London’s New Subway Symbolized the Future Then Came Brexit.
Up an alley, beyond some hoarding, through what can feel like Harry Potter’s secret portal, the underworld of an unfinished Crossrail station sprawls beneath the traffic and commotion of Tottenham Court Road. Escalator banks descend through a sleek, silent black ticket hall where towering, empty, white-tiled passageways snake toward the new, vaulted train platform, curving like a half moon into the subterranean darkness.
Crossrail is not your average subway. London’s $20 billion high-speed train line, which plans to start taking passengers late next year, is Europe’s biggest infrastructure project.
It will be so fast that crucial travel times across the city should be cut by more than half. The length of two soccer pitches, with a capacity for 1,500 people, its trains will be able to carry twice the number of passengers as an ordinary London subway. While Londoners love to moan about their public transit network, by comparison New York has barely managed to construct four subway stops in about a half-century and its aged, rapidly collapsing subway system now threatens to bring the city to a halt.
But standing one recent morning on that empty Crossrail platform, where construction workers in orange gear and hard hats hauled shiny metal panels to line the walls, I still couldn’t help wondering whether the new train leads toward another glorious era for this city, or signals the end of one.
Before Britain voted last summer to leave the European Union, Crossrail was conceived for a London open to the world and speeding into the future. Now, with Brexit, the nightmare scenario is that this massive project, to provide more trains moving more people more quickly through a growing city, ends up moving fewer people more quickly through a shrinking city.
Crossrail was built by a Britain whose strength grew, for better and worse, out of a longstanding, stodgy but reliable confidence that the country knew itself and where it hoped to go in the century ahead. It is no longer even certain that Prime Minister Theresa May will survive the year.
It was an especially unpromising sign this spring when Mrs. May’s Conservative government, as if fearing exactly what anti-Brexiters predicted about an economic downturn, issued a campaign manifesto that conspicuously omitted funding for Crossrail 2, the long-planned, $39 billion critical north-south sequel to Crossrail’s east-west line.
Since then, the government’s transport secretary has endorsed the project — provided that the city pay half the whopping cost, upfront. The semi-reversal suggested a grudging acknowledgment that, whatever the political fallout or economic prospects, Britain ultimately needs a thriving London all the more after Brexit.
During the past three decades, London has been transfigured by wild growth, much of it the consequence of government-sustained megaprojects: Along with Crossrail, there have been the stupendous renovations to King’s Cross and St. Pancras Stations, the wholesale invention of Canary Wharf, the addition of the Jubilee subway line, the Olympic makeover at Stratford in East London and the expansion of Heathrow Airport.
These megaprojects, in different ways, helped remake London into the great global city-state of Europe, a 21st-century melting pot and Sybaris of culture and free-market prosperity — at the same time that they clearly exacerbated underlying urban inefficiencies and stirred resentment elsewhere in England toward the city.
Crossrail was intended as a kind of democratizing corrective, at once shrinking the city and expanding on a vision of London as a great, inclusive metropolis. While it will whisk bankers at new speeds from their office towers and multimillion-dollar aeries to Heathrow, it will also help millions of now-marginalized, lower-income workers, unable to afford runaway home prices in and around the center of the city, to live in cheaper neighborhoods often far from their jobs.
But what if the flow of incoming bankers slows, if immigrants look elsewhere, if the excesses of European money and human capital that helped drive growth begin to dry up? As Brexit skeptics warned, the pound has lost value and inflation is starting to rise. Some companies are already making plans to move employees out of London.And as London goes, so goes Britain.
source:-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/world/europe/london-crossrail-uk-brexit.html?
