The price of everything and cost of nothing: Evaluating London’s underground transport infrastructure projects 1900-2000

This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognised narrative. We use London in the 20th century as a case study, identifying major change in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onwards. We think that this approach fostered rent seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.