More seriously, everything new has been shelved unless it already has contracts or (Labour) govenrment funding. The only exceptions are daft stuff like the “new Routemaster” and studies for an airport in the Thames estuary.

He’s opted out of any vision or project for the future of London’s public transport.

The GWT had become nothing more than a watered down verision of the original plan – spurred on by bureaucrats in transport planning departments taking no account of the impact on community or the benefit (or lack of) that it would bring. The GWT had become nothing more than an expensive glorified 472 route. Taking more people to North Greenwich, given its overcrowding at peak times now, is foolish. The original visiion has long since been superceded by the DLR at Woolwich and Crossrail. It is retained only due to the bureaucrats who promote it.

GWT1 is unfortunately still with us as it is further along in the planning process. We need this cut and the funds allocated to where they will bring real benefit. The community the route will impact does not want the scheme, will not use the scheme and gets no benefit from the scheme.

The money should be allocated where it will do some good.

But in the long term what positive difference is he going to make to London? What will he be able to point to when it comes round to 2012? What will voters be thanking him for? Putting the fares up? Standing on the back of a new glossy Routemaster? Having a new police commissioner?

At the recent LSE talk, one of the speakers said that what London needs in times like this is a ‘booster.’ It is becoming increasingly clear that Boris is very far from being that.

Actually, the Box came about because the original (Tory-introduced, remember) GLC legislation gave the GLC highway powers but no public transport responsibilities. Obviously, all the people whom they hired to work on transport were therefore US-obsessed highway engineers who therefore planned big US-style highways everywhere. In fact there’s an argument that the *point* of the original Tory GLC was to build the Ringway scheme.

They then imported US techniques of car use prediction which were wildly wrong in a 1960s British context – one bit of the scheme (Earls Court to Battersea, IIRC) was predicted to take 300,000 vehicles a day. They came up with some really bizarre ideas – ‘Scheme 9′, for instance, looks like a string vest laid over London.

The death of it is an interesting story in itself, but it basically came about partly because people saw what the relatively small-scale Westway did to Notting Hill (which wasn’t posh then, remember) and partly because nice middle class people from places like Strand-on-the-green organised, agitated and eventually infiltrated the Labour Party, which gained control of the GLC in 1973 and immediately binned the scheme in favour of public transport improvements. In truth it had very little chance of funding then anyway, but the difference to today’s news is that the electorate didn’t want it, either (there’s some staggering figure of the percentage of the London electorate that lived in the noise shadow of the thing).

Boris, as far as I remember, didn’t promise to scrap every transport improvement that isn’t already signed and sealed, but that’s what he’s done, as well as pulling the old New Labour trick of re-announcing things as if they’re new, with the added chutzpah of blaming the guy who originally announced them for you canning the rest. Really, the spin is Alistair Campbell grade here.

Congestion would, of course, have got worse if all the available money had gone into the Ringways, as well as swathes of London being deeply blighted. What London really lacks as a result of all of this fannying about and lack of proper government is probably two or three tube lines. The Tories are, unquestionably, mainly to blame for this – the original GLC structure excluded control of the Underground, then the subsequent abolition of the GLC erased any strategic London-wide transport planning for 14 years. Boris is keeping up a fine old tradition, as well as keeping up the current Tory hatred for trams (that’s three London schemes they’ve killed now, and don’t forget that Croydon Tramlink was Val Shawcross’s baby – I’ve seen the Tories try and claim that one).

Fabulous site for Ringway information – http://www.cbrd.co.uk/histories/ringways/

How myopic of you.

If you want London to go into reverse gear and stop being an even better place to live you’ll soon complain when the jobs go, your house price drops and your services are total rubbish; go ahead, but seriously, for a few quid off your council tax?

A million londoners get three quid back on their council tax and they can buy a beer each, give that million three quids to somebody that knows how to use it and all our lives can be improved.