HS2 and the garden bridge are vanity projects – it's not too late to scrap both | Catherine Bennett
Theresa May should call time on the wasteful follies that have become nothing but politicians’ playthings
It said much about Boris Johnson’s eight-year performance as mayor of London that when the reviews came in, the highlight was often a fleet of buses. Designed by Thomas Heatherwick to satisfy some nostalgic, icon-hungry mayoral whim, they were widely taken at their instigator’s word to be an awe-inspiring success story, as well as one in the eye for “doubters”.
“They said I was mad,” Johnson crowed in 2013, in one of the Telegraph columns in which he would occasionally conduct an auto work appraisal, finding himself quite brilliant. Stop talking the buses down! He had seen Heatherwick’s bus, “a masterpiece of design”, being made. “I felt a sense of awe, and the deep certainty that this was the most wonderful project I had ever been involved in.” And given what he has done to his country since, that could indeed be the best epitaph he can expect.
Source: Guardian Transport
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