White Elephant - Examples of Alleged White Elephant Projects

Examples of Alleged White Elephant Projects

• China's ambitious and grandiose projects such as, CRH project are beset with numerous technological and safety problems, allegations of mass corruption. The CRH for instance is plagued by low ridership from high fares, and encumbered with enormous debt accounting for 70% of the assets of the China National Railways ministry . These problems, such as a corruption prior to a high profile trainwreck killing 40 people failed to attract funding from fiancees and other sources within the Chinese economic apparatus. With exhaustion of funding from stimulus packages from 2009, and global an economic crisis the CNR has trouble securing funding for future growth of the CRH network and future growth has been halted or delayed as being cost prohibitive.

• The U.S. Navy's Alaska-class cruisers were described as "white elephants" because the "tactical and strategic concepts that inspired them were completely outmoded" by the time they were commissioned – the Japanese heavy cruisers that they were designed to hunt down had already been destroyed.
• The U.S. Navy's Seawolf-class submarine was designed to combat the then-threat of large numbers of advanced Soviet ballistic missile and attack submarines in a deep ocean environment. Initially planned for 29 and then 12, only three were built at a cost of over $2.5 billion each. The three were extensively retrofitted for their new, shallow-water missions with the most expensive boat retrofit costing $887 million.
• Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from the United Kingdom to the United States.
• SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch in 1858, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling, but was not a commercial success. Her hold was later gutted and converted to lay the successful 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable, an impossible task for a smaller vessel.
• The Thai aircraft carrier HTMS Chakri Nareubet has been criticized as having been built for nationalist reasons rather than applicable military uses. It has spent little time at sea since being commissioned in 1997 (the year of the Asian Economic Crisis) due to her high operating costs. However, the ship has participated in training activities, and in disaster relief after the 2004 tsunami. Coincidentally, the Royal Thai Navy ensign features a white elephant.
• Hughes H-4 Hercules (or "Spruce Goose"), often called Howard Hughes' white elephant before and during the Senate War Investigating Committee. Hughes' associate Noah Dietrich called it a "plywood white elephant".
• Lambert-St. Louis International Airport runway 11/29 was conceived on the basis of traffic projections made in the 1980s and 1990s that warned of impending strains on the airport and the national air traffic system as a result of predicted growth in traffic at the airport. The $1 billion runway expansion was designed in part to allow for simultaneous operations on parallel runways in bad weather. Construction began in 1998, and continued even after traffic at the airport declined following the 9/11 attacks, the purchase of Trans World Airlines by American Airlines in April 2001, and subsequent cuts in flights to the airport by American Airlines in 2003. The project required the relocation of seven major roads and the demolition of approximately 2,000 homes in Bridgeton, Missouri. Intended to provide superfluous extra capacity for flight operations at the airport, use of the runway is shunned by fuel-conscious pilots and airlines due to its distance from the terminals. Even one of the airport commissioners, John Krekeler, deemed the project a "white elephant".
• The Millennium Dome in London, built at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds in Greenwich in London to celebrate the millennium, was commonly termed a white elephant. The exhibition it initially housed was less successful than hoped and the widely criticised building struggled to find a role after the event. It is now The O₂, an arena and entertainment centre.
• The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania. Built by dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu as the world's second largest building (second to The Pentagon). After the 1989 overthrow the cost of demolishing the palace would have been higher than the cost of finishing it.
• Christ's Hospital railway station was constructed in 1902 to accommodate Christ's Hospital school, a large independent school which had relocated from London to the West Sussex countryside. The station had seven platforms and a magnificent terminal building, and cost £30,000 to build, an enormous sum of money for 1902. It was envisaged that the station would be busy due to the 850 pupils regularly using it, and also the foreseen westward expansion of the nearby town of Horsham. It was also the meeting point of three separate railway lines. However, the railway company failed to realise that the school is a boarding school, as a result of which the station is only used by large numbers of pupils a handful of times per year; and the development of Horsham did not materialise. Two of the railway lines also closed down in the 1960 as a result of the Beeching Axe, and the station now has two remaining platforms (one northbound to London Victoria, one southbound to Portsmouth), and one train per hour in each direction.
• Montréal-Mirabel International Airport is North America's largest airport, but has been abandoned as a passenger airport due to its awkward location and lack of traffic. Ironically, the name of the project's most-notable supporter Pierre Elliott Trudeau was ultimately placed on the busy Dorval Airport which Mirabel was intended to replace.
• The Philadelphia Athletics baseball team was referred to as a "white elephant" by rival New York Giants manager John McGraw prior to their meeting in the 1905 World Series. Although the Athletics lost that series, in defiance they adopted an elephant as an alternate team logo and eventually as a full-fledged mascot.
• Olympic Stadium in Montreal cost about C$1.61 billion. Since the departure of the Montreal Expos baseball team in 2004, it has had no main tenant. The debt from the stadium wasn't paid in full until December 2006. Because of the financial disaster in which it left Montreal, it was nicknamed "The Big Owe". The French-language term "gros bol de toilette" has also been applied as a pejorative.
• Osborne House, East Cowes, Isle of Wight, England, was one of Queen Victoria's favourite royal residences. She died there on January 22, 1901. In her will, she asked that it be kept in the Royal Family, but none of her family wanted it, so Edward VII gave Osborne to the nation. With the exception of Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice, who each retained houses on the estate, the rest of the royal family saw Osborne as something of an inaccessible white elephant.
• M74 Northern Extension, Glasgow, Scotland, opened in 2011. Originally costed at £177 million, the road's final cost was estimated at £692m for just 5 miles of road. Its intended purpose was to reduce congestion in Glasgow, but it was rejected at a Public Local Inquiry, for reasons that included the likely failure to improve congestion. The report concluded: "Drawing these various strands together, and looking at all the policy, transport, environmental, business, and community disadvantages of the proposal as a whole, it is concluded that the proposal would be very likely to have very serious undesirable results; and that the economic and traffic benefits of the project arising from the transfer of future jobs from other parts of Scotland would be much more limited, more uncertain, and (in the case of the congestion benefits) probably ephemeral.", but Scottish Ministers overturned the Inquiry's report and approved construction. The project has been described as a white elephant by local campaigners.
• The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, designed as the world's tallest hotel, began construction in 1987. Due to financial difficulties, construction ceased prematurely in 1992. Since then, the structure has remained as a massive concrete hulk, unfit for habitation. Construction resumed in April 2008.
• Ada programming language, commissioned by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). It was designed to be a single, standard language, particularly suitable for embedded and real-time systems. The DoD mandated the use of Ada for many software projects in 1987, but removed the requirement in 1997. It is still used in many countries, especially for safety-critical systems such as air traffic control and subways. It came to be known as the "Green Elephant" for the color code used to keep contract selection unbiased. It became irrelevant for commercial applications, barely surviving the wave of free and successful tools such as C++ and Java. The introduction of the GNAT compiler and the Ada 95 and 2005 standards has to some extent mitigated the affordability problem.
• Several incomplete or badly functioning dams, such as the Bujagali dam (Uganda) and Epupa dam (Angola). Most were constructed by foreign companies in the interest of foreign aid. Although the buildings do not meet expectations, if construction is completed or restarted, they could still provide a contribution to the local population.
• In 1907, author Henry James described the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island as being "white elephants" and "witless dreams" because they were summer homes for the wealthy and were unoccupied for most of the year. Thorstein Veblen invented the term conspicuous consumption to describe the mansions.
• In "Hills Like White Elephants", a short story by Ernest Hemingway, an unborn child is viewed as a white elephant.
• The Cross City Tunnel in Sydney was touted as a model for public-private partnerships, but went bankrupt in 2006 and had to be bailed out by the NSW state government.
• The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway (CGB), a £160+ million public transit project in East Anglia, United Kingdom whose immense construction costs far exceed even the most optimistic projections of revenue. Because the 50,000 tons of concrete used to build the busway is itself white, the project is particularly often referred to as a white elephant.
• Brisbane, Australia's Clem Jones Tunnel. The operating company Rivercity motorways posted a 1.67bn loss in 2010, largely due to overly optimistic traffic projections. Despite cutting tolls by up to 50% traffic volumes are less than half of the projected 60,000 vehicles a day.
• The stadiums built in South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup have been dubbed "white elephants", citing a massive misappropriation of national funds to provide a spectacle for the sporting event that might have been directed toward the country's staggering poverty.
• Shanghai Maglev Train or Shanghai Transrapid. The journey was designed to connect Shanghai Pudong International Airport quickly (approximately 7 mins train ride) to the outskirts of central Shanghai where passengers could interchange for their final destinations in the city centre. Due to the proprietary technology the Maglev Trains couldn't be incorporated into the Shanghai Metro and became a "train to nowhere" as its final stop is another 20 mins connection to the city centre via the Shanghai Metro.
• Digital terrestrial television project by Radio Televisyen Malaysia is described as a "white elephant" because it has been delayed and recently deferred because technology rapidly evolved over time.
• The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is being increasingly viewed as a "white elephant" by the US military, due to its astounding price tag of some $380 billion for nearly 2,500 aircraft in three differing versions, to equip nine nations' air forces. The lifetime cost of the F-35 program has since been estimated by the Pentagon at $1.45 trillion.
• Ciudad Real Airport, just south of Madrid, has been described as the worst example of the many white elephants in that area. It promised 6000 new jobs and a boom for the local economy, but closed in 2012, only four years after opening.
• The National Ignition Facility, a laser fusion research facility in the United States, has been described as a white elephant for being five billion dollars over its original budget and years behind schedule. A common joke in the fusion industry is that "the technology is always 20 years away".