The Dutch Zuider Zee railway: A giant with feet of clay

On 15 December 2004 the Dutch Parliamentary Committee of Infrastructural Projects (Tijdelijke Commissie Infrastructuurprojecten (TCI) or the Duivesteijn Committee) presented a number of reports to the House of Representatives which reconstructed the decision making on two Dutch megaprojects (the Betuwe Freight Railway and the High Speed Railway HSL South). The Committee also proposed a review framework to the House for any future infrastructure projects and tested this on a possible new infrastructure project for which a substantial sum had already been earmarked in the budget: the Zuider Zee Railway to link Amsterdam and Groningen. This report, ‘The Zuider Zee Railway Project. A Retrospective Review’ (TCI, 2004a), was written largely by Martijn Leijten, in collaboration with Hans de Bruijn and Hugo Priemus. It is evident from the analysis by Leijten et al. that the justification for the Zuider Zee Railway leaves a lot to be desired: the utility of and need for this link have not in fact been demonstrated convincingly. Despite this, the government had already made substantial promises to the northern provinces and set aside e2.73 billion in the budget, and themajority of the political parties had declared themselves in favour of the railway. This article shows how it was possible for this to happen. It makes a few comparisons with the Betuwe Freight Railway, regarding which the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (Centraal Planbureau (CPB), 2004) found that its construction was in fact unnecessary and that the revenue from it would at most cover the cost of maintenance. The argument we put forward here is that the course of events concerning the Zuider Zee Railway is far from exceptional; similar processes are found in the case of other megaprojects. The lessons to be learned from the Zuider Zee Railway case are of value to other countries.