Boris Watch

Quick scan through the July 13th TfL Finance Committee meeting (prop. Daniel Moylan, who props the whole place these days, it seems).  The Project Approvals document is our usual check-in, to check on projects going down/up/in/out of TfL’s roadmap.  What do we have here?

UIP8702 – Thameslink

Thameslink 2000 2012 whenever is not a TfL project, although I’m inclined to think it would be better if it were.  Regional considerations in Bedfordshire and Brighton (both opposed to letting Ken get hold of outer-suburban or semi-fast services) nixed that, leaving the odd situation of Crossrail being TfL while the ostensibly similar in scope Thameslink is being delivered by Network Rail and the DfT.  This doesn’t mean, however, TfL aren’t involved, they’re on the hook for £46.48m of financial authority, of which £32.04m has been granted so far, up £11m or so from the previous amount.  However, this is all reclaimable from Network Rail, as one would expect.  This is essentially dealing with all the interfaces, PFI, infrastructure protection stuff incurred by LU as a result of NR digging the place up.

ST-PJ202 – A406 Henlys Corner

This is a small scheme to try and make some sense of the A406 at Henlys Corner which as any fool (Brian Coleman) knows was originally earmarked for grade separation, before this was canned early on in the life of TfL.  They’re now just remodelling the middle bit of the junction, and the cost’s gone up a bit from £7.58m to £8.36m.  Roads, eh?  This is another of the billions of things that count as ’smoothing traffic flow’, by the way.

Apart from that we have the usual early warning of big stuff coming down the pike.  Here’s the £100m+ pile:

London Underground

• Bank Congestion Relief – a massive £600m project stretching out past 2017/18 – currently £7.1m is approved
• SSR Upgrade – Overarching project authority confirmation – £4.2bn for this. Notable that the ancient 1926 Edgware Road ‘K’ frame is being trotted out as part of a TfL/Mayoral PR blitz to put the bite on Phil ‘Slasher’ Hammond come the CSR
• SSR Upgrade – Signalling – no price on this yet, you’ll recall the original contract was scrapped when Metronet was taken in house, and still hasn’t been relet.  This is getting a bit urgent, not least since it’s a really good idea to use the same system on the Piccadilly, too, since it shares tracks with the Met and District.
• Tottenham Court Road Congestion Relief – £523.7m on this, which is related but not part of Crossrail.  A fair bit of the TCR works currently under way are for the Tube station, not Crossrail.  Big job.
• Major Power Works (SSL) – the new S-stock trains use higher voltage supplies, use regen braking and have things like aircon and different traction motor characteristics, all of which requires upgrades to the electricity supply.  £596m to you, guv.
• Croxley Rail Link – this is still in despite being a fairly unlikely candidate to be taken forward at the moment.  A lot of the support for it came from bodies due to be scrapped, let alone the DfT’s funding cuts.  Still, TfL have approved £0.5m for it, against an estimated turnout cost of £172m

Notably missing from that (it was in June’s list) is the £800m for the Northern Line extension to Battersea.

Surface Transport

• Cycle Hire (extension of existing scheme) – £87.1m is quoted as the current project authority, but the Final Cost and estimated authority sought are both ‘commercially confidential’, although evidently over £100m given where they sit in the programme.  It’s probable, therefore, that Boris will be announcing some expansion of the scheme sooner rather than later, possibly at the full launch.  Whenever that is.  I’d put money on Canary Wharf being in there.

Those are the biggies.  Of the smaller projects of interest:

• A406 Bounds Green – estimated to come in at £56.1m, below target of £69m
• East London Line 2b – estimated to come in at £53.6m, below target of £75m.  No excuse not to build Surrey Canal Road, then.
• Electric Vehicles – now at £27.4m, which seems rather a lot.  Was £20m in February.
• Scoot Deployment – this is farting about with traffic lights, and comes in at a hefty £45.3m estimated final cost
• Cycle Superhighways – £42.5m for the first two routes, out of £145m for ten.  However, Adam Bienkov’s of the opinion that the real cost is £168m, plus TfL is now saying there are twelve routes on the drawing board.

Finally, and unusually, there’s a list of closed projects with the final cost shown against the authority available – note that there’s always contingency built in, so coming in under budget is what you’d expect if everything goes right:

• Oxford Circus modernisation – £85.3m (this is the Tube station, not the diamond crossing!)
• White City – £142.6m, slightly over budget
• Kings Cross CTRL – the new St. Pancras works, came in well under, £883m out of £935.7m.
• West Ham Bus Garage – £51.7m, slightly under.  Recently opened by Boris, shamelessly trying to claim it for his threadbare ‘green’ credentials, since it’s been planned since 2006
• DLR 3-car extension – £238.5m, well under the planned £303.2m
• East London Line extension – £993.4, against £1044.3m planned
• Stratford International DLR – £181m, against £188.9m planned

What’s obvious there is that Boris is now on the downward slope as regards opening legacy projects – he’s had 3-car DLR, ELLX, Class 378s on Overground, 2009 Tube stock on the Victoria, DLR to Woolwich and the White City developments, none of which he had much to do with beyond cutting the ribbon, and he’s now reduced to opening bus garages and slightly narrowed High Streets.  Still to come we have the DLR to Stratford International, the entry of S-stock into service, the Hangar Lane bridges, the A406 at Bounds Green and the increasingly out-of-its-time vanity Borismaster.  It’ll be interesting to see how much the Victoria and Jubilee signalling upgrades are celebrated.  The pipeline is awfully trickly after that, though.

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Please excuse the title as, having grown up watching Bill & Ben on TV, I never learnt to speak proper like what Boris Johnson can. In his chickenfeed column this week, Johnson plugs a new publication which claims to explain the high levels of illiteracy in London. Is it a weighty tome by a renowned academic, with pages of appendices featuring peer-reviewed research? No. It’s a pamphlet, written not by an expert in education but by a titled literary editor.

So Why Can’t They Read? is published, not by an academic publisher, but by the Conservative think tank Centre For Policy Studies, the baby of Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph. Joseph was the Tory Education Secretary who abolished O Levels and introduced the National Curriculum, both of which deeds seem to have been conveniently erased from the collective memory of the Conservatives.

What are the causes of  illiteracy? The author of So Why Can’t They Read? finds from her extensive research (“recently been working as a voluntary teacher with a group of immigrants“) that, to summarise, it’s because things aren’t like The Old Days when teachers taught properly and Boris Johnson and his sister Rachel were taught to read on a sunny river bank by their grandmother. Oh, and some children apparently refuse to use the approved Mayoral mix of shouty posh and Latin and converse in  ‘“Street” English, the argot in which children – both white and non-white – who live in the poorer areas of inner cities often speak to each other‘. Ms Gross has evidently never encountered the grammar school-educated youth of Kingston or Richmond who can be heard affecting just such a lingo of a weekend in the leafy suburbs.

I have recently been reading a different pamphlet concerning illiteracy, Standards Of Reading 1948-1956, Ministry of Education, 1957. Then, as now, poor, inner city schools had the highest number of pupils with poor literacy skills. Then, as now, poverty and poor living conditions were responsible for low academic achievement.

Some examples of the pupils with the lowest scores in literacy tests in 1956:

He is the fifth in a family of ten, and a poor school attender, who works in a general store all his spare time.

Has eight brothers and seven sisters. His parents are said to be very uncooperative with the school. An instance is that when he had ringworm in 1954 his parents did not send him for the treatment arranged.

Has two brothers and two sisters, is said to come from a very poor home, and is badly clothed. He was found to be verminous at a medical inspection in 1954.

A boy whom all efforts have failed to interest in any school activity. He was found guilty of indecent behaviour in 1955.

Has a sister at work and two younger brothers at school. He is a well grown lad who is said to have become a local gang leader, to have been before the juvenile court on two occasions and to have a admitted to a good deal of petty theft as well as two more serious offences.

He is one of a large family of six boys and six girls…The home now has a television set and it is hoped that further progress will be made through the boy’s desire to read the captions.

Surely 1956 was the height of The Old Days, before “irresponsible breeding” (what was that, Boris?), gangs, juvenile crime  and hordes of Hippy/Marxist/Communist teachers set on destroying the British Empire?

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Just a pointer to the much more locally attuned views of Darryl Chamberlain, who has been busy tearing a strip off TfL over the Blackwall Tunnel closures, having discovered an early morning flaw in the arrangements.

Also, the grassroots campaign is still going and still not in a great mood, by the looks of things.  And to think Boris campaigned on a pro-Blackwall Tunnel platform once.

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They should be coming thick and fast – three are done (38/507/521), three are known about (18/149/25) and the seventh debendification, Route 12, has just been announced.  Let’s update our chart:

Done

Route    Tender    5    5+    Old PVR    New PVR    Revised End Date    Factor
507    1-Jun-2002    1-Jun-2007    1-Jun-2009    9    15    25-Jul-2009  1.67
521    1-Jun-2002    1-Jun-2007    1-Jun-2009    19    32    29-Aug-2009   1.68
38    20-Jul-2002    20-Jul-2007    20-Jul-2009    47    72    16-Nov-2009  1.53

Awarded
149    18-Oct-2003    18-Oct-2008    18-Oct-2010    27    35    23-Oct-2010  1.30
18    23-Aug-2003    23-Aug-2008    23-Aug-2010    32    48    13-Nov-2010  1.50
25    26-Jun-2004    26-Jun-2009    26-Jun-2011    44    59   25-Jun-2011   1.34

Consultation and tendering under way

12    31-Jul-2004    31-Jul-2009    31-Jul-2011    31    39 (? estimated ?)    ??-Nov-2011  1.25 (? estimated ?)

Subject to contract (dates and PVR provisional)

73    1-May-2004    1-May-2009    1-May-2011    43    66    1-May-2011
207    9-Apr-2005    9-Apr-2010    9-Apr-2012    26    40    31-Dec-2011
29    14-Jan-2006    14-Jan-2011    14-Jan-2013    29    44    31-Dec-2011
436    9-Feb-2008    9-Feb-2013    9-Feb-2015    26    40    31-Dec-2011
453    16-Feb-2008    16-Feb-2013    16-Feb-2015    23    35    31-Dec-2011

What’s notable from the TfL documents I’ve seen is that the capacity will be sharply reduced, by 11%, due to the increase in frequency being only from 5 minute to 4 minute intervals, rather less than previous routes.  This, using some shaky estimation, means the debendification factor is now down to around 1.25 (this is the multiple of the bendy PVR required to meet the revised route timetable):

• Now – 1440 capacity per peak hour = 12 bendies
• Then – 1275 capacity per peak hour = 15 double deckers
• 12 to 15 is a 1.25 multiple of buses running per peak hour, which must therefore be about the same as the PVR increase, although there’s one extra journey per peak not included which might raise it slightly, but the current inbound morning peak is actually 14 buses at the moment, which reduces it rather more.

The result is that extra buses are having to be introduced on parallel routes to provide for the lost capacity, which rather defeats the whole object, and certainly isn’t cost-free.

However, there’s some good news – according to TfL:

We consider our proposals will not cause additional congestion

That’s OK then, we can conclude that Boris’s debendification has no effect on congestion.  Shame he campaigned on the congestion-causing bendy buses, then.

Final thing – the November changeover date is getting perilously close to Boris’s self-imposed end-2011 target (the one which neatly removes any requirement to make the replacements all-hybrid).  We’re going to start seeing routes change over mid-contract fairly soon, which is going to be an opportunity for the incumbent operator to extract a chunk of money from TfL for varying the contract.

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In case anyone forgot that Boris gave the culture portfolio to a scion of the Revolutionary Communist Party, there’s a gentle primer on the subject in the LRB from Jenny Turner.  Well worth a read, if only to prompt the question ‘how the hell did Boris meet her?’.  Through Ritterband, we think, but that only prompts the question ‘how the hell did she meet Superman Dan?’.

These days, though, it isn’t clear what the Continuity RCP is after, except that someone, somewhere, really likes setting things up.

After two years, it’s unclear what Mirza is after (London culture not being particularly fertile ground for acting out the RCP obsessions of opposition to bans on things and anti-greenery, although the sucking up to big corporations is going splendidly), either, other than setting up badly advertised, badly planned events and conspiring to get Veronica Wadley onto the Arts Council.  I’ve often wondered why Wadley got mixed up with them, for that matter.

A former supporter told me that the young women the RCP recruited always resembled ‘pushy head girls from all girls’ schools’, even when they weren’t.

Hmm.  That’s probably it.  Note also the reference to the Times as a media collaborator – that’s the paper that pushed the Routemaster and Boris Airport, if memory serves.

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Good old Norman Baker:

Over 150 new low carbon buses will join fleets throughout England saving around 50,000 tonnes of CO₂ thanks to £15m of additional Government funding, Transport Minister Norman Baker announced today.

What changed?  Last time we looked TfL were convinced it wasn’t going ahead.

The DfT had planned to allocate a further £15 million of funding during 2010/11 but this has recently been cancelled.

I’ll be interested to know if they’ll be bidding this time.

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With Boris Johnson’s imminent announcement that he intends to stand as the Tory candidate in the 2012 London Mayoral Election, we’ll be interested to see who the major donors to his campaign will be, especially as hedge funds and private equity funds provided the bulk of the donations to his 2008 campaign.

Over the last 18 months, the Mayor seems to have become remarkably fond of executive headhunters, Odgers Berndtson, awarding them Tier One of the GLA’s lucrative Executive Search & Selection Services contract in July 2009.

Exactly how lucrative providing such services to Johnson’s GLA can be is clearly shown in the almost-monthly payments made to Odgers Berndtson since January 2009:

• 01/09 £9,473.44
• 03/09 £20,603.36
• 04/09 £79,267.84
• 06/09 £16,097.13
• 08/09 £33,521.35
• 09/09 £33,797.37
• 11/08 £30,368.23
• 12/09 £54,710.79
• Period 12, 2009-10 £17,551.91
• Period 13,2009-10 £11,137.82
• Period 01, 2010-11 £2,337.08

That makes a total of £308,865.32 paid to Odgers Berndtson from January 2009 to April/May 2010.

Guto Harri, the Mayor’s Director of External Affairs, lists lunch and a speaking engagement with Odgers Berndtson in his gifts and hospitality register in June 2009.

So, who runs Odgers Berndtson? The Chair is some woman called Virgina and the CEO is Richard Boggis-Rolfe, who just happens to have donated £207,500 to Conservative Central Office in three-and-a-half years, the most recent donation being £50,000 in March 2010.

It transpires that the parent company has not been doing terribly well recently, with its share price falling from just under £5.00  to £0.395 in two years. Despite  a 39% fall in pre-tax profit, Boggis-Rolfe and Bottomley received maximum bonuses of £375,000 and £280,000 respectively. With TfL Directors recently waiving their bonuses, maybe it’s about time the private sector saw fit to do the same, especially when profit and productivity have plummeted.

Still, at least Odgers Berndtson can attract top quality staff and never have to “let them go” due to bad judgement like the Mayor.

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Kulveer Ranger doing his main job of talking a good story to the press:

Kulveer Ranger, the mayor of London’s transport advisor, said: “It will be cold comfort for those using warmer lines but this summer we will see a significant rollout of trains with air conditioning on the Overground lines and the first air conditioned tube train.

All of which were ordered well before Boris was elected, of course – 2006 for Overground, 2003 for the ‘tube’ train, which isn’t really a tube train as commonly understood, it’s sub-surface stock.  Indeed, there’s a case for saying Kulveer using the phrase ‘tube train’ is a bit iffy, since the Mayor’s pledge to look at air-conditioned tube trains is effectively dead – at best we’re going to have air-cooled trains as they do on the Victoria Line (but only on lines ordering new trains, which will be Victoria/Piccadilly/Bakerloo), plus any of the infrastructure cooling projects that escape the TfL/Phil Hammond axe.  The train Ranger’s talking about, the S-stock, will mostly operate on the above ground Metropolitan Line rather than the melty-molten inner city Tubes the casual reader might expect here, doubtless very nice for outer London commuters, but not really helping the core issue of heat build up in the deep tube.

What this is all sort of covering up is that TfL aren’t going to hand out free water any more, presumably to save money.  Personally I recommened avoiding the Tube if you can; to go to BlogNation on Saturday I took the Overground (North London then East London) and it was bloody excellent.  That’s what investment gets you, Kulveer – and perhaps you should look at this idea from a couple of years ago?  Why put water fountains in parks when they’d be more useful on platforms?

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At State Of London on Thursday last I asked Boris, in a slightly roundabout way, why spending £11.4m on five hybrid not-a-Routemasters in two years time was apparently better than spending £5m of Whitehall fiscal stimulus money on 50 off-the-shelf hybrids today.  I got a non-answer as follows (thanks Helen for taking the time to transcribe this, by the way):

Boris: “On the bus question, as I think I said to an earlier questioner, the budget for the new generation bus covers the development of a new bus for London that will actually be used throughout the London bus fleet. The technology will be used throughout the London bus fleet. And I think that the, I think it actually means a fantastic investment for this city. It’s a long time since London has had the confidence to develop technology here in this country  that we’re going to use for a long time and I think that we do need a new generation bus. These buses on our streets at the moment, they’re incredibly polluting, too heavy, they’re too noisy, they’re basically glorified truck chassis that are pulling people around in London. They’re running on very, very powerful diesel motors, we’d do far better with lighter, cleaner, greener technology and I’m determined to do it. So I think, you know, you can go back to the bendy bus if you want, I think it’s completely the wrong way forward.”

This all raises more questions than it answers, really.  Off the top of my head:

• If this is the prototype for a fleet to be used ‘throughout’ London why is the bendy policy resulting in 500 more diesel buses being delivered before the end of next year, polluting, heavy and truck chassis and all?
• If current hybrids aren’t suitable, why hail them as ‘big on fuel efficiency and small on harmful fumes’?
• If the NB4L is going to be used for a long time, how long are the existing buses being bought today for bendy replacement expected to run?
• Why does he still think it’s OK to combine NB4L and bendy replacement when he divorced the two almost immediately on coming to office?
• Why, given his devotion to the small state and private sector competition let alone the misguided ‘austerity’ bollocks is his state-sponsored bus still the right way to go, particularly given the funding problems (see below)?

I have to admit I reckon he knew full well who was asking the question, as there was an instant where he seemed about to ask me who I was, but checked himself in time.  That was a golden moment.

Anyway, Boris or no Boris, TfL are pressing ahead with normal off the shelf hybrids, as this report [PDF] to tomorrow’s Surface Panel highlights.  Amongst the talking points Boris could have used last week if he was backing an honest policy are:

Diversity, Innovation and Competition

• Four manufacturers are involved (Wrightbus, ADL, Volvo and Optare)
• Two systems are in use (parallel and series (the latter being the NB4L method)
• Both single and double decker buses are available (NB4L is a large double decker only)
• Two battery types (Li-ion and NiMh).

Sounds perfectly sensible to me, the aim is to get a broad range of results in before deciding what approach is best, which might well be a package of different ones, using the flexibility of the private sector to produce vehicles tailored to what TfL decide:

Most types are showing fuel mile per gallon benefits over standard diesel buses on identical routes. The series systems are demonstrating the most miles per gallon (mpg) improvement on inner city routes.

Cost

Now, the NB4L is of course £11.4m for the first five, and regardless of what Boris says you need to buy a fleet of hundreds before you see the prices come down to hybrid levels.  TfL confirm the current Boriswatch assumption of about a £100k premium on a normal bus, by the way:

Hybrid buses currently cost approximately £110,000 more than a conventional diesel bus. For example, a hybrid double deck bus for London would cost £300,000 compared with £190,000 for the diesel equivalent. Initial indications are that maintenance costs are about the same as a conventional diesel bus, although replacement of batteries after about five years will require further capital investment. The cost difference for single deck buses would be comparable, though from a lower starting cost.

Fuel Consumption

One of the talking points generated around Routemasters by the Bendy Jihadists was their fabled light weight and consequent fuel economy over the ‘truck chassis’ designs that followed (neglecting that Thatcherite deskilling and obsession with cheap fuel incentivises the use of easily maintained, over-engineered, reliable equipment regardless of fuel cost). These days the emphasis is very much on using less fuel, so how do the current generation hybrids stack up in the real world:

The double deck buses in the trial fleet are achieving an average of 6.1mpg compared with the benchmark diesel buses at 5mpg. At current fuel prices, taking into account fuel duty rebate and based on average annual mileages, this represents a fuel saving of £4,900 per annum per bus. The results from the single deck trials indicate more variability, but the best performing vehicle is achieving 9.9mpg compared with benchmark of 8.0mpg giving a saving in fuel costs of £3,700 per annum.

Now, the NB4L is supposed to be 15% better than this, which would be about 6.1 * 1.15 or about 7 mpg, confirmed by taking the other figure of 40% better than a regular diesel and multiplying it by 1.4 to give you 7mpg.  Figures for the Routemaster vary from 8 to 15mpg (I detect the hand of Policy Exchange here) and the bendy about 5-6mpg.  That’s not a great deal more, considering the lower capacity and the possibility of hybrid bendies.

Green Bus Fund

The key point to note here is that the Green Bus Fund money has now officially dried up, leaving Boris with 112 hybrids, half of which were paid for by the previous government he excoriates but no more will be funded now his own party is in power.

TfL was successful in securing £5 million from this fund which has been used to pay the capital premium to the contracted bus operators in order to allow them to purchase or lease an additional 50 buses. These buses will be delivered towards the end of 2010

The DfT had planned to allocate a further £15 million of funding during 2010/11 but this has recently been cancelled.

Future Rollout

Remember Boris is pledged to have all post-2011 buses as hybrids?  We’ve often wondered how he’s going to deliver this given that he’s cutting back on funding things and as we’ve seen there’s not going to be any central government money.  Finally we have some hard numbers round this aspiration:

The business plan includes £47 million over the plan period to support the roll-out of hybrids and assumes that the capital premium reduces as volumes increase. If these capital cost reductions are achieved, then the business plan has sufficient funding to allow a fleet total of 300 buses in 2012.

That’s 188 or so more, five of which are NB4L, presumably.  So even after the NB4L starts rolling the majority of new hybrids will be the current style of, essentially, adapted or co-developed pure diesel based designs.  Of course, that’s *if* the cost reductions are achieved, and cutting the Green Bus Fund 2 will not help this.

Funding

Thorny one, this.  Boris would doubtless like some generous private sector organisation to fork out, but he may find this hard to turn into rolling reality:

Leasing companies are currently unsure of the market for second hand hybrid buses and with no guarantee that the vehicles will be reused in London are taking a cautious view on residual values. This is pushing up the initial lease rentals and TfL continues to explore with a number of these organisations how more attractive leasing arrangements can be arranged.

This is bad news for the NB4L, really, since we knew from the KPMG report that there was a marked sense of cold feet amongst operators and lessors when it came to being expected to stump up for a unique London bus, however much Boris expects it to last for ‘a long time’ – he is, after all, only a two-term Mayor at best.  This reluctance also extends to the current generation hybrids, it appears, and it remains to be seen what depredations Phil ‘Slasher’ Hammond has in store for the bus industry in the UK.

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From the report on roadworks mentioned in the previous post, we get some facts on what actually causes congestion on the roads:

3.1 London has around 20 per cent of the UK’s traffic congestion. This is estimated to cost the Capital’s economy at least £2 billion a year. In 2009/2010, TfL recorded the main causes of congestion as:

• Collisions 28 per cent
• Vehicle breakdowns 9 per cent
• Highway Authority Works 19 per cent
• Utility Works 19 per cent
• Special Events 4 per cent

Other issues (e.g. spillages, general volume of traffic etc) 21 per cent

3.2 Roadworks therefore account for 38 per cent of the duration of the most seriousand severe disruption across London. A conservative estimate of the total cost of disruption from this work is £752 million.

Or in other words it’s not the bendy buses holding up the traffic, it’s car drivers bashing into each other. Another myth up in smoke.

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