Central Planning Failure: French state owned railway firm orders 2,000 trains “too wide” for platforms

Incredible moments of government failure. 

From Reuters

France's national rail company SNCF said on Tuesday it had ordered 2,000 trains for an expanded regional network that are too wide for many station platforms, entailing costly repairs.

A spokesman for the RFF national rail operator confirmed the error, first reported by satirical weekly Canard Enchaine in its Wednesday edition.

"We discovered the problem a bit late, we recognise that and we accept responsibility on that score," Christophe Piednoel told France Info radio.

This “broad modernisation effort” has been part of the French socialist government’s measure to boost statistical GDP. Instead, such flagrant costly error translates to a combination of bigger deficits, more debts, higher taxes, loss of purchasing power and greater risks to financial stability which ultimately entails a lower standard of living. This is a showcase of the government’s knowledge problem. 

And importantly this also exposes on the myth of the populist glamorization of centralized “infrastructure spending” elixir.