Railway station of the day

Time-lapse pictures of Elstree and Borehamwood station having its platforms extended to take 12-coach trains. This is part of the Thameslink upgrade programme.

Bicycling news

The latest issue of the Campaign for Better Transport's London Group Newsletter (PDF) includes a review of the new London bike hire scheme. We are supposed to call it the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, but I don't see why we should give an evil grasping bank any credit for contributing less than one-fifth of the cost. Most people seem to be calling them Boris bikes, but I won't do that either, because B. Johnson has merely brought to fruition a scheme that was already being developed when Ken Livingstone was Mayor.

The reviewer welcomes the principle of the scheme, but is a bit sniffy about the bikes themselves, which he finds heavy and slow. As it happens, I got round to joining the scheme myself a couple of weeks ago, and have now used it a handful of times. I find the bikes just fine, and easier to use than I expected; not terribly fast, sure, but they are not meant for racing, after all.

I do already have a bicycle, but the great beauty of this scheme is that you can take a bike from one docking station and leave it at another, so that you don't have to bother about finding something suitable to which to lock your bike and then still worrying that it might be stolen none the less. The density of the docking stations is quite remarkable: on average they are said to be only about 100 metres apart. The only big problem is that so far they are only to be found in roughly Tube zone 1, so it's entirely an Inner London thing for the moment.

The scheme seems to be a huge instant success. I see loads of people using the bikes, and it's not that unusual to find a docking station with no bikes available at all, so clearly more need to be provided already.

TfL's other great cycling innovation of this year has had more mixed reviews: it is the first two Cycle Superhighways. These are commuting routes into central London from, so far, the east (Barking) and the south (Wimbledon). From what I have seen of the southern route, there are rather few stretches where the cycle path is separate from the road. Mostly the "superhighway" amounts to putting a lot of bright blue paint on existing streets. Amsterdam or Copenhagen this is not. But, as the CBT newsletter points out, it should at least help raise awareness of cyclists on the part of motorists, and it certainly makes the route more visible to the cyclist himself.

London transport spending

London Reconnections reproduces a Transport for London statement about the funding settlement.

Four points caught my eye:

(a) It implies that some sort of Piccadilly Line upgrade is still going ahead, despite the cancellation several months ago of the order for its new rolling stock. Maybe we are to get new signalling but with old trains.

(b) The East London Line extension to Clapham Junction is going ahead "and will be delivered by the end of 2012", though presumably still without the new station at Surrey Canal Road. It will be good to have more frequent trains from Denmark Hill, though I am not sure how far the new journey opportunities will compensate for the forthcoming reduction in Victoria-bound trains (and their removal altogether from Clapham High Street and Wandsworth Road).

(c) The congestion charge is increasing to £10. This is a step in the right direction, but I think it ought to be at least £15. Most car journeys in central London are unnecessary and should be penalised accordingly.

(d) Parking on the TfL road network will be charged for. And so I should think. Why on earth that's not already the case is a mystery.

Probably the worst news is the confirmation that fares, already quite high, will rise by a lot more than inflation. On buses, especially, this will hit the poorer citizens disproportionately and is therefore regressive. Ken Livingstone always did his best to keep bus fares as low as possible within whatever financial settlement was available, even when there was no alternative to putting tube fares up.

Pointless helicopters

Am I alone in getting irritated by the broadcasters' use of helicopters? The Prime Minister goes to Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for a dissolution, and his motorcade through central London is covered live on TV via a helicopter. I suppose at least you could say that is a way of visualising a constitutional ritual. But then he sets off to St Pancras to get on a train, and we have to watch that journey from a helicopter as well. It is of no conceivable interest, except perhaps to notice in passing how many one-way streets the PM is allowed to go the wrong way down. It is wasteful of BBC licence-payers' money, exceedingly un-green in fuel terms, and damned noisy to boot, if you happen to be in the streets concerned.

Manhattan: Broadway traffic ban becomes permanent

Good news from Manhattan, where sections of busy Broadway have been experimentally car-free for nearly a year. According to this article in Business Week, the ban has been so successful that New York's Mayor Bloomberg is making it permanent. Pedestrian injuries are down by 35%. Taxi journey times are improved by 7%. The car-free zones are to become public plazas where outdoor events will be held.

Let us hope that, on his next visit to London, Mayor Bloomberg will have words with his pal Boris Johnson about this success. Quite aside from the ongoing kerfuffle over what to do about the nightmare that is Oxford Street, our own theatreland could also do with some radical thinking of this kind. Christian Wolmar has recently blogged about being stopped by an idiotic jobsworth of a policeman for walking in the road in Soho where the pavement is too narrow and there were no cars coming. Mentalities are going to have to change.

The Drain in Network S.E. livery

One tends to forget about the Waterloo and City line. Even though it's just a stone's throw from where I sit, I think I've only used it about twice in 60 years.

I suppose it's rarely of any use to people who actually live in London, its target market consisting entirely of commuters into Waterloo main line.

This video clip reminds us that it used to be run by BR and was not part of the London Underground, and for a brief period its trains bore Network SouthEast colours, something I had quite forgotten.

Boris lambasted by transport consultants

This from TransportXtra:

In an unusual step for a transport consultant, Colin Buchanan has spelt out its transport vision for the capital in response to the Mayor's draft transport strategy.

The consultant is critical of some of the mayor's priorities, such as the plan to scrap the western extension of the central London congestion charge, replace bendy buses and commission a new bus design for the capital. “In the present financial circumstances the mayor needs all the sources of revenue possible and not to incur expenditure which provides no improvement in transport services, for example the replacement Routemaster,” said Colin Buchanan chairman Andreas Markides.

I agree with both those points, as I have written before. The abolition of the western extension to the charging zone is merely pandering to the selfishness of Kensington petrolheads who no doubt vote Tory, and runs altogether counter to any conception of a sensible transport policy. The replacement of bendy buses is just an absurd hobby-horse of Boris Johnson's, on which I have written several times, most recently last February. Dave Cole also devoted a good deal of attention to this issue, notably here.

The TransportXtra article continues:

The consultant suggests that bus travel could be made more attractive by allowing Oystercard holders to make unlimited boardings of buses within 90 minutes of the first boarding without an additional charge.

Something of the kind was one of the relatively few interesting ideas put forward by Brian Paddick as LibDem candidate for Mayor. I was always impressed with the system in Brussels when we lived there: you pay a flat rate ticket for one hour's use of the whole city transport network, however many times you change buses or trams or metros in that period. It does seem arbitrary and inequitable that people whose journey happens to necessitate a change of bus should pay twice as much as those whose journey happens to be all on one route.

UPDATE: This from Boris Watch: New Bus For London – Costs Shoot Up, from which it appears that this wholly unnecessary project is going to cost us Council Tax payers over £11 million, and that only includes the first five vehicles.

Tramway unfairness

Tramways & Urban Transit reports that Nottingham is to have no fewer than nine new tram routes.

In Manchester, Birmingham and other cities, too, new tram schemes seem to be going ahead.

Meanwhile, here in London the number of new tram routes we are getting remains firmly stuck at zero, since B. Johnson brutally cancelled the cross-river tram project, on which so much preparatory work had already been done, and which was strongly supported by all the boroughs affected.

What have we done to deserve this?

Circle/teacup line problems continue

I noted yesterday that all seemed not to be well with the new configuration of the Circle line, which, we were told, was to bring a five-minutely service on the Hammersmith branch for the first time ever (adding the new Circle service to the existing Hammersmith & City one). Now the Evening Standard has published New improved Circle line is 'rubbish', say delayed passengers. Admittedly this is only week 1, and teething troubles were to be expected. One also takes with a pinch of salt anything the Evening Standard prints about transport, and notes that this article is written by some hack who clearly hasn't taken the trouble to understand the new pattern. She writes:

Circle line trains now start in Hammersmith, run along the Hammersmith & City line to Edgware Road then do a clockwise lap of the Circle line and head back to Hammersmith. They then do the journey anti-clockwise.

which makes it sound as if Hammersmith itself is part of a new, larger circle, which is entirely wrong.

Nevertheless, it was always going to be the case that the Circle itself would only run every 10 minutes under the new regime, giving 6 trains per hour (tph), a slight reduction on the previous (highly theoretical) 7 tph. Transport for London glossed over this in its publicity for the change, so it arguably deserves opprobium now.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering people on the Hammersmith branch still don't appear to be getting their promised train every 5 minutes:

UPDATE: The Londonist has this: Circle Line Not So "New" or "Improved" (A Passenger's Lament)

Teacup Line problems

Could it be that all is not going well with the new teacup line? You will recall that the new Circle/Hammersmith arrangements were supposed to produce a train every five minutes on the Hammersmith branch. Yesterday's Evening Standard had a letter from somebody complaining that they had to wait 25 minutes at Edgward Road for an eastbound train on Monday. And here is the departure board for westbound trains at that station a couple of minutes ago, as the evening peak gets under way:

London Underground's new Teacup Line

Transport for London has a new leaflet out explaining the forthcoming changes to the Circle Line (from 13 December). They are still going to call it the Circle Line, though it will be in the shape of a teacup, not a circle.

I hadn't previously quite understood that the Hammersmith and City line will still exist as a separate entity. When TfL says there will now be a train every 5 minutes between Paddington and Hammersmith, I take it to mean a Teacup train every 10 minutes and a H & C train every 10 minutes. This is certainly a remarkable increase in overall frequency on that section, which used to be notoriously unreliable and sporadic, at least it was in the early 1980s when I was living in Shepherds Bush.

Chaos can, I think, be expected on 13 December at Edgware Road. The leaflet makes a lot of the fact that, although some passengers will have to change trains there who up to now have had a through service, it will be an easy cross-platform interchange. In fact, this is not always the case. If you are going from, say, Great Portland Street to High Street Kensington (a direct journey by Circle train at present), your Teacup or H & C train will arrive at platform 4. The next High Street train might be across the platform at platform 3 (for Wimbledon) but it might equally be over the footbridge at platform 2 (an anti-clockwise Teacup train).

This is a good example of the iron rule that every transport improvement silver lining has a cloud for certain users.

Train of the day

A look back to the era when London tube trains weren't painted red, but just trundled around in bare aluminium. I suppose it saved money on paint. This is, I think, 1962 stock, so it was pretty new when I took this picture at White City, on the Central Line, in August 1963.

These trains were fairly spartan inside, but they served us well for some 40 years.

Putting ill-informed people right

It can get rather dispiriting sometimes, the frequency with which people write such ignorant tosh that one feels obliged to write in with a correction.

The Economist website has a new (rather superficial) piece comparing the commuting experience in four world cities. The London section of the report includes this:

(.....) "bendy buses", an incomprehensible waste of precious road real estate (.....)

I wrote in the comments section as follows:

Absolutely wrong. The bendy bus is very suitable for certain high-density routes, where it uses the road space very efficiently. Having three wide doors, it can empty and load large numbers of passengers quickly. With a low floor and no stairs to climb, it is also much more accessible than a double-decker, especially for anyone with impaired mobility or who has luggage, pushchairs, etc. They carry considerably more people than ordinary buses, saving on operating costs. London TravelWatch calculates that the number of ordinary buses needed to match the capacity of bendy buses would be so much greater that the road space taken up in total, if bendy buses were withdrawn from the routes they currently operate, would be more, not less. See London TravelWatch's response to Transport for London's consultation at http://www.londontravelwatch.org.uk/document/3530/get

On a different topic, someone else wrote in the comments:

"...the train was repeatedly delayed for days on end due to leaves on the tracks. And by delayed I mean it took three hours to make the journey. LEAVES on the track? What century are we living in?????..."

After all these years in which this silly canard has been repeated and rebutted, wouldn't you think people would have got the message by now? (I largely blame dim-witted hacks in the gutter press.) I wrote in as follows:

Leaf mulch, actually. Leaves fall; rain falls; the leaves get wet; the train wheels grind the wet leaves into a sticky mush, which makes the tracks very slippery. So the wheels slide and the train can get going only very slowly. Once it is going again, the driver has to make sure the train doesn't skid. So he/she goes slowly and the train is further delayed. Not at all peculiar to Britain, in fact. It happens every autumn wherever there are deciduous trees next to railway lines. This has been explained so many times, yet people still won't believe it.

I wish there was a law against writing nonsense.

Heathrow: Is there still hope?

I have been depressed and outraged in equal measure by the announcement that the third runway at Heathrow is to go ahead. I'd earlier been resigned to this as the most likely outcome, given all governments' unerring instinct for taking the wrong decision about anything to do with transport.

But more recently Christian Wolmar, among others, revealed that the Cabinet was deeply split on this issue, with the Millibands and Hilary Benn thought to be strongly against. Indeed, Benn went further than Cabinet ministers are normally supposed to go in openly questioning whether the third runway was compatible with Britain's air pollution commitments. (And in my view he should now resign; but people don't seem to resign on principle any more.)

This news of splits at the top level of government gave short-lived hope that Brown and Hoon might just do the sensible thing after all. But it was not to be.

The environmental and social reasons why the third runway is such a catastrophically bad idea have been gone into at length by so many others that there is no point in rehearsing the arguments again here, except to note that the village of Sipson is an extremely minor aspect of the case and not, as some affect to believe, the main point. I don't mean to say that I have no sympathy with the people who live there, only that the many arguments of principle against expanding the airport would still be just as powerful even if it could be done without destroying homes and communities.

The political arguments are a whole other thing, and were well put by Polly Toynbee in This craven airport decision hands Cameron a green halo, in which she describes the decision as "a crass error" purely from Labour's own narrow party point of view, quite aside from any other consideration. In one fell swoop the government has thrown away what green credentials it had, when, as Ms Toynbee points out, there was absolutely no reason why this decision had to be made before the election:

By 2015, when the first sod is cut on the runway, Gordon Brown will be no more than a pub quiz question. Plunging towards depression with air travel slumping, what was the rush?

"In order to be seen to be decisive", is her answer, and that just sums up the whole superficial approach that has always characterised New Labour -- all short-term deviousness and tactical calculation, no long-term strategy or overarching vision, still less anything resembling principled leadership.

All this is depressing enough, but what made me feel ill was that Ms Toynbee also pours cold water on any idea that the incoming Tory government will cancel the thing, despite their present rhetoric against it:

But how green is Cameron really? Only this week he opposed the compulsory switchover to new light bulbs. Few think that once in power the Conservatives will cancel the runway ...

I just hope she is wrong about that. Would a Tory government really take refuge behind a claim that it was now too late to stop it, having been so vocal against the idea? I have been quite surprised by how vehement Theresa Villiers has been on this subject from the Opposition front bench, even while we keep being told that a lot of decidedly non-green Tory backbenchers are secretly appalled at their party's public stance. We should note also that in London itself, Conservative activists, councillors and MPs form a significant part of the almost universal local campaign of opposition, as suggested by the event reported in this post by the Tory Troll.

There are of course those who have all along said that the runway isn't going to get built in any case, whoever is in power in the future. One of them is Vince Cable, as I have noted before. The Plane Stupid campaign also takes this line.

And finally, so does Christian Wolmar:

Either the proposal will be thrown out by the Tories or, by concerted opposition or, when serious money finally needs to be invested in it, the rationale will have disappeared. As one of my correspondents put it, no runway decision has ever survived a general election. This one will be no exception.

The interesting question is why does Labour do this? Why is it so in hock to business? My theory from talking to ministers is that they have no understanding of the private sector, only a fear that it will turn against them. So they feel compelled to give into them at any turn.

I hope these commentators are right, I really do. This is just such a hugely totemic issue for the future shape of our society.

UPDATE: The Campaign for Better Transport says in its February newsletter, "A final decision about Heathrow expansion is many years away". This is very reassuring, if true.

Boris "emperor with no clothes", say experts

"The direction of the mayor's transport policies is becoming depressingly clear", says the latest newsletter of the London group of the Campaign for Better Transport. It is a pdf document which you can download here.

Johnson has adopted a misguided notion of 'mode netrality', abandoning the progressive road user hierarchy, which puts the needs of pedestrians and cyclists first, public transport users in the middle and car traffic last. Now TfL is required to develop plans to pursue Boris's impossible dream of reducing congestion by smoothing traffic flow. Increasing capacity at traffic light and other junctions will increase traffic -- this is road building without building any roads. It can only make congestion worse. Will no-one tell the emperor that he's wearing no clothes?

The report goes on to note that, as well as the cancellation of various tram and DLR schemes, "even Boris the cyclist has started to disappoint", with the halving of funding for the (so far woefully inadequate) cycling network.

In conclusion,

Time after time increasing capacity has been shown not to work as a means of tackling congestion; now it is to be tried yet again. In the last few years London had shaken off its reputation as the laggard among major European cities and had become one of the pioneers. Now it's losing its status as a leader in progressive transport policies.

I feel increasingly vindicated in my decision to spend a lot of time campaigning for Ken Livingstone last spring.

Worth checking out

Some interesting stuff that has caught my eye recently:

Broadcasting guru Richard Rubin has a wise and thoughtful piece about dodgy BBC outsourcing, the Ross/Brand affair (expressing exactly my own thoughts about how this was just a particularly ghastly example of what has become a "nasty, cruel and very regrettable" aspect of British popular culture), and how TV stars can get radio wrong. Also fond memories of meeting Kenny Everett and Keith Skues.

In Ross's case, there can be little doubt that the negative coverage was partly prompted by his outrageous but seemingly sincere belief that his £6,000,000 a year contract with the Corporation was "worth a thousand journalists". It was that remark that prompted me to stop listening to him -- I rarely watched him, in any case -- because the BBC must have, as its irreducible core, robust, well funded and well staffed journalism, and the thought that, at a time when it was cutting journalist posts, such cuts were helping to pay this grossly overcompensated 'star' was offensive, to say the least.

There is a new edition of Joel Crawford's online mag Carfree Times. Among other things, he puts forward An Agenda for President Obama. Nothing less than the fate of the Earth is at stake, he says:

It has become apparent that we simply cannot continue growth in the manner prescribed by the World Bank and the IMF. Unfettered capitalism is the road to vast riches for a very few people, a better standard of living for many, but not all, people, and massive damage to the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

The only solution is a completely different approach. We must focus not on material standards of living but on quality of life. (.....) Rising material standards of living have led, in the main, to a falling quality of life. We must focus not on goods, the manufacture of which is nearly always accompanied by damage to the environment, but on services, which can provide a livelihood to enormous numbers of people while improving the quality of life and protecting the environment. One service in desperate need is indeed the repair of damage we have already done to the environment ..... 

He goes on to deal with the transport and energy implications in particular. With the aim of ending dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, he calls of course for a national system of renewable electricity generation, but also, in the short to medium term, for an urgent large-scale programme to reduce energy consumption in all buildings (labour-intensive work which will provide many jobs), an end to new housing in rural areas and distant suburbs, a new tax on air tickets, a ban on all airport expansion, and heavy public investment in the railway network. The article focuses on the USA but most of what he says applies everywhere, and it is well worth reading in detail.

Progressive London is a new website designed to keep alive the progressive policies of Ken Livingstone. It is cross-party, not a purely Labour affair. It is campaigning on various fronts, including a petition against the latest above-inflation fare increases.

Intriguing revelations from Christian Wolmar, who claims that the Cabinet is deeply split over transport policy:

On transport, it is clear that Geoff Hoon has little truck with the environmental agenda. He is a definite supporter of the third runway at Heathrow, the touchstone issue in this debate. A host of younger Cabinet members, such as the Millibands, more tuned into the Green agenda, are ranged against him. Gordon Brown's instincts are to side with the arguments in favour of economic development and I suspect that means the third runway will get the go ahead in the New Year. 

Bendy buses revisited: following my posts in March and September, London Travelwatch has given its attention to TfL's proposal to abandon bendy buses on, in the first instance, routes 38, 507 and 521. I am happy to say they wholly agree with me that this is a stupid idea:

London TravelWatch believes that there are overwhelming advantages in terms of accessibility, manoeuvrability in limited roadspace, loading and dwell times at stops, and economies of operation to the use of articulated buses on routes with high volumes of passengers. In particular these are very suitable for use on routes which serve main line railway termini where large volumes of passengers often arrive at stops in very short spaces of time from arriving rail services.

Congratulations also to Dave Cole, who has been following this issue as well, and has managed to extract some information from TfL. One commenter on his blog points out that the proposed replacements for the Red Arrow routes (507 and 521) will lead to a net increase in the amount of road space required of 21% and an increase in the number of drivers required of 82%.

And finally, European socialism is back, according to Neil Clark in the Staggers and Naggers:

Across the continent, there is a definite trend in which long-established parties of the centre left that bought in to globalisation and neoliberalism are seeing their electoral dominance challenged by unequivocally socialist parties which have not.

Grim news on transport in London

A couple of months ago I attempted to draw up a quick balance sheet of Boris Johnson's record on transport issues over his first few months in office.

At the time there was (a bit of) good news and (rather a lot of) bad news.

Since then, all the news out of City Hall has been dismal in the extreme:

(1) The Cross-River Tram scheme has been scrapped. This is a serious blow to hopes that Britain could resume its earlier progress towards catching up with our continental neighbours in the matter of sensible use of light rail in cities. The undoubted success of the tram schemes in Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Croydon has made it clear that there is nothing peculiar about the UK and that here, just as in France, Germany, Holland, Spain and elsewhere, trams are easily the best transport solution for high-density routes in cities.

In addition, the only opposition to the Cross-River scheme was coming from one or two loony maverick petrolhead Tories. Everybody actually involved, in particular all the boroughs along the route of all political hues, was very much in favour of it. All sorts of consultations had already been held by TfL, even down to the precise line of route (I declare an interest: I live near the route and took part in that consultation). There was none of the groundswell of local feeling against it that characterised the West London tram that Ken Livingstone wanted to introduce along the Uxbridge Road and which was scrapped earlier.

Boris Johnson says he is not against Cross-River in principle, and that the plan might come back on to the agenda if funding can be secured. But that is no good. Even if the go-ahead had been given now, it was going to take ten years to build it, which I find incomprehensible (the Victorians managed to build tram routes in months, not years). In effect he has junked the plan and all the work that has already gone into it. Funding could certainly have been organised if the political will had been there at City Hall and national level.

The consequence of this is that we have bequeathed to future generations more congestion on the roads and on the Tube, and a less livable London. We have also extinguished the hopes of deprived areas like Peckham that they will ever get properly connected to an efficient transport network, or benefit from the wider regeneration that that would bring.

(2) A lot of the initial coverage of Johnson's long-term idea of a new airport in the Thames Estuary assumed that this would be INSTEAD OF Heathrow. As he himself has often said, Heathrow is in the wrong place. But he made clear during Mayor's Question Time the other day that there was absolutely no question of shutting Heathrow. Any new airport would be AS WELL AS existing capacity at Heathrow. It is merely supposed to be an alternative to an extra runway at Heathrow. So the final effect of it would be a huge net increase in total airport capacity, which is exactly what we do not need at this point and which the citizenry, I suspect, simply will not put up with.

The only cheering note in all this came from Vince Cable, who as MP for Twickenham represents a lot of constituents angry about aircraft noise. He said last week that whatever Geoff Hoon finally announces (mysteriously and intriguingly, the announcement has just been postponed until the end of January), he is confident that the third runway is never actually going to get built, for a variety of practical, financial and political reasons. I am inclined to trust Vince Cable to know what he is talking about.

(3) The western extension of the congestion charge will be abolished. This makes no sense from an environmental, transport or urban-planning point of view, and seems to be a straightforward caving-in to the Jeremy Clarkson petrolhead tendency. It suggests that Kulveer Ranger has won the argument about "modal agnosticism" and that we are now supposed to go back to regarding the private car as equally entitled to take up scarce urban road space (a finite public resource), despite the fact that its use of this resource is enormously inefficient compared with other road users (bus passengers, cyclists, pedestrians).

(4) Once the DLR extensions that are already well under way (to Stratford International and Woolwich) are finished, no further extension to the DLR will be planned. So the longer-term ideas of pushing it eastwards to Dagenham Dock, and westwards from Bank to Fleet Street, Charing X and Victoria (part of which would have exploited some existing disused infrastructure), are dumped.

(5) Thoughts of extending the tram network in Croydon seem to have fallen off the table.

What are we left with? Well, there is Crossrail, and contrary to some recent whispers it does now look as if this is going ahead. That is very good, but some are worried that part of the financial justification for it is based on the assumption of a third runway at Heathrow. Although nobody has, as far as I know, suggested anything so crude as a straight quid pro quo, one might wonder whether the BAA share of the funding, for instance, would melt away if they see that they are not going to get their wretched Heathrow extension. Are we going to be told that we can only have Crossrail if we also get the third runway?

Crossrail is a very long-term scheme, the benefits of which will not appear before ten years from now, at the earliest. Much more urgent, indeed a lot more important than anything else, is getting on with upgrading the existing Tube services. Some work is pottering along, but there are big delays because of the funding crisis. One tube station near me has now been boarded up for nearly three years, with no sign whatsoever of any work starting behind the hoardings. TfL has a jolly website called "We are transforming your Tube" which attempts to put everything in the best possible light, but if we look at the details we see that the Bakerloo Line, for example, is not going to be finished until 2020, even if all goes to plan from now on. And the trains on that line are already 36 years old.

Here, the mess we are in is NOT BoJo's fault, and not Ken Livingstone's either. The blame lies with Gordon Brown, and his crazed sidekick, former investment banker Shriti (now Baroness) Vadera, who concocted the Public Private Partnership scheme on which squillions of taxpayers' money has been wasted in a now completely discredited attempt to part-privatise the modernisation work. As Chris Randall writes in Rail Professional magazine:

Despite fierce opposition from London's then Mayor, Ken Livingstone, and his transport commissioner Bob Kiley, who, with great prescience, described the public private partnership as 'fatally flawed', it was steamrollered through by Gordon Brown. Four years later, one of the contractors, Metronet, folded owing £2bn, causing prime minister Brown political embarrassment. And now the remaining contractor, Tube Lines, is demanding at least an extra £1.4bn of public money to plug a widening funding gap.

And yet New Labour seems never to have uttered a word of contrition about this. They continue to behave as if the PPP is a wonderful idea. And Baroness Vadera is rewarded with a ministerial job (not at Transport, thank goodness).

Cripes! Boris goes all Keynesian

Well, I never. Until a couple of days ago or so, all Tories and the people they represent were scornfully dismissive of J.M. Keynes and everything he stood for.

How the worm turns! BoJo in today's Torygraph extols the virtues of Roosevelt's 1930s efforts to spend America's way out of depression by such projects as building the Hoover dam: 

It is no wonder, frankly, that the average tourist to America still spends a lot of time looking at 1930s infrastructure, because Roosevelt's New Deal created 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 bridges, 664,000 miles of road and 285 airports, as well as jobs for 8.5 million people. Like the German autobahns - built at roughly the same time - these investments were indispensable to the country's future growth and economic might.

The lesson to be drawn, says the Mayor, is that in our present economic mess we must press on with big projects in London: Crossrail for starters, various other rail schemes, the Thames Tideway tunnel, and maybe, in the long run, his favourite fantasy, a new airport in the Thames estuary:

We will beat this recession more speedily, and emerge in far better shape, if we make sure we put people to work in projects that boost the long-term competitiveness of the country. That means investing in the things that can radically improve the transport, attractiveness and general liveability of the capital city, the motor of the British economy. We may be in a hole, but the lesson of history is that tunnels and bridges and dams can bring jobs and growth.

Boris Johnson's attempt to pose as the new FDR is a bit rich: Crossrail and the other rail schemes, notably the transformation of the North London Line into the London Overground and the inclusion in the latter of the extended East London Line, due to open in a matter of months, were planned and got started under his predecessor, Ken Livingstone. BoJo has merely inherited them all. Ditto the various DLR extensions that are well under way.

Still, his confidence that Crossrail is definitely happening is reassuring. Presumably he knows something we don't, because all the rumours recently have been to the effect that the project is being drastically scaled down, as first noted back in August by The Railway Eye and later picked up by Private Eye.

Boris and transport: latest balance sheet

The latest newsletter of the London local group of the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) is out. You can download it here (PDF file). 

It reports good news and bad news on the progress or otherwise of the new Mayor - but sadly more of the bad than the good. (Why am I not surprised at that?)

GOOD NEWS:

- Isobel Dedring is the Mayor's new Environment Adviser. As former head of TfL's policy unit she entrenched the policy that car traffic must be restrained. This seems to presage a clash with the new Transport Adviser, Kulveer Ranger, who, as I noted a week ago, has delivered himself of the absurd view that all transport modes are equally valid.

- The Mayor says he wants to develop a scheme to protect local shops in the suburbs. If he means it, this will involve being much less accommodating to the big supermarkets (and their associated carparks) than any local politician hitherto.

- So far, the cycling and public transport investment programmes have been maintained in the budget.

BAD NEWS:

- Fares are going up by 6%.

- Ken Livingstone's "100 Spaces Programme" has been dropped. This "would have reversed decades of traffic domination in many strategic locations".

- CBT fears that Boris not only is set to abolish the Western Extension to the Congestion Charge, but might be "softening us up" to scrap the charge altogether. (I slightly doubt whether he could get away with that, myself.)

- The planned pedestrianisation of Parliament Square has been scrapped. So this highly symbolic space in front of Britain's most iconic landmark, supposedly the cockpit of the nation, will remain a mad, roaring jumble of people-hostile traffic.

- As threatened in his election campaign, the £25 congestion charge for gas-guzzlers will not go ahead.

- The Mayor appears to be backtracking on his earlier opposition to the Thames Gateway Bridge (one of TfL's few major errors in Ken's term of office), an environmentally unsound proposal which, if built, would generate much extra private car traffic.

- He has also backtracked on his opposition to expanding London City Airport. As CBT notes, it looks as if he has been "got at" by big business. (What did we expect? He is a Tory after all.)

- It is expected that traffic lights will be rephased in favour of cars and at the expense of pedestrians, starting almost immediately.

- No sign at all, apparently, of any long-term thinking at TfL on the financial and environmental unsustainability of running a fleet of 8,000 diesel buses. Boris seems to have junked Ken's small experiment with hybrids, no doubt because at present they are fiendishly expensive - but this could turn out to be a false economy in the long run.
(UPDATE: It turns out I was wrong about the hybrids. The hybrids trial is being expanded.)

- The Mayor seems to be blowing ominously cool towards the already much-delayed cross-river tram project. Residents, borough councils and businesses potentially affected are overwhelmingly in favour of it. It would be a catalyst for regeneration in deprived areas like Peckham. Its benefit-to-cost ratio is good. But Boris is apparently listening instead to the idiot Tory MLA Brian Coleman, whose distinctive platform is an irrational vendetta against all tram schemes, in the face of evidence (Manchester, Croydon, Sheffield, Nantes, Grenoble, Montpellier, Nice, Bordeaux, Zurich, Melbourne) that well-planned tram schemes bring huge transport, environmental and social benefits.

- Eight major new developments under way in London, such as the huge new shopping centre shortly to open at Shepherd's Bush, have an average of 8,000 parking spaces each as currently planned. This, of course, isn't Boris Johnson's fault, but as CBT notes, if he is serious about tackling congestion "he will need to ensure that parking provision is substantially reduced during the planning process". It is not sufficiently appreciated how much new parking provision acts as a magnet to traffic growth from many miles around. That, naturally, is what the developers want. In the long run, such developments accentuate the vicious circle of an increasingly car-dependent society, a process which happily has, up to now, gone less far in London than most other places, especially in inner and central London. In part this is precisely because of the relative lack and/or expensiveness of parking. This is not just an "outer suburbs" problem. The proposed new Stratford City in inner London, adjacent to the Olympic Site, is planned to have over 11,000 parking spaces. This nonsense must be stopped.

The sad demise of the bendy bus in London

Dave Cole writes that he actually uses bendy buses every day. He regrets the fact that they will be disappearing from his route when Boris Johnson's absurd and ill-informed (and expensive) election pledge kicks in next year.

As Dave points out, these buses are particularly well suited to the short, high-density "Red Arrow" routes, which have to mop up large crowds of passengers at mainline rail terminals. Lots of people are getting on and off all at once, making the bendy's three wide doors ideal for fast loading and unloading. The journeys are mostly too short for it to be worth the bother of trailing up stairs and down again.

In the case of route 521, there is also the problem that double-deckers won't be able to go through the Strand underpass, so they will get stuck in the traffic going round Aldwych to get on to Kingsway.

Dave notes that getting rid of these buses is policy based on tabloid prejudice, rather than the boring facts on the ground.

I myself wrote about bendy buses back in March, when it was still possible to hope that Ken Livingstone would get back in and put a stop to all this nonsense. I noted then that the anti-bendy campaign was being run by aesthetes and commentators who probably did not much use buses themselves, and that actual regular users were largely favourable. Now we have an "actual regular user" speaking up to that effect, but it is too late.