Boris Watch

Much hoo-ha (well, a little bit of hoo-ha) about the Green’s proposed cable car between Thamesmead and Beckton.  Tiresome Hammersmith and Fulham (or ‘Foolham’ as I’m going to rename them if their deeply unpleasant council carries on the way it is) councillor Harry ‘Some Day I’m Going To Regret This Surname’ Phibbs has jumped aboard the idea rather enthusiastically.  Now, LBHF isn’t noted for its love of green issues or alternative transportation; they’re rather busy spending money on propaganda and running fraudulent opinion polls to try and convince Londoners to vote for more traffic congestion at the moment, so what is it about the cable car idea that’s so refreshing and original?

Firstly, and obviously, it’s cheap.  The idea of spending money on transport (let alone half a billion on a bridge) is rat poison to the modern tax-cutting London Tory, so stringing a few cheap bits of wire up is much more appealing.  You can’t be accused of doing nothing, but you can claim to be saving money.  Lovely.  It’s even green!

Secondly, Ken didn’t think of it - he wanted a horrid old expensive gas guzzling statist bridge.  Oo, nasty!  Doubtless it would have been named after Chavez or Castro or something.  If only he’d announced it would be named after Ernest Marples.

So, what does Mr. Phibbs have to say?:

Anyway I was delighted to find my prejudices about Greens challenged by a proposal from the Green group in the London Assembly for a cable car crossing over the River Thames in east London, between Newham and Bexley.

The link leads to a Guardian article from May 21st 2008 headlined ‘Cable car over Thames preferable to new bridge, say TfL analysts’.  TfL analysts?  Not just the Green group in the London Assembly?  Who was Chairman of TfL at the time, Skippy?  Ken Livingstone, eh?  So Mr. Phibbs is an enthusiast for a proposal from some academics appointed by an organisation chaired by Ken Livingstone.  Much better to present it as a conversion to greenery, then.

Now, obviously the Greens like the idea, they’ve said so, and they oppose the bridge on the reasonable grounds that making it easier for people to drive places increases car use.  However, the scheme does recognise this by providing two dedicated bus/taxi lanes (and four, not six, general traffic lanes) and charging people from outside the local area twice as much in tolls.  The bus lanes would be upgradable to trams if demand existed, but would probably be used for linking the two busway schemes in the area - East London Transit from Barking and Greenwich Waterside Transit from, er, Greenwich via Woolwich and Thamesmead.

Mr. Phibbs goes on to give us the Tory view:

The advantages are considerable. Low cost. A crossing time of a mere two minutes without any anxiety of traffic jams. And a very enjoyable two minutes they will be too, with great views that are sure to prove popular with tourists, as the London Eye has shown.

Obviously the views are so much better than being in a bus going over an extremely high bridge (about 50m/160ft).  The height is limited by the shipping going underneath, so both would be the same height.

Let’s talk numbers here.  Two minutes is 120 seconds.  Assuming a cable car runs along the route of the bridge, a quick look at Google Maps and the Thames Gateway Bridge documentation reveals that the bridge crosses the Thames at right-angles from about here.  Now, the Thames here is about 600m wide, so that’s an average crossing speed of about 5m/s, which is a perfectly reasonable speed for a modern gondola lift.  However, at 11mph it’s not exactly congestion beating - London’s traffic is only slightly slower than that, and buses going over the bridge on their dedicated lanes would be free from congestion and rather faster - at 40mph there would be about a 35 second crossing time.  Mr. Phibbs presumably thinks its good for our souls to be kept hanging around over the river.

There are bigger problems.  The first is that its no use just building a link from one side of the river to the other, there’s a great deal of nothing much at either landing point and to be useful the link is really going to have to go from somewhere to somewhere.  The obvious western terminus is Gallions Reach DLR station, which is about 400m inland from the western landing point.  On the eastern side we have to go quite a long way before we find anywhere suitable; there are no rail lines to connect to so we need a main road with some bus potential.  Here is one spot, it’s about 900m east of the river.

So what we now have is a 1900 metre long gondola running at 5m/s.  This now takes nearly 6.5 minutes to connect a small bit of Thamesmead to a single DLR station near the end of one of the branches, without any possibility of through travel somewhere else.  It’s not a bad solution (although I’m not sure what the problem is), just an odd one compared to what it’s intended to replace:

• Direct high frequency bus transit services through to Barking from Woolwich and Abbey Wood using the public transport lanes on the main bridge.  Further extensions and technology upgrades would be possible as demand grows and the GWT and ELT networks develop (precise routing is being developed to maximise access to local centres);

• Wider direct orbital bus services using the public transport lanes  across the bridge.  For example, these could operate between Thamesmead and Stratford, and Woolwich and Dagenham Dock (but a wider range of destinations may also be appropriate exploiting the flexibility of the bus);

• Fast links to provide interchanges to the DLR at Gallions Reach (as well as Woolwich) for onward travel on the DLR network to the Royals, Isle of Dogs and beyond and, if progressed, the envisaged Dagenham Dock Extension; and
• Good interchange with National Rail and wider bus networks at Barking, Woolwich and Abbey Wood as well as future Crossrail access at Abbey Wood

There’s also the five other projects in the area to consider

1. the DLR will extend to Woolwich Arsenal very soon, giving a 20 minute journey to Canary Wharf, which (if there was a decent bus from Thamesmead) would be about the same as a Gallions Reach cable car, only cheaper and less intrusive.
2. there’s Crossrail, which will link Abbey Wood and Woolwich directly to Canary Wharf and the City in extremely quick time.  Again, a good bus service to Woolwich Crossrail station is going to be the most cost-effective way of getting people into town quickly.
3. Gallions Reach becomes a quite important hub come 2017 if the DLR gets its extension from there to Dagenham Dock.
4. Likewise connecting Gallions Reach to the north-east is the East London Transit, an orbital express bus scheme (hello, Boris) including a section from Gallions Reach DLR to Barking.  This would be extended over the bridge to Thamesmead, linking in with…
5. …the Greenwich Waterfront Transit project which would provide, amongst other things, direct buses on segregated routes from Thamesmead to Woolwich (see 1. and 2.)

For radial journeys the cable car is obviously near useless - it caters for a few people who’d want to go from Thamesmead to Beckton or points along the northern side of Royal Albert Dock.  Everyone else will use the GWT to connect with DLR or Crossrail.  In fact, the TGB documentation makes it obvious that the primary purpose of the bridge is orbital, which is exactly what Boris has said he wants to improve.  However, a direct bus from numerous points in Thamesmead is going to be much more attractive than a cable car trip starting from a single point, taking three times as long to cross the river whereupon you get off and wait for the bus that could have picked you up closer to home if they’d built the bridge.

It’s clear from this that a cable car, while superficially attractive, is a rather poor substitute for a proper package of public transport solutions - while Crossrail should be safe and the DLR Woolwich extension is nearly finished, the Dagenham Dock DLR project, GWT and ELT projects definitely aren’t committed yet, and if you build up a picture of the plans in your head you realise that removing any one component doesn’t do a lot for the whole plan.  Being a key component between the two bus systems, the bridge is actually quite important to the whole plan, and replacing it with a cable car isn’t going to be an improvement.

There’s another slight problem with the cable car idea - the route goes across the approach path into London City airport and while this obviously doesn’t preclude a 50m high structure (since the bridge is allowed) it does affect the choice of material.  Large scale metal structural solutions for the Thames Gateway Bridge were all ruled out due to concerns about affecting the navigational equipment at LCY.

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