A large part of the railway and road projects in the Folketing’s Infrastructure Plan 2035 can no longer pay. That’s what Ingeniøren writes.
The gains in the form of, for example, shorter travel time are not commensurate with the billion-dollar costs to build them and negative consequences such as extra CO2 emissions, shows a calculation prepared by Ingeniøren.
Silkeborg-Aarhus will be twice as expensive
An example is the new direct railway line between Silkeborg and Aarhus, which is expected to cost just under DKK 6 billion. kroner, which is double what was expected and allocated in the Infrastructure Plan 2035.
With the price increase, the economy is estimated to be at a loss of DKK 3-4 billion. kroner. It is the weakest project in the whole plan and cannot be justified at all, say transport researchers.
The expansion of the Kalundborg motorway has also increased – by almost half a billion. kroner – since the Infrastructure Plan was adopted in June 2021. The price increase means that the project is no longer profitable.
Professor recommends reconsidering
For Mogens Fosgerau, professor of transport economics at the University of Copenhagen, the natural thing would be to reconsider the projects.
– When you get new calculations that show that the projects are not profitable, it clearly means that you should drop them, he says to Ingeniøren.
Professor Otto Anker Nielsen, who heads DTU’s transport division, states that when you politically choose to ignore social economy, you are actually prioritizing the few over the many.
– If the social economy of a project is poor given a given interest rate, then this means that society as a whole is losing money on it. There may be some local benefits, but they are offset by an abundance of losses elsewhere in the country. It is a political discussion whether you want to build the projects anyway, but it is not traffic-wise or economically rational, he says.
The Minister of Transport maintains
In total, since the agreement on new roads and railways was concluded in June 2021, the Folketing has received new socio-economic calculations for 11 projects.
Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen (V) refuses to reconsider the projects, despite the poor economy:
– It is not a list of results for the individual projects, he says to Ingeniøren.
