berlin each needed their own. In those times, traffic was even lower because few people in the East ever got to fly, West Berlin had basically no industry or business that was not exclusively local, and the population of West Berlin tended to be somewhat poorer as well.
Berlin is not the only case of the political center of a country but not economically: see Milan vs Rome, Barcelona vs Madrid, New York/San Francisco/etc vs Washington
Sydney vs Canberra, Zurich vs Bern, Amsterdam vs The Hague, Istanbul vs Ankara, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) vs Hanoi, São Paulo vs Brasilia, Ottawa vs Toronto, Beijing vs Shanghai, New Delhi vs Mumbai, Wellington vs Auckland, ...
Rome has the same problems with Ciampino airport. It's exclusively used for budget airlines, and although it's closer to the city center there is no public transit link. You can either take the privately run air coach which takes forever (if the bus departs on time it should take 40 minutes, but late at night or early morning it's usually late taking double that or more) or cough up for a taxi and hope they don't rip you off (the fixed price only applies within the historic city walls, if you are going outside they will charge you more, even if it's less distance).
When I was living there I'd always try to fly to Fiumicino because of that. I can't imagine what impression it must give to tourists on their first trip to the city.
I’ve made 17 total flights in and out of TXL and SXF in the last 12 months, and while I agree that SXF is terrible (it reminds me of Nairobi airport), I like TXL. I prefer both TXL and SXF to London Luton, and TXL alone to London Gatwick, London Heathrow, and London Stansted. I find TXL about equal to London City.
Hate to do this, but having lived in Berlin for over a decade and flown out of more than half the major airports on Earth, Tegel is awesome and more airports should be like it.
I strongly agree, and what's more I have heard more than once of firms choosing to establish a European base in Lisbon over Berlin simply because of the airport connections.
Whilst we're ragging on Schönefeld, my least favourite part is having to walk through burger king to get to the departure gates.
That's curious, here in Lisbon we're constantly talking about the insufficiency of our airport, and making plans for an extra (with a good chance it'll harm a protected natural landscape).
> To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there.
This is part of Berlin's unique culture, though, isn't it? Usually, the capital cities aren't also average to below average in living costs, which Berlin is. Berlin isn't convenient, Berlin is dirty, raw and cheap.
Sure, Berlin used to be crazy cheap, now it's just cheap. Rents are increasing, but that's happening everywhere. For large cities, Berlin is still the least expensive (compared to Western Germany, Eastern Germany is a different thing), by far. If you're looking at Hamburg, or worse, Munich, be prepared to pay two or three times the rent.
It's been my impression from the two or three times a year that I'm in Berlin for a few days that it just works very differently, there's a trade-off between cost of living vs convenience that people accept when they move to Berlin. It's dirtier, a bus or train may just break down, people are generally a bit more rowdy, and you don't expect much from the administration, but then again: you pay a lot less, so it's worth it, like a hostel compared to a hotel.
Berlin is quite a unique capital in that it's relatively poor and contributes relatively little to the national economy. Apart from its size warranting certain infrastructure with sufficient capacity, it'd be surprising if it had much better infrastructure than it does. Its economy doesn't easily allow it.
I disagree with this pretty firmly, I'm afraid :-)
Berlin can be cheap relative to other capitals (though this is getting less true) but the extent to which that's the case depends on your personal choices.
Public infrastructure is another matter because it serves everyone and everyone contributes - there needs to be a minimum bar. And yes, if I pay the same taxes as everyone else, I want a comparable level of service and convenience in my infrastructure to what people in the other cities get.
I meant "cheap" compared to other German cities. No matter what your personal preference is, you'll pay significantly less in Berlin than you would in Hamburg, Munich, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt etc, regarding rent, but also things like eating out at a restaurant.
The taxes aren't the same as well - local infrastructure isn't a federal issue, so federal income tax doesn't pay for that. Berlin's tax factor for companies (a major part of local taxes) is 410%, compared to Hamburg's 470%, Munich's 490% or Cologne's 475%. Berliners have decided to go with lower taxes to attract companies away from other cities, so Berlin has less money to spend on public infrastructure, even though Berlin gets a lot of subsidies from other states (2-3bn/year).
That's very interesting, thanks, I didn't realise that was the case with the taxes. I assumed that some percentage of each person's personal income tax would end up being spent on infrastructure - I actually find it hard to believe it's not, i.e. that it all comes from tax on businesses, but if what you say is the case that does make it feel a little less unfair.
Agreed entirely. I think there are about 4 electrical outlets for customers in the entirety of SXF. Also, the train station is nowhere near the airport, especially for the RB9 express train which is the furthest platform.
It's really the worst airport I've been to and as you say makes the whole situation a lot worse.
If I may take an opinion on this having lived in Berlin for 2 years, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this is that this new airport isn't just like a better, fancier one that'll replace an already adequate airport(s) - Berlin's existing airports (Tegel the 'main' one and Schonefeld the secondary) are, to put it mildly, an embarrassment for the captial city of Europe's biggest economy.
As an American I rather liked Tegel (and the cute little I [hexagon] TXL bumper stickers I'd see periodically). It's small, and I imagine when things go wrong they'll go really wrong. Although I'm somewhat used to that at SFO with the fog, I'm glad I missed the German Air Force crash at SXF by a day or two since everything to diverted to TXL. Compared to London City there was dramatically less walking at Tegel and the public transit connections were better. While London transit will accept NFC payments, Berlin requires an app (albeit one of the best transit apps I've used).
The only airport that I've visited that really stood out as being awful was Amsterdam. It took about three miles of walking to get to the gate (from the "airport" Hilton), there was absolute chaos between the security checkpoint and passport control (wall to wall passengers, no indication where the lines started or ended, no airport staff, etc), and Americans flying Delta (but not KLM) get singled out for extra interrogation at the gate. God forbid you want to buy a train ticket.
To all the mentioned faults I would also add that most of Schönefeld has serious accessibility issues. I've seen a few times people with disabilities completely at a loss. And both airports have problems with staff being rude.
The architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, wrote a book about it, Black Box BER, back in 2013, after they were fired in 2012. It's a bit self-serving, unsurprisingly, but highlights some of the issues arising when you change plans mid-construction.
For example, an airport has very carefully designed zones: land-side and air-side (after security), Schengen and non-Schengen (after immigration), staff and non-staff, etc., that must be separated. It also has carefully considered passenger flow, escape routes, fire sprinklers and smoke vents, etc.
Then, after all is agreed and construction had started, the airport company requested much more space for retail. That's obviously going to lead to problems.
One thing I must say, though: I am glad that the officials responsible for fire safety are not afraid to deny certification. There was a fire at DUS (Düsseldorf Airport) in 1996 in which 17 people died. So, good job in standing up to the immense pressure.
The BBC article says that's a major problem, but actually puts a large part of the blame on Gerkan himself. (IDK whether justified on not.)
> One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's, dislike of shopping.
> Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible.
> But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
No. That was not the problem. The problem was that they did not properly supervise the architect. Architects are artists. They always have some bias one way or another, some little opinion on how things should look or work. They need to be watched. It was someone's job to ensure that architect's "vision" matched the customer needs. That person should have realized the error and halted proceedings long before breaking ground on anything.
> The church staff drafted a blueprint for the replacement, calling for a long, rectangular shape to allow for natural lighting, with a curve in order to preserve an oak tree to the south of the church.
Sorry, I don't see how that story is relevant to your position.
An architect not delivering on some basic requirements is one thing, not necessarily because they are artists, because art will always only be a part of architecture. Delivering that is completely disconnected from it's use case is simply bad architecture.
Making a major change to a plan half way through is a good way to piss off any designer or engineer though. Especially one as massive and all-encompasing as a huge airport, railway, and hotel complex + retail shopping center. I'm curious how much that had to do with them dragging their feet, in a huff, out of ego or whatever. I doubt the architects simply 'hates' shopping, or maybe they do and didn't know that was a requirement before going in deep into a project.
But somewhere the communication broke down and relationships deteriorated.
I am a bit surprised that architects would have such a big involvement in such a project. You wouldn't hire an architect to design a factory production line or a freight terminal. An airport has much more common with a complex industrial site than a traditional building. And at this scale everything is an engineering challenge that needs a specialist to do properly.
If executed properly, sure, but nobody was realy in charge and the politicians (not chosen for their qualifications for the task) didn't know how to this (or to do at all).
Airports do have to be very carefully designed as you say. They are a complex set of interconnected facilities. But the upshot of this are dozens of different specialist teams who have conflicting interests. Communication is difficult and it is hard to maintain consistent state.
In an operational airport this complexity still exists and major airports are in a constant state of flux. They are always building something and there are always contractors on site doing construction or maintenance. The difference is that it can be treated as an incremental improvement. No one can pretend that the entire system will be optimal first time. Of course the requirements will evolve.
> The management company now says the overall cost of the project will be 6bn euros (£5.3bn) - if it opens as planned next year
6 billion euros is $6.83B. That actually sounds like a bargain for a brand new airport with 2 runways.
For comparison, Heathrow's 3rd runway is estimated to cost £18.6B.[1] That's $23.6B for just 1 runway.
LAX renovation has a projected cost of $14B [2]. That's $14B just to "improve the design, safety and efficiency of the airport." No new runway will be built.
Hong Kong Airport 3rd runway is expected to cost HK$141.5B [3]. That's $18B for 1 runway.
Your Heathrow numbers are off. Latest cost is £14b, and the price includes re-routing one of the UK’s busiest roads into a tunnel, building a new terminal, and purchasing 7,000 of the UK’s most expensive homes, while not disrupting air traffic at an airport which handles take offs and landings every 45 seconds from two runways.
> it doesn’t detract from BER being relatively inexpensive compared to other airport projects
But it does incorrectly describe BER as a "brand new airport", where the reality is: "The northern runway of BER is the southern runway of the old Schönefeld Airport and has been in use since the 1960s." (Wikipedia) and also it's a single terminal. At this point, it's then very similar to the Heathrow project in what's being delivered, except for the added context I gave.
"Harold Balfour ... deliberately deceived the government committee into believing a requisition was necessary so that Heathrow could be used as a [military base] in support of the war with Japan. In reality, Balfour wrote that he always intended the site to be used for civil aviation, and used a wartime emergency requisition order to avoid a lengthy and costly public inquiry."
British government in requisitioning other people's land shocker.
The problem is that one precondition for the opening of the new airport BER, is that the old airports Tegel and Schönefeld shall be closed. But BER is probably not large enough to handle the traffic of those both..
Mind that it isn't a "complete" airport. It's on the area of Berlin-Schönefeld airport. Thus less need to acquire new land. Which I expect to be a notable part for a new runway in London's vicinity (of course a new runway also requires new fire fighting station and new tower etc. to guarantee service, such a project is a bit more than just the runway)
How much was land acquisition and noise proofing of residential buildings for those? The new airport in Berlin is not in a particularly densely populated area...
Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
Most recent example was the bridge deconstruction in our small town. It was supposed to cost 80k Euros to completely deconstruct it. Actual cost was 150k and we have the pillars still standing around. It's just business as usual here in Germany.
> If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
This is nonsense. It's just that infrastructure projects that get delivered on schedule and on budget (or somewhat close to that) don't make for equally pretty HN headlines.
There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if public spending is more often out of budget or behind schedule than private spending like you suggest. But even then, Berlin Brandenburg is an exceptional case and suggesting that excesses like it are inevitable when politicians were involved is just nuts. There's plenty of competent politicians.
In my experience, the level of pride politicians show when initially announcing a project is a good indicator of how badly a project will go. The more politicians are "excited" about it, the more they will try to micromanage it later (to death) and the more they will be OK with any shit from the contractors actually building it and the more OK they are with it going over budget. It's easier to pull one over on a politician who makes the final decisions, than a professional project manager with tons of experience.
If it involves different political parties or governments (like BER, which had politicians from Berlin and from Brandenburg involved, both local and state, and the federal government too to some degree) then it gets even worse, a lot worse.
So projects merely commissioned by politicians usually do better (go over budget because of the moronic public bidding process, but that's a different issue), while projects not just commissioned but overseen by politicians do far less well.
>There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
>Which you "proved" by carefully selecting a single anecdote?
I CAREFULLY SELECTED a single anecdote... did you miss the part where is detailed why toilets (as in more than one) and other government projects cost so much ant take such a long time to complete? What can I say, keep believing, comrade.
So we are all communists for pointing out that the press only report on public projects gone wrong and not the 1000s of projects that are on budget and on time? Please...
Maybe it's because publicly funded and managed projects have much greater scrutiny, and in many cases are required to respond to information requests. A private company is a black box and can use whatever means they please keep badly managed projects from becoming a story the press would be interested in.
Even the auditing firms are in on the game in the UK, so you really have no chance of knowing the truth until the bankruptcy is announced and the banks are lining up to get whatever assets are left.
Nah, I didn't call you __ALL__ communists because I was replying to a single douche who translated "I wager" to "I proved" while claiming I "carefully selected" a youtube video. In fact, I didn't ever call him a communist because it's not just the communists who call each other comrade, it's a leftist thing in general or least it used to be until the number of comrade run failed states became unbearable. I'm glad you like and trust the politicians so much, I'm sure they appreciate it.
> 1000s of projects that are on budget and on time
Ha, ha, ha, ha... Oh, you're serious :(
> A private company is a black box
That's why it's called a PRIVATE company. Is not your money, it's theirs, if they fuck up, they pay the consequences, it's simple.
Yeah, rules like "wheelchair accessibility" (1:21). Clearly the disabled citizens should just crap at home, so we can save a few bucks. And sustainability? Who needs that?!
Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
>Clearly the disabled citizens should just crap at home
Disabled citizens are clearly better served by waiting for the oversized "Super Commission of Wheelchair Access" that takes three months to put a stamp on a project that has wheelchair access. You clearly didn't even understand the argument.
>And sustainability? Who needs that?!
Buzzword, three months, stamp.
>Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
> Disabled citizens are clearly better served by waiting for the oversized "Super Commission of Wheelchair Access" that takes three months to put a stamp on a project that has wheelchair access.
There is no such commission, no such stamp. What there are, as the video says, is rules (and by the way, the guide shown is for visitors, nothing to do with construction). And yes, maybe disabled citizens are better off with those, because from what I can tell, the so-efficiently-renovated Bryant Park restroom has no wheelchair accessible stalls.
Again: is there waste? Absolutely, and it would have been nice to see some proper journalism covering it.
Actually, that would be the last time I saw a highway construction project get completed: a major revamp of the A2 highway as it circles my home town Eindhoven.
Politicans of all flavours, in all countries, for nearly all projects seems.
Yet just about every IT, aircraft and building project etc in the private sector comes in on time and under budget. Oh, wait, it barely ever happens there either!
Maybe it's large projects per se then. Maybe there's added risk when politicians and private sector interrelate.
The issue is simply that accurate estimation cannot be done for complex projects, yet people who aren't engineers and especially politicians cannot psychologically accept this, so insist on setting fixed size budgets (which then inevitably turn out to be insufficient).
A better approach would be to do what's done more in the tech industry - decide a project needs to be done, then allocate it a permanent percentage of total revenues with close supervision of the details, until it's completed.
> The issue is simply that accurate estimation cannot be done for complex projects
I do not think so. There are plenty of previous examples with enough similarities to estimate costs to +/- 20% at most, usually better.
A bigger problem may be that quoting wildly optimistic price is more likely to get a public project started, even though most parties understand that the actual budget and time will be very different. But as long as the project takes a long time those who gave original estimates / started execution have plenty of chances to move away. And then "well, when I was running it, things were different" is a decent defense.
Maybe I should have said "cannot be done reliably".
Even a very inaccurate and bad estimation process will yield correct estimates at least occasionally - stopped clocks and all that. But estimate-driven budget allocation is hardly useful if the result is wrong 50% of the time, and to me it feels like it's at least that unreliable. Although this story focuses on Germany, look at CrossRail in the UK for another pertinent example. It was "on time and on budget" right up until a few months before launch, when it suddenly wasn't on time or on budget anymore, and in fact, after churning through some CEOs, eventually they got one willing to admit the truth - that nobody knew how long it would take to complete. But by then they had started shutting down the project, e.g. by laying off their entire internal and external communications team. It'd have been far more effective if they'd admitted up front they didn't know exactly how long it'd take.
That's actually more like the approach taken in the past in the UK for huge infrastructure projects, or road and power station, sometimes via setting up a specific (nation or city) owned company that got funding rounds! Yes, projects turned out more expensive than thought quite often, but it didn't make headlines quite the same. It was managed to stay good value rather than expected to hit a precise penny-accurate budget.
I think the modern tendency to seek cheapest bid, rather than best value, makes it far worse. In trying to save money time and again they end up spending far more...
If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
My son talks a lot about a study that showed optimists badly underestimated how long a project would take. So did pessimists, though their estimates were less egregiously wrong.
Basically, if people are involved, you can assume that budgets and time estimates are hand-wavy, ballpark guestimates at best.
Life will get in the way. Even people who truly understand that will fail to accurately predict just how much life will get in their way.
If you always give the contract to the company that offers the lowest price, don't be surprised that it eventually gets too low to cover the real costs.
80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines? Sounds like a joke.
>After the prescribed date, the bids are opened and assessed, and either the "lowest cost" or "most economically advantageous tender" is chosen. The contract award must also be reported in the OJEU and be published electronically on Tenders Electronic Daily ('TED'). [1]
It's difficult to choose the best offer if you are legally obliged to choose the cheapest one. This has led to a situation where all companies have to make cheap offers. The only way to make money is by invoicing bills for unforeseen work that wasn't covered by the original offer.
The irony of the situation is that there was an offer by the industry to build the airport for a fixed price. But Berlin chose to build the airport by themselves because that was supposed to be cheaper.
Well, Athens chose the other way: [2]
> However, after delays and slow development, the project was revived in 1991 with the then government launching an international tender for the selection of a build-own-operate-transfer partner for the airport project, with Hochtief of Germany being selected.
>In 1996, Athens International Airport S.A. (AIA) was established as a Public–private partnership with a 30-year concession agreement.[1] That same year, the €2.1 billion development finally began with an estimated completion date of February 2001. The airport construction was completed five months before schedule, but was delayed opening a month due to surface connections to Attiki Odos not being completed. The airport officially opened on March 28, 2001.
> If you always give the contract to the company that offers the lowest price, don't be surprised that it eventually gets too low to cover the real costs.
It's a known problem no one seems to care about. The Swiss do it better: They throw the cheapest and most expensive offers out and pick a contractor from the middle price range. Seems to work well for them in most cases.
> 80k for a project that likely consists of months of filing for permits, coordinating tens of people and machines?
It was a small bridge for pedestrians and cyclists that was closed about 5 weeks before they took it down, which took the crane just a couple hours.
It was a project as simple as it gets and they still went way over budget while also leaving half the bridge standing. I just wish I could say this was an outlier, but it's commonplace around here.
The store is the same everywhere. I find very little info about the New Karolinska hospital in English, but it ended up being several billion SEK more expensive than planned. The cost is spread out over 30ish years,but it has already cost 18bn SEK (1.8bn EUR).
> Basically boils down to: If politicians get to call the shots in any way, it's going to run way over budget. Pretty much every single time.
So it’s not a surprise that we find counter examples in strong democracies. The Gotthard Basistunnel was build faster than projected and about 30% cheaper [1].
Genuine question but have there been studies comparing public and private construction projects and whether or not both go overboard financially/time-wise?
Also the us. The subway extension to Dulles airport is years over due and well over budget.
I don’t think it’s a problem with government. If you want these sorts of public good projects built, you need government to do it. Government doesn’t have the same incentives that private business does, and there are positives and negatives with that. A profit oriented organization would never have taken on projects of this scale.
Istanbul Airport was built in 3 years by private companies, it was opened this year and considered as biggest after the new Chinese airport being built.
Not only that, large parts of it remain under construction. I know because I’ve been there two weeks ago. There was raw cement residue sitting uncleared before passport control. The signage is half broken and half incomplete. Instead of signage they have temp workers shouting the names of connecting flights and you have to huddle over to that guy and hope to god he knows what he’s doing.
Oh, and it takes 4+ hours to come to Kadikoy, the centre of the town on the Asian side.
It might be less of a disaster than the Berlin-Brandenburg mentioned here, but only barely so.
I was aware of those issues while I was typing the comment. One of my cousins worked in the construction (as a worker), heard things from him, too.
My point was about private companies building airports. If Turkish government built Istanbul Airport, would there be no deaths ?
Worker rights definitely make difference. But in the context of new Berlin airport, it looks like the problem is more about being able to organize and being able to manage a huge project.
I meant more in the vein of government having a large role in being the referee in these kind of issues. Had Istanbul Airport been built in Germany with the exact same private companies, I suspect it would have far fewer of a death toll, since the German government is much more aggressive in coming after workplace safety violations. So even if private companies are ultimately responsible, the government still does have a large role in keeping everything in check - a role Germany and Turkey failed in different ways.
Sorry to hear about your cousin, though, I hope he managed to get out unscathed.
> And some have even turned this black humour into a business opportunity. Philipp Messinger and Bastian Ignaszewski have invented a board game based on the Berlin airport disaster. The main object of the game is to waste as much public money as possible.
> I pick up a card saying some of the escalators from the train station were built too short, needing very expensive additions. "Everything on these cards," Mr Messinger says, "has really happened."
I know it's en vogue to mock Germany / Berlin for BER, and it's certainly deserved to a certain extent. However, BER also shows another thing to me: that regulations are taken damn seriously in Germany. I can think of some countries on the planet were such an infrastructure project would have long been in operation regardless of not meeting regulations.
The manner in which this all unfolded is however a completely different story...
This. In most of the countries, including my own, the airport would have open despite the imperfections.
The delay per-se is a disaster, but it shows also how much Germany sticks to their regulations and legality in general.
I mean, politicians or not, the moment you start making major changes during buildout you’re going to have problems, regardless of what you’re building.
> One simple problem, bizarrely enough, was the airport architect, Meinhard von Gerkan's dislike of shopping.
> Joel Dullroy, a Berlin-based journalist with Radio Spaetkauf, who produced a podcast telling this airport's story, says Mr Gerkan wrote disdainfully about passengers "dragging around unwanted bottles of whisky like a beggar" and wanted to have as few airport shops as possible.
> But when the airport company realised this - very late in the day - it insisted on adding whole new floors of shopping into the design, as the company now makes up to 50% of its revenue from retail.
This article was entirely too negative, and neglected to mention some of the best outcomes from this project. Like the fact that BER is the world's most environmentally friendly airport: https://www.der-postillon.com/2019/06/ber-oeko.html
I still don't understand how building an airport can be so difficult, and how we've apparently gotten worse at it over time. There's a weird mix of ego and incompetence at work in the BER project (e.g. smoke vents installed in the floor for artistic reasons, despite the face that smoke rises).
Yet at its core, an MVP of an airport would be a runway with a building next to it + fuel and security services. It baffles the mind that this can be such a shitstorm. I can only perceive this to be bikeshedding at a national scale.
To those interested in the topic I highly recommend the podcast, that is mentioned in the article - "How to fuck up an airport" [1]. It is very entertaining, while exploring the topic in depth.
I’ve worked on airport design. €5bn is not that much and 10 years is not a particularly long build time. Heathrow’s T5 building was about £4bn and the design work started in the 1980’s and it had loads of teething problems also. What’s the big deal? It sounds like they were just unrealistic about how long it would take and how much it would cost.
The big deal is that it is done since 5+ years and they are postponing the opening because of a million minor issues without having any kind of schedule for fixing them. And whenever they are just about ready they find a million new issues.
The big deal is that there is a lot of technology in there which now has to be replaced because it is reaching its end of life without ever being used.
The big deal is that this is a waste of taxpayer money. If this was privately financed I wouldn't care either but it isn't. At this point whoever is working there is just milking us.
This article whitewashes the hell out of this debacle under the aegis of "politicians messed it up." It is way worse than that. Go read the Wikipedia article; it's very entertaining. BBC fails to mention details like:
* The fire response system wasn't just broken; it was never built. Siemens (a small/medium sized contractor according to the article) is "still waiting for paperwork" to deliver the software for the smoke suction system, based on hardware which was never even designed.
* The ventilation system turned out to be impossible. The architect didn't want ventilation ducts on top of the design for aesthetic reasons, so air was to be ducted and blown down, and out to vents on the airfield. Pushing warm air downwards many meters is generally not a trivial ask.
* turns out the architect of the fire suppression system wasn't an architect, but only a draftsman.
* The sand lime brick used in the foundations apparently necessesitatss replacing big chunks of foundation, cabling, and concrete.
* The windows wouldn't open when the weather was above 30 degrees Celsius (about 80 fahrenheit). It's 36 in Berlin today.
* 80% (!) of the doors just didn't work as of 2017.
* For the opening in 2012, there were no ticket counters and the escalators did not work.
* Three rounds of bribery and corruption charges in the project leadership
* 5 different project chairpeople and presidents
* By 2017, there were still major problems with smoke control, sprinklers, fire detection, sirens, emergency bulbs, and similar critical systems.
* Big parts of the cable ducting was not waterproof, and now about 700km of cabling needs to be replaced.
* 600 fire protection walls have to be replaced because they were made out of the wrong kind of concrete.
* They had to halt construction at one point because the main roof was going to collapse due to structural issues.
* The railway station serving the airport (built by Deutsche Bahn), and the tunnel to the airport (built by the airport construction company) were incompatible and had to be adjusted.
* When they finally simulated a fire situation (2017) they discovered they needed way more water than was planned for the sprinkler systems... Which therefore needed to be replaced.
The official scheduled opening date remains October 2020, but several official letters have called that info question. Certainly no one in Berlin expects it to open then. It has been delayed 10 times so far.
This is not just bureaucratic bungling. This is incompetence, corruption, mismanagement, AND bungling. Anyone on HN who has a contracting background can tell you: no responsible or capable project management would touch this steaming dumpster fire at this point. It has more warning flags than cabling problems, and that's saying something.
Really, read the Wikipedia section on "construction delays". It's very entertaining:
Fun fact: when I arrive in Berlin, the plane often lands on the new airport's airfield and then rolls on to the old Schönefeld airport, passing the new, dysfunctional BER main building; just to remind us visitors of the city government's incompetence.
One aspect I didn't see mentioned here so far which explains these mechanics beyond simple "the government is just incompetent" rethoric:
Unlike some (but not all) private institutions, regional and national government officials are incentivized to downplay the budget/runtime of major infrastructure projects as
1) the person is often not going to be around and accountable anymore once the true extend comes to light
2) telling the truth/adding proper buffers would make the project not being accepted by voters. So downplaying is the only way to get such projects through at all in many cases
Procore[0] is popular with general contractors in the US. I work for a national electrical contractor.
I'm not sure what architects and engineers use for issue tracking, but they use Procore during the build phase for product submittals, change directives, change orders, RFIs, etc. These are all standard things laid out by the standard AIA contracts.
That money isn’t all going into mistakes like this. Despite knowing about this airport for years, I moved to Berlin from the UK, which I’m fairly sure [1] raised both my %- and absolute tax rates. Yes, governments make mistakes; but most governments work somewhere between “well” and “adequate” most of the time.
Nonsense. The feedback mechanisms are very, very weak. "Choose between X candidates every 4 years" is a ridiculously weak feedback mechanism. Compare a market, where the feedback mechanism is:
also, feedback is more granular by several orders of magnitude. In a political democracy we roll up every single issue (including mutually contradictory ones) into a bundle of policies, multiply that by an uncertainty factor of the personality of the person you are voting for, and then a fraction of us actually turn out to make the decision.
Meanwhile in the market I can decide down to the level of "no, these oranges aren't sufficiently orange-y for me".
I'm no market fundamentalist, mind you. I'd rather find ways to make the public sector more responsive to public feedback than through occasional elections.
There are other feedback mechanisms in governments besides elections, which are pretty much the same as those you get in businesses. Shareholders ~= party donors (varies by country, certainly in UK and US, my German is nowhere near enough to follow politics); opinion polls ~= customers surveys; exchange rates (yes, I know the Euro is shared by many nations) ~= share prices; tax base ~= business-to-business (not B2C!) customer base; EU-internal migration ~= B2C customer base.
For much the same reasons as in the private sector, anyone who can demonstrate a way to save 20% — heck, even 5% — of a national budget would have their idea taken up by any party: a big-government party has more national improvements to spend on (e.g. “let’s put half the country through university!”); a small-government party would want to pay off the national debt.
You have convinced yourself with a "~=". It doesn't address passive feedback as I mentioned, and the volume of transactions matters quite a lot, and is not even close to comparable.
Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government, without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.
What do you even mean by “passive feedback”? The only things I would (grudgingly) give that description to are available to governments and businesses alike.
> volume of transactions matters quite a lot
Why? I only see a reason to divide between “lots” and “not much” (a spreadsheet vs a census) rather than anything more fine-grained, otherwise fridge manufacturers would be meaningfully different to Amazon because they sell so much less.
> Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and many more, solve problems at a scale and difficulty far exceeding any government
I think you’re radically underestimating the scale and difficulty of government. For one thing, governments have to balance the interests of all the businesses which operate in their jurisdiction against not only each other, not only against national security, but also against the interests of those working for those businesses and the consumers and any externalities of the products and services.
> without a compulsory 42% draw against the population.
The figures I’ve seen put German tax revenues at (2014) €593 billion from a GDP of €2.938,6 billion, or 20.2%. I pay more than that because I am well paid, something something whales something, it doesn’t bother me.
Then there’s the matter of what counts as compulsory: Amazon sales fees seem to be “the average seller paying 15%”, but they also have enough profit margin — effectively though not literally a tax on the employees, because it’s wealth the employees created but don’t get — for Bezos to gave his own private space race with Musk.
You might reply that this isn’t compulsory, to save time I repeat: I chose to move to Germany, my taxation in any particular nation is not compulsory because I can move away if I don’t like it. Therefore any argument along the lines that “business fees are not compulsory” also applies to taxes.
I'm not convinced. The public generally is not really aware how the money is being spent. And all parties tend to promise tax reductions that never come. How exactly is the population going to get out of this?
You really think that there is no savings potential for the German government? I think there is lots and lots.
And BER is costing money every day. It might be cheaper to tear it down and start again from scratch.
I think there is publication by the "society of tax payers" listing all the wasted tax payer money. Too few people read it though.
https://www.schwarzbuch.de/ - I see it is even free. And I have never read it, either. Will order a copy now :-)
I think as long as people are reasonably pampered (enough money left after taxes), they don't care enough.
In my opinion it is also the way the system is set up: taxes for employees are deducted before people even receive their money. So they have less feel for how much is being deducted. Self employed people see it differently.
I had an employed person deny this recently, but I am not convinced.
With perfect information I might expect 3% savings from optimal changes. As perfect information is NP-hard, I expect the the reality to be that attempting to cut the waste will result in mistaking useful things for waste, and cutting those useless-seeming-useful-things will cost at least as much as is saved from cutting the actually-useless-things.
This reply ran away from me a bit, for which I apologise. I don’t see how to improve it though.
Governments are not free markets. That is the problem. What you describe is exactly what governments do. They try to do better than free markets (human hubris, I guess), and therefore they produce waste. Few, if any, political parties try to reduce government.
This problem is equally present in the private sector. If it wasn’t, we’d never — for example — have had the financial crisis. I would go so far as to say that the waste in the private sector is the main signal for improvement in your own argument, so eliminating it becomes asymptotically difficult in the same was as error reduction while training an AI.
To put it another way, how many businesses use free markets internally? It’s not none worldwide, but it is none of the places I worked.
You don’t have to go to a crisis before I would count performance as neither “[going] well” nor “adequate”. Things like the global financial crisis — never mind the collapse of the Soviet Union which led to Berlin becoming the capital again and leading to a need to think carefully about the airports — is why I said “most of the time”.
> Of which the airport was probably a tiny fraction of a percent.
And it's also just a tiny fraction of a percent of all the things where money is wasted.
> Most of the money is spent on pensions, education, healthcare and other benefits.
Healthcare isn't a federal expense, you'll pay an additional 15% of income (both parts) for that. Pensions are also an additional expense, the federal government only subsidizes it. 12% of the federal budget goes to the military - which looks more and more to be on a similar level of inefficiency to BER.
There is a comment in this thread by rolleiflex on the number of worker deaths and shambolic state of the airport 2 weeks ago.
Press freedoms in Turkey might be the actual difference.
And yet the stock is back to where it was before the breach anyway. His mistake was not realizing that there are no consequences for not safeguarding customer data properly.
Hubris, incompetency, inexperience at the very top. And what was needed was the opposite, which sounds obvious, but then the former problems directly inhibited recognizing anything obvious.
It wasn't that someone had installed a light switch and they couldn't find it....they just didn't a have a switch.
> "It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.
I meant to equate the lighting with the UI. To a casual user (a traveller) everything looks fine and probably pretty fancy, but a lot of the more intricate functionality simply isn't there yet.
They are quite simply awful, way over capacity, bad facilities, and also pretty inconvenient public transport links (Tegel especially). I honestly would rate both of them poorly if they were regional airports. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find a regional airport anywhere in Europe as bad as these.
It makes flying in and (especially) out of Berlin pretty inconvenient, particularly internationally where you need to do a short hop to an actual European international hub airport to even get a direct flight to most places (only direct long haul flight I ever got out of Tegel was to Abu Dhabi - to US, Latin America, etc, all needed connections first).
To be fair Berlin has a unique culture as a capital and it's not your typical 'capital city' experience, but this is just basic infrastructure and really, really should be there. You pay a lot of tax, after all.