Some days ago I was discussing with some people about the MetroTren Asturies project. This project involves several kilometers of underground tunnel with several stops in my town, Xixón, so many people think of it as a sort of Metro. That's the main reason why there is a common perception of it being an unnecessary project for a city of this size. People have not understood that this has nothing to do with a local Metro, but with a section of a light rail system (think of Parisian RER, Berlin s-Bahn...) for the Central Asturies metropolitan area. I think this can be a really useful project and I'm rather happy that after too many years on hold due to financial problems now the project seems to have been resurrected.
This reminded me of the Charleroi Metro, also a light-rail system that was on hold for a very long time. Reading again about this work I ended up finding one really interesting wikipedia page, the list of Grands Travaux Inutiles/Big useless projects. The French language entry contains an impressive list (nothing to do with the skinny English entry), with particularly rich sections for France, Quebec, Spain (quite expected :-) and even a separate page for Belgium. Checking that list one learns about the failed Liege Metro, that with a built tunnel reused as storage space reminds me a lot of what could have been the future of the Xixon's Metro Tunnel (but as aforementioned, hopefully the project seems to have been restarted).
It's important to note that such list of "useless projects" is not exempt from subjectivity, as it does not only contain projects that were never completed or never entered into service (or never achieved any success among users), but also projects that the green-red totalitarianism has deemed unnecessary and has managed to cancel (even if the average, not far-left-far-green citizen was in favor) like the Notre Dame des Landes Airport or the Sivens reservoir.
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