Haven’t had a chance to read the Board minutes this month, but Mwmbwls over at London Reconnections has, and a first-class job he’s made too. First thoughts:
- It’s official that scrapping the WEZ will hit TfL’s finances to the tune of £50-70m a year, and they’re looking at cuts – the recent Business Plan, notably, didn’t account for this. In other words, following the petrolhead consensus hurts public transport directly.
- Alternatives to the Cross River Tram and the Thames Gateway Bridge will be looked at in the new year. The CRT, remember, had strong public support. Let’s see if the accountable Mayor gives the public the option of restarting the original plans.
- The Mayor wants your comments on ‘Way To Go’ by the 16th January. Where’s my green ink pen?
- The Routemaster will apparently replace the bendy bus to ‘get London moving’. Not on the 507 and 521 it won’t. I think I’d better investigate this one properly – up until now Boris has been at pains to disconnect the bendy from the Routemaster. If he’s really starting to connect them again, we start revising our cost estimates to include the 2-crew requirement, at which point we’re really talking telephone numbers, and as we can see there is a substantial budget hit already brewing.
- As Mark Lee in the comments points out, none of the seven major priorities explicitly concern public transport – they relate to: roadworks, roadworks, bendy jihad, roads, roads, roads and motorbikes in bus lanes. This should form the basis of my comments on ‘Way To Go’, which should probably be better termed ‘Way To Stop’.
- SWT are still holding out on Oyster PAYG, to my extreme annoyance. Having said that, they didn’t bother to have a working ticket machine or any staff available on Friday night, so stuff ‘em, they obviously don’t want my money.
- Oyster PAYG agreements are in draft form, and might be announced at or prior to the long-delayed ‘emergency rail summit’, which still sounds like a PR exercise to me, particularly if the legal and financial side of it (which informed sources suggest comprises a considerable bung due to the TOCs knowing Boris has promised this to the public and can’t back down).
- ELLX Phase 2 funding is still mired in an artillery exchange of proposals and counter-proposals between Boris and the DfT.
- The first rephasing of traffic lights will apparently be in the City of London and, *gasp*, Bromley.
I have to say, Boris is getting to grips with transport all right. Not a single development in there I would consider in any way progressive or necessary for London, huge question marks with pound signs attached and priorities apparently written by his cab-driving friends. A lot of flim-flam and waffle, with the occasional beacon of a project like Crossrail that he had nothing to do with. We knew during the campaign that he had no transport policy, what we see now is the implementation of a policy of having no transport policy.
Tags: 11 Comments
11 responses so far ↓
On the plus side, they say that Woolwich Arsenal DLR will open on 10th January.
SWT didn’t have a working ticket machine or any staff on hand on Sunday night, either.
We’re absolutely stuffed. We have a chair of TfL who doesn’t give a stuff about public transport. All of his priorities focus around improving the use of private transportation means, be they car or bike. This is Boris revealing his true colours and setting quite a clear, ideologically different transport agenda from that of the previous mayor.
As for South West Trains, stuff them. You can cover most of their Z1-Z3 journeys by bus or Northern Line (with a bit of imagination). And that’s exactly what I do. Why pay for a train to Clapham when I can use my already capped Oyster on the Northern Line? They’ve probably lost a good £100 quid from me alone using alternative transport means over the past year.
There was also a comment that I’d read on a blog somewhere which said that due to South West Trains refusing to retail Oyster at Clapham, an enterpising newsagent opposite the ticket office got three Oyster terminals and is now the biggest Oyster retailer in London.
Next time South West Trains bleat on about the risk of losing revenue through fare evasion if Oyster PAYG is implemented, someone really ought to point out how much revenue they’re losing now.
Aren’t SWT summat to do with Stagecoach? Wouldn’t that explain their issues regarding a complete lack of customer service?
To add to what D-Notice says, the DLR extension should open about five or six weeks earlier. The benefits of having a well-drilled machine and a rolling programme, eh, Boris?
I still can’t work out the rephasing of traffic lights. Some people seem to think that it’s a panacea for all ills; that rephasing traffic lights wil make all queues suddenly disappear.
If there’s a junction that’s always full of cars on all entrances how is rephasing traffic lights going to help?
Would love to know where Boris got this from, I’m pretty sure he’s not come up with it himself.
Ah, ye of little faith. What Boris means by ‘rephasing traffic lights’ is ‘put them on green longer for cars, at the expense of pedestrians’. There are often phases at lights where all lights are red and pedestrians can cross, and these are to be reduced in duration. When you cut through the spin it’s ‘cars are more important than people’, which appears to be the bedrock of Boris’s transport policy.
I would like to make a suggestion. People who regularly read this blog should all reply to Boris’ so-called transport policy paper. We should use this blog to exchange ideas and encourage each other, though we should do our own submissions and not reproduce each others’ talking points. If there are any key themes, we should publish them in some way and try to get them linked to by other blogs. This could start to set the agenda for the next elections (only three years away).
The thing about rephasing is that it’s a London Tory religious issue.
Way back when the congestion charge was introduced, they invented a conspiracy theory that the reason why the hens didn’t stop laying as they predicted was that Ken Livingstone had secretly altered all the traffic lights to create more traffic jams before the charge came into effect, and then changed them back, or alternatively that the congestion problem was just because evil socialists were fiddling with the traffic lights.
Some of them are still convinced, and so this is a bit of necessary fan service.
Alex is right – it is an article of faith that one of the ways car users are picked on is by fiddling with the lights.
On the other hand, the lights have definitely been fiddled with, in order to provide more time for pedestrians to cross, for the perfectly laudable aim of reducing road casualties. No one appears to be asking how reversing this, plus putting more cars back into the WEZ, plus putting motorbikes in bus lanes plus encouraging a massive increase in walking and cycling isn’t going to lead to more road deaths. You’re safer in a bendy bus, after all.
Congestion in London, in my experience, is caused by weight of traffic and roadworks, the first of which is being ignored and the second of which Boris is intending to deal with by reducing roadworks. Unfortunately, quite a lot of the works we have round here are emergency ones where the gas and water pipes let go, so how does not repairing them first, then rushing to do it when the street’s full of water help?
[...] to kill off one election pledge, are those of us in the Tube-free suburbs ever really likely to see Oyster Pay-As-You-Go on our trains, I [...]