Boris Watch

Peter Hendy and Boris appeared before the Transport Committee yesterday (conveniently just *before* the publication of the TfL Business Plan, which considering it was announced via an appalling attempt to bury bad news in this blatant bit of TfL press office spin is presumably going to be seriously damaging to London).  Helen, Martin, John Bull and myself were watching it on the webcast (JB apparently from a dentists’ waiting room, apparently attracting a crowd) and Twittering the result.  I’m not certain any of us were impressed.  Neither was a member of the committee, Jenny Jones, who left the room briefly to twitter her disgust.

i had thought, hoped, that one day, in the future, i might be able to work with boris on cycling, but it wldn’t work. he wldn’t listen.

How’s that for direct access to your democratic representatives, albeit to hear that they are being ignored by other democratic representatives?  Boris, on the other hand, managed the interesting feat of twittering from the audience while simultaneously being sat at the table taking questions.  I wonder if he really does his own twittering or if there’s someone else?

What of the actual meeting?  Boris hasn’t grown into the role in the slightest, still nervously employing over-familiar quips (‘if the congregation would turn to page..’ appeared twice), covering up his partial memory of a document he didn’t write and evidently hasn’t thoroughly read (at one point answering a question about road congestion (MTS p. 252) by referring to a diagram about *rail/tube* overcrowding (MTS p. 119) that had evidently caught his eye but was irrelevant), making the kind of wild assumptions symptomatic of a true zealot (‘the non-biking boroughs’ will eventually see the light and join his revolution, apparently, which is probably news to Brian Coleman, Ealing, LBHF and the other petrolhead paradises and a conversion hardly encouraged by the apparent waste of money on Cycle Fridays) and repeatedly contradicting himself without apparently realising it (not spotting the glaring contradiction between massively reducing bus subsidy and removing bendy buses).  There were a number of points where he appeared to decide on the fly that the MTS was wrong, usually when to admit that it was right would be to admit that some previous position he’d taken was wrong.  In particular, he seems to have a higher personal estimate of the effect of mucking about with traffic lights, roadworks etc. on congestion than the report does, which is rather strange, but does allow him to pretend away the expected increase in congestion, or at least make it the Next Mayor’s Problem (NMP).  I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of that over the next two years.

Anyway, you could either cry or get angry, I got angry, on Dave Hill’s surprisingly (and, to my mind, somewhat unsupported by the evidence of my own eyes, but possibly the best bits were in the soundless first eight minutes and Dave missed Jennette Arnold unforgettably machine-gunning Boris later in the broadcast) positive report on proceedings:

He claimed he supported ‘modal shift’ (where’s your ‘modally agnostic’ hierarchy, by the way?) but then slagged off buses, didn’t seem to recognise that modal shift from his big ticket cycle hire scheme would be from buses and tubes, couldn’t make a coherent case for cycling in the suburbs other than ‘it’s nonsense to drive 2km’, which is true, but people still do it and since he supports their right to do that and has no money to spend (he naively hopes ‘the non-biking boroughs’ will see the light and stump up, in a city where both Labour and the Conservatives are pledged to freeze council tax and people like Brian Coleman get elected) it’s immaterial what else he believes at the same time. He tried to claim Smarter Travel Sutton as his model for the future (it’s the Lib Dems with TfL money from the previous Mayor who *at the same time as he was paying for things Boris approves of* was a cynical deceitful profligate who left a big hole poor Boris was now filling despite already filling it once last year when he made exactly the same arguments, and which was also caused by the recession) and mounted his usual defence of motorists who pay ‘too much tax’ and why charging heavy polluters more would hurt ‘families’ during these hard times, while putting the bus fares up would ensure we kept the marvellous bus system that’s the envy of the world, except that he doesn’t like the horrible dirty buses that would be replaced by his clean green new bus, except he won’t say where, when and how much it would cost except that while he’s building them bus subsidy has to fall £200m or so while the buses have to negotiate more congested roads because *even with the measures he’s taking in the MTS* congestion will rise 14%. Oh, and Val Shawcross is the ‘last of the bendy *something*’ and silly to want to talk about why his only self-proclaimed ‘big idea’, the Thames Estuary Airport isn’t in his Transport Strategy.

I’m not sure, on cool reflection, I could add much to that.  Fortunately John Bull was in more lucid mode today with this piece, noting that while Boris expressed a large number of fairly loose and uncontroversial wishes for the future of London’s transport system, Peter Hendy just said ‘funding’ when asked what the biggest challenge is, and I’m sure he’s right.  We have to rely on Boris firstly to get it, and secondly not to waste it, otherwise the whole vision collapses.  Oops.

Meanwhile, Adam covered the burial of the Thames Estuary Airport.  RIP.  We don’t yet know which airport Boris wants to expand instead, given that this is in the MTS:

the Mayor is interested in looking at whether optimum use is being made of London’s existing airport capacity (though mixed mode operation is not favoured at Heathrow), and the potential benefits of additional capacity elsewhere in the South East.

My money’s long been on Gatwick.

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