Boris Watch

Dave Hill’s recent pieces on the NB4L have caused the usual Hilton-bashing in the comments (comments from two new faces are particularly good since they evidently have inside knowledge) – since Hilton has been on top irrational form this has been rather enjoyable, but there’s a serious piece missed here – obviously the professionals at [...]

It’s the 149, not the 18, which is next in the timetable.  The 149 is one of the 2010 batch, however, so we’d expect an announcement on the 18 shortly, if all else holds true, in line with the most recent TfL board minutes.
Details are based on this piece which is mostly behind a paywall, [...]

Am I missing something here? From today until Sunday, Trafalgar Square is hosting an art installation entitled Ghost Forest, which apparently seeks to raise awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. The installation consists of ten enormous rainforest tree stumps (only some of which “fell naturally in adverse weather conditions”) hand-picked by the [...]

Was out and about in the West End yesterday, so decided to pop down to Piccadilly Circus and see if any new 38s were about.  Quite a lot were, in fact, this greeted me as I turned the corner out of Regent Street (apologies for the poor quality, dark/crap camera/trying not to photograph a van [...]

Not a dog person, myself, so the amusement of the long-grass-kicking of another of Deputy Mayor ‘Weapon Cat’ Malthouse’s mental ticks (banning prostitute cards, Thames Estuary airport, tunnels under Park Lane, Dangerous Dogs – it’s a litany of moribund Tory big ideas really) is entirely objective.  Obviously.
Dog owners – especially owners of bull breeds – [...]

Someone’s been leaking…
The document, circulated to senior colleagues in the past four weeks and seen by the BBC, sets out Mr Johnson’s plans for his time as London mayor, including his airport strategy.
And what is this ‘airport strategy’?
…he says the airport could be the “single biggest… and bravest project we do”.

When we mentioned yesterday that the definition of what policies constitute ’smoothing traffic flow’ is apparently as flexible as Kulveer Ranger’s idea of ‘common sense’ we didn’t expect another ripe example quite so soon, but TfL obligingly dropped this into their RSS feed this morning:
Transport for London (TfL) is introducing new traffic light timings on [...]

Been crunching the numbers and trying to find a concise way of expressing the results in graphical form.  Try these on for size:
Graphs are separated into pairs, one for Peak, one for Off-peak, shown from each zone by destination zone and fare scale:

[h/t Green Party candidate Daryl853 for much of this lot]
Information is beginning to leak out [PDF of Mayoral Decision on fares] as to just how much it’ll cost to travel on Oyster PAYG on National Rail – leaving aside the apparent lunacy of something called ‘Oyster Extension Permits’, which apparently allow Travelcard users to extend [...]

Confirmed by London Reconnections and LOTS:
Now that all but a handful of the new Gemini 2DL (62x DW class) and E400 (18x T class) buses for Arriva London’s route 38 have been delivered, the date for conversion from Citaro artics can at last be confirmed as 14th November. The night route N38 will also convert [...]