70 öre på kronan

The verdict fits in four lines

A samlad effektbedömning, a consolidated impact assessment, is a standardized form, and the Hässleholm–Lund one looks like all the others. Every page carries the object number, a case officer's contact details and the status line granskad och godkänd av Trafikverket, reviewed and approved, with a date: 21 May 2025. Even the reservation is standardized; "uncertainties remain regarding costs and design" recurs page after page, part of the template. At the end sits the analysis-result box, four lines: net present value minus 22,132 million kronor, benefit-cost ratio minus 0.78, effects not calculated negligible, final assessed profitability robustly unprofitable. The whole archive lies open on Trafikverket's website, sorted by region.

The rulebook behind the form is called ASEK. Benefits are forecast, converted to kronor and discounted over sixty years, according to values a scientific council maintains, and Sweden has refined the method since the 1960s. The form even discloses its own errors:

Det har upptäckts fel i prognosmodellen Sampers som ger ett för högt resande med tåg … vilket innebär att de beräknade nyttorna i denna kalkyl kan vara överskattade.

Minus 0.78 is the kind reading.

The state scrapped a finished investigation, then ordered it again

The two tracks have been on the state's drawing board since 2014, when the Sverigeförhandlingen was appointed to negotiate a high-speed line between Stockholm and Malmö. Municipalities along the route, Hässleholm and Lund among them, signed agreements on co-financing and housing. In 2019 Trafikverket began the localisation study: seven Swedish miles of new double track, corridors drawn across central Skåne.

On 22 December 2022, two days before Christmas Eve, the government cancelled it. Trafikverket's own follow-up report records the state of the work at that moment:

Utredningen var i princip färdig när den avbröts

The following year the government asked the agency to study railway capacity in Skåne instead. The answer: the most urgent measure is two new tracks between Hässleholm and Lund. In October 2023 planning was ordered to restart, now as conventional rail, and a new localisation study is scheduled for 2026 to 2029, for the same corridor. In the new study's maps, the old investigation survives as a white line.

What the scrapped round cost has never been put on paper. When riksdag member Maria Stockhaus asked in 2021 what the high-speed investigations had cost since 2014, the infrastructure minister answered that the work fell within the agency's budget, and gave no figure. Trafikverket's project page today reads: localisation study 2026 to 2029, earliest construction start from 2034, tracks ready around 2040. Twenty-six years after the negotiation began.

Seventy öre, by the state's own count

Trafikverket's plan proposal, delivered on 30 September 2025, states on page 23 that the named investments average a benefit-cost ratio of minus 0.3. Trafikanalys, the state's own transport-analysis agency, converts that to money: a net present value of roughly minus 50 billion kronor, the sum of road objects at plus 30 billion and rail objects at minus 79. Trafikverket's own guidance counts anything above plus 0.1 as profitable. The ratio measures benefit as the state prices it, travel time, safety and emissions in kronor; it is not money that returns to the treasury, and it is the only measure of its kind the state budget has. Stockholms Handelskammare condensed the average into one sentence.

Det innebär att varje investerad krona skapar samhällsnytta värt 70 öre.

Everyone cites the number, no one obeys it

The Riksrevisionen, the state audit office, examined the previous plan and found no relationship between assessed profitability and which measures got in, neither in Trafikverket's proposal nor in the government's adoption. Its report, titled "Promises more than it can keep", puts the trend in one line:

Trafikverkets och regeringens hänsyn till samhällsekonomi har därmed minskat från liten till obefintlig mellan planrevideringarna 2018 och 2022.

Among the report's formal recommendations to Trafikverket: prioritise measures with high economic returns. The state's auditors had to ask.

The new plan repeats the pattern. Handelskammaren compared the projects that made the plan with the candidates that were rejected: both groups average minus 0.3. One exception exists. Trafikverket struck a stretch of the Ostkustbanan, Kubikenborg–Dingersjö, minus 0.9, citing insufficient economic efficiency: the only place in the proposal where the number acted as a rule. In the adopted plan the government put it back, with just over 4 billion kronor. The one time the number said no, the no was overturned.

On 16 June 2026 the riksdag debated the plan into the evening; the chamber rose at 21.48. The word nettonuvärdeskvot was never uttered, according to the protocol, and neither was 70 öre. The calculation appeared only as ammunition. One member praised the government for not building unprofitable high-speed trains. Another attacked a Stockholm motorway graded robustly unprofitable, the same project the infrastructure minister welcomed back into the plan with the word "finally". A third objected that Tomteboda, assessed among the most profitable investments in the country, had been removed, and proposed revising the models until they capture defence, the climate and growth. Every party arrived armed with the calculation. None arrived bound by it.

None of this means Sweden counts too much. The infrastructure plan is the only large stream of public money that gets a standardized calculation at all before it is spent; the ROT deduction costs around 12 billion kronor a year and has nothing similar. The scandal is not the counting. It is that the counting changes nothing.

A decade of planning is not a law of nature

A Swedish infrastructure project spends about a decade in investigation, design and review before construction starts. That is where the money goes missing. The finished builds land roughly on the budget they broke ground with; the growth happens in the years before, while plans are redone and projects wait. Every added year makes the same road more expensive on paper. The minus in the plan is manufactured there.

It does not have to be this way, and the size of the prize is on record. Innovationsföretagen has calculated what happens if the cost growth is held down: the money already committed stretches roughly 225 billion kronor further over the plan period. Projects that are unprofitable on paper today clear the bar without a single forecast changing. A shorter planning decade helps twice: fewer years of cost growth on every project in the queue, and a lower cost for producing the documents themselves.

What fills the decade is document work: investigations, design rounds, reviews, produced by hand at consultancy and contractor desks. That is exactly the kind of work that AI and new ways of working can now make much faster. Yesper is built for it: it reads the full set of documents and produces the deliverables, with the judgment and the signature staying with the engineer. The firms that shorten their part of the decade will do more than win tenders. They will move the number the next plan is judged by.