In reply to philipjardine:
> and the French papers are saying this morning how much the price of the new lift has gone up. So its not only in England where infrastructure builders play this trick!
We live in an old railway station that was built in 1860 at the same time as the line that (still) runs beside it. There's a couple of books that talk about the Victorian entrepreneurs who built the line and it's a familiar story of scope creep, fallings out, cost overruns and missed deadlines. I think the problem is human rather than nation specific, I strongly suspect you could go back to the very earliest construction accounts written by man and find exactly the same thing happening.
Back on topic I spent a happy few months many years ago living in the Grand Roc apartments next to the bottom station of the GM lift. Getting to the very top was always a pain, long queues and convoluted reservation systems, so hopefully they'll manage to solve them with the new system.