Category Archives: Op-eds

A quick journey into the fantasyland that London’s City Hall has become leaves one quite simply lost for words. When in the past under Livingstone there was a degree of discipline, vision and planning (tempered of course by a slight whiff of the unusual) backing up the policies of Transport for London, we now have confusion, contradiction and incoherence flowing out of every orifice, from Boris’s mouth and advisers to TfL’s own offices.

The most amazing part of this farce is the manner in which Londoners seem to passively sit by and watch while London’s transport policy falls apart at the hands of a Conservative Mayor egged on by indifferent Tory Greater London Authority members representing the vested interests of Outer London. In City Hall, the only concept relevant is political mileage – even if the cost is throwing away the future of London by killing years of necessary investment and replacing it with a mass of spin, nonsense and re-launches.

The most dangerous part of London’s new transport policy is the very fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. Boris may portray himself as a man of some intelligence, but it is deeply unfortunate that his policies seem to spell out intellectual and logical bankruptcy. What Boris has managed to achieve in his time in office so far is to reduce future capacity and increase fares at a time of soaring demand for public transport. He has cancelled alternatives to the Tube and Bus in the form of the Oxford Street and Cross River Tram lines- promising extra bus services – while at the same time making this virtually impossible by ‘brooding’ over the scrapping of the congestion charge.

He has committed himself to regenerating East London and the Thames Gateway while at the same time scrapping nearly every single project that would help achieve that aim. When taken one at a time, his new ‘vision’ for transport in London sounds rather terrific – fewer cars, more bikes, improved Tube. However, when aggregated together, it becomes a flailing mass of contradictions.

How, I might ask, are we supposed to reconcile more bus services and a possible lack of a congestion charge with increased bicycle use? Or, alternatively, how on earth will London cope with massive population growth without improving its capacity to move people from A to B? Put simply, TfL is now advocating a policy of zero expansion in the face of rising demand, preferring instead to ‘spin’ new capacity out of nowhere rather than actually pick up tools and spend money to build it.

Not that you would hear this from TfL, if you actually bother reading the spin that comes out of that particular part of Boris’s empire. Apparently, new Tube upgrades will result in capacity increases of up to 40% on some lines. This forms one of the key arguments made against projects that the Liberal Democrats and Liberal Youth support like the Cross River Tram – there is no need for it, as Tube capacity is going to ‘increase substantially’ thanks to ‘improvements’ to the Northern line. Boris seems to completely miss the plot here. Given the fact that the Tube is already overcrowded and full to the brim, surely this is merely expanding capacity to cover demand that is currently unmet?