Come around to Vorarlberg, Austria - where we talk about building a Highway in the 70ies or 80ies and never even start building it (all with official planning and studies and resident participation and environmental evaluations and public voting and discussions on the suggested variants). It has become a well known joke in the area.

AFAIK we still don't know where it will be built, but there has been some progress... EDIT: They agreed upon where! But they don't know when and holding another forum due to public outcry over the chosen path... sigh.

Meanwhile, Switzerland built the connection ~40 years ago [1]

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/xNEp622mFP73Bewy5

The potential upside of delaying highway construction by a few decades is that you could, in theory, reconsider whether it's still a good idea. Of course that's usually not what's going to happen, and most likely the project will be pushed through anyway when there's hardly any public support left for it, as with Berlin's infamous A100 extension cutting through the city.

Oh, I"m all for not building highways at all and pushing the alternatives (e.g. public transport, cargo on rails).

But this is a special situation, a really small gap between the Swiss highway and the Austrian/German highway, so transit had to go through the villages and clogging up everything at the bottlenecks along the border (or in Höchst, Hard, Bregenz, Lustenau, Hohenems, Feldkirch etc.)

It looks like they have to bridge 5km/3mi? Sure, there's one bridge involved, but that's an awfully short distance to plan for 40 years.

At the narrowest point it would be ~2km, but this variant has not been considered for years...

The variant that (at the time) is supposed to be built would be 8.6km.

I guess burocracy is the same everywhere.

Singapore is pretty efficient.

Estonia as well, everything online, very fast turnaround, all documents available electronically for everyone to see