The Politics of Doing Not Being

1. On the “fewer white men at TfL” point – is CP suggesting that women and non-white candidates are losing out at the selection stage? Or is it that most of the TfL technical people (civil engineers, electrical engineers, land planners and so on) are white and male because those are the people who have traditionally studied and become qualified in these fields?

2. More (from recalling the conversation) that key decision-maker positions within management still fall into those demographics, for a variety of reasons, some of which you touch on.

3. In my first year doing an engineering degree, more than 40 years ago, there were two women and, as far as I recall no black people. Roll forward to today and the numbers/percentages are much, much higher. However, it takes 20 years (more or less) for an undergraduate to get to senior management. Thus whatever any of the candidates does today (and be assured they will build on TfL’s recruitment policy which is as fair and open minded as I have ever seen), their actions will only bear fruit after the Mayor in question is long gone.

4. Looks like a few ligatures have disappeared

   ” at has possibly been a weakness.” (That)
   “And we’ve got to nd other ways” (find)

5. No mention of air pollution, except possibly indirectly when referring to electric black cabs.

6. On Uber:
   “they’re going to drive everyone else out of the market. and then they’re going to hike fares. We’ve seen this model elsewhere in the world.”

   Really? It seems highly unlikely. If Uber tries to charge too much, consumers can go back to just phoning around local cab companies. All TfL need to do is prevent Uber from imposing restrictive contracts, e.g. preventing their drivers from also working for other agencies.

   On a practical level, companies such as Uber could provide anonymised travel data, which would help inform bus route planning.

7. Missing ligatures fixed. Cheers Andy.

8. I’m somewhat disappointed with what’s been said by CP. I accept we’ve only got an edit of what may have been a long and in depth conversation but far too much “politics” and not enough transport really. While I understand her point about “better representation” on the Board this is a typical left of centre politician’s point and the concept / need for “competence” is never stated. The TfL Board has to be competent and challenging not just full of “represenative” people. I also think it’s trite to portray people she’s met as “interested in the train set” when she is, at the same time, criticising the lack of resources and skills. I also agree with 100andthirty that it takes time for people to work their way up an organisation and I’ve seen huge strides made by TfL to push management development and to progress women and people with ethnic minority backgrounds. It is not something you fix in a 4 year Mayoral term and I would, again, want people to be promoted on their merits and performance not their gender or ethnicity. There is nothing worse than having “the right face” in a job where they are utterly hopeless and then demoralise everyone around them.

   I note, yet again, that CP fails to mention buses in any substantive way. This is in line with all the other Mayoral candidates (barring S Berry) who seem not to appreciate the role that buses play. This is based on having read all of their manifestos and also seeing some of their social media / mainstream media coverage. A pox on all their houses. I see CP does mention the dreaded “orbital” buses issues and thwacks TfL again but fails to point out that there are plenty of orbital bus routes in London – something TfL specifically pointed out to the Transport Committee. What she really means is the X26 bus which has retained its enhanced frequency despite not meeting TfL’s rules for “value for money”. Instead of making cheap jibes I’d be far more interested to know if CP wants more express buses, where they would run and how she would find the money to pay for them. I’m sure there is a role for some such routes but let’s not kid ourselves about the costs involved and the need to find increased subsidy to fund them (especially with the loss of £700m revenue grant).

   I’m deeply sceptical about things like the “early bird” fares concept on the tube. The peak already starts at 0630 and runs until about 1000 and I don’t think reducing TfL’s revenue base helps anyone even if she believes that she has identifed how to fill the shortfall. Of course it doesn’t help people reliant on National Rail services and I’m not sure that the idea wouldn’t fall foul of the DfT if it was to be applied to TfL Rail and Overground services given other TOC services run parallel. C2C use the TfL farescale between Upminster and Fenchurch St – I doubt they’d want to be losing money nor would they want an even more exacerbated peak demand. I also don’t think early bird fares would bring any congestion relief in the main peak. If any space was released it would be gobbled up within days so you end up with a small shift in time as to when people travel, less money overall and no congestion relief and you widen the fares gap between NR users and those who can use the Tube. A winner all round clearly! 😉

   I hoped for much better from CP. Sadly disappointing.

9. On creating more taxi ranks – surely that is yesterday’s solution. One of the reasons why Uber has thrived is that users can use smart phones to hail a cab. Similarly with Hailo and Gett. Taxi ranks are not only not places where we should expect users to go to to get a cab, but to use taxis efficiently we shouldn’t be encouraging them to sit around.

10. Re 130 and WW,

    I studied engineering a lot more recently than 130, the number of women on the course was 37% but the number of UK born and educated minorities was still very low (or rather 0 as all minority students in my year were actually educated abroad HK, Singapore, China (Shanghai), Malaysia, Thailand, Nigeria etc., only 1 is currently working in the UK.) By the time I finished my PhD when number of women as 1st year UGs was 43%, the number of minority students had also increased but still hardly any UK educated ones better than 0 in my first year.

    Double Maths A Level almost being a pre-requisite to studying engineering (due to single maths A-Level being dumbed down to enable grade inflation) will stop many potential students at schools where it isn’t taught – the problem starts a long time before university probably in primary school as is way out of TfL’s hands.

    The last thing TfL needs is extra problems occurring because they didn’t have to best possible people when there are lots of challenges.

    0730 early bird – Probably based on CP’s personal journey experience which has a fairly late starting peak, unfortunately the peak rush starts far earlier in other places in London. There is already the pre 0630 oyster discount on NR, tweaking that to pre 0700 arrival is far more realistic but getting out of bed earlier isn’t necessarily a vote winner.
    There is going to be a large pile of undeliverable promises from all the candidates, we probably need the OBR to vet all candidates financial plans especially where they interact with DfT and HMT…

11. @130, WW, ngh

    Mrs Long Branch studied engineering in the late 1980s in London and was one of the few women and visible minorities on the course.

12. Far too much management BS, e.g. “hit the ground running”, “plan … going forward” ( how can you plan otherwise?). It was as if she realised that she could now be appropriately technical, talking to specialists or at least knowledgeable people, but couldn’t rein in the effusive guff which, I’m afraid, sounded [Offensive name snipped. Let’s keep it civil shall we. LBM]. Not a Londoner, but if I was she wouldn’t get my vote.

13. @WW

    This is in line with all the other Mayoral candidates (barring S Berry) who seem not to appreciate the role that buses play.

    Do you really believe that Sadiq Khan, as the son of a bus driver, doesn’t understand the role that buses play?

14. @ Ngh – I note your comments and agree with them but discussion of the UK’s education system is *way* out of scope. 😉 Your comment about TfL needing competent people is spot on and I note with great concern the remarks from differing Mayoral candidates about their perception about TfL’s engineering function and its efficiency and the way in which individuals are being “highlighted” for having the experience they have and not being what candidates think, in some magical world, they should be. Everyone has to face new challenges and endeavours in every job to help build a wider experience and greater skills.

    There is the criticism about the use of consultants but some people will never, ever become permanent employees nor are they needed for long periods. You can’t deliver technically complex projects without recourse to the right experience and skills. TfL threw out an awful lot of consultants and contracted staff when I was there and that was the right thing to do. It then became extremely difficult to hire consultants or bring in agency people without MD level sign off. I’d be surprised if any of that has changed. However you don’t get stuff done like segregated cycle superhighways (a totally new challenge for London) or complex rail upgrades without hiring in some expertise.

    @ Ian S – I’m afraid I don’t think Mr Khan has any great views about buses. He’s a clever man and a political tactician and it’s very clear to me that a carefully crafted dialogue has been created as part of Mr Khan’s “appeal” to Londoners. The fact his dad apparently drove the 44 bus and that the young Sadiq used that route has zero bearing about his knowledge of today’s bus network, its funding or the challenges that the network has. It has *massive challenges* facing it because of what has happened to patronage, income and revenue support. Congestion and removal of traffic lanes to create cycle superhighways has increased the cost of running many services. Environmental pressures will also shove up the cost of vehicles, garage infrastructure and fuel / power. Every aspect of the bus service has gone in the wrong direction in the last few years and no one has a strategy or even a rough outline idea about what to do.

    Mr Khan’s manifesto, yes I’ve read it, mentions buses about 7 times and nearly all of those relate to his 1 hour bus ticket idea (stolen from the Lib Dems – Mrs Pidgeon has championed the idea for many, many years). There are no plans to improve bus services just a loose reference to environmentally friendly vehicles. There is not even a statement or remark about whether the 1 hour bus ticket will lead to more passengers on the buses or help the network become more efficient by allowing some routes to be altered to serve new places or buses freed up to create new routes (the latter two things happened in Hong Kong as a result of their bus to bus interchange scheme – a similar concept to a 1 hour bus ticket but more restrictive in its scope). Perhaps saying nothing avoids any future “hostages to fortune”?

    I know I have a “bee in my bonnet” about buses but they are the most used public transport mode in London (in terms of daily pass jnys). That they are being roundly ignored shows a lack of knowledge and also a failure to understand what is needed to deal with what is a simmering funding and operational “crisis”. I genuinely expected better than this from all of the main candidates. Surely they cannot be ignorant of the great gains made in the early 2000s under the first Mayoral term?

15. I would expect all the candidates to have some policy on fares. Any candidate will feel that he/she has to be seen to be doing something for ‘all Londoners.’ Service improvements, especially those that are infrastructure-led, inevitably affect a minority. Given the squeeze on the revenue grant, any fares restriction, no matter how limited, has to be very well thought through to be both affordable and have some impact. Perhaps the 1-hour bus ticket might have some potential in this respect but, as WW says, it has to be thoroughly considered and presented.

16. ngh 8 April 2016 at 17:06

    “Double Maths A Level almost being a pre-requisite to studying engineering (due to single maths A-Level being dumbed down to enable grade inflation) will stop many potential students at schools where it isn’t taught – “.

    Less than half of A levels are taken in the 6th forms of secondary schools.

    I thought every well-informed person knew that, apart from journalists on BBC radio 4.

17. Diversity in any workplace is a great thing and it does bring different perspectives, and I don’t doubt that TfL could do much better in this area. Women and minorities have been part of the LT/TfL workforce for well over the average career length, so I don’t buy that as an excuse. There weren’t many “windrush clippies” who made it to Senior Management.

    However, the suggestion that women bring the perspective of passengers whilst men can only think of train sets is both condescending and sexist. It also suggests a lack of real appreciation for the engineering required to solve those real passenger problems, and possibly a focus on tinkering around the edges rather than grasping larger structural issues. As ever, pointing at problems is not the most difficult part; finding workable and affordable solutions is.

18. The more I read about all candidates, the less optimistic I am about London’s future.
    I don’t doubt CP’s competence, but based on what is presented here, and having watched her performance and responses at many transport committee meetings via webcast, I fear she is perhaps somewhat flattering herself when she asks [i]’can I get technical?'[/i].
    Echo WW’s post and points. The faintest suggestion of positive discrimination somehow making a comeback is most disappointing to read, and looks to be an answer to a question on *transport* that few in London have asked. Do we not need the brightest most talented people, irrespective of personal attribute, to help us accommodate the biggest swelling of London’s population since the interwar period without chaos ensuing?
    It is very sad that the phenomenal progress made on bus travel over the first two terms has not only stalled but started to regress under the current mayor. I was hoping CP might pick up on this, but it would appear the false binary nature of bus vs bike is still too strong.
    All in all, underwhelming.

19. Still need time to dig into the details (which I would post an update later), but IMHO representing Lib Dems in these days quite reflects her political intelligence. This party neither …[Snip. sorry Patrikov, but general discussion about political parties must take place elsewhere. Would everyone please make sure that their contribution relates to the contents of the article, or closely related transport issues. Malcolm]

20. ABO
    As ever, pointing at problems is not the most difficult part; finding workable and affordable solutions is
    To which, may I add, half the “trick” is to ask the right / correct question – there’s an infinite number of facts out there – which are the relevant ones?
    And putting those two observations together to get something that is practical can be quite difficult.

    Ben
    Bus travel has stalled, because the traffic has snarled up (again) – caused, IMHO by a combination of unwelcome factors, which include, amongst other things … A big increase in small apparently-private cars (Uber), loopy policies by some local authorities forcing even local traffic on to major routes, yet more uncoordinated major roadworks, including “cycle superhighways” – (see Diamond Geezer), etc.
    I’m sure I’ve missed some. too.

21. I agree that competence is much more important than gender or ethnicity in hiring, and that you wouldn’t want to ignore it. And also that the broad stereotype of men=technical, women=personal is not that accurate.

    Provided that TfL is not institutionally racist or sexist – which I know nothing about, but the comments above indicate that it is not – then the broader questions of career opportunities in engineering etc are more of a schooling problem, and nothing to do with the mayor.

    However, I’ve certainly noticed that within the cycle campaigning community (my main experience of people thinking about transport), whilst there are men who think about “What about children?”, “What about short trips to the shops?”, etc etc, it is predominantly women who raise these issues. As long as our society as a whole has gender, class or ethnicity differences in what people tend to do (e.g. women more likely to be caring for children), these differences will appear in the way people travel. And whilst, of course, privileged white men are entirely capable of understanding these differences once raised, most won’t be bashed over the head with them in the same way as if they were facing the issues themselves every day.
    I’ve had to stand up in rooms with older white men who were assured that their experience was the only valid experience, and that if I had problems with the current situation, then the problem must be me. It’s not pleasant or easy.

    Unless you are prepared to be rigorously scientific about gathering data on people’s travel habits and opinions, and to do so frequently, some things will just get shuffled lower down the pile. As CP says, the issue of guide dogs is irrelevant to the vast majority – but very important to that small minority.

    Not sure that means different hiring practices – possibly more data gathering instead! Certainly issues that affect Londoners working minimum-wage jobs won’t be experienced by TfL graduate engineers of any background, so inclusive thinking needs to happen regardless.

22. Half-price fares before half past seven?

    Oh, that old chestnut. Variations on this theme are also suggested from time to time. Is this to apply to buses? This probably wouldn’t make that much different and not enough to change demand patterns. Would it apply to TOCs? If so, just from within London? If it did apply to TOCs then they would have to be compensated but is that a good use of money? Alternatively if it didn’t apply to TOCs and just applied to the tube you would exacerbate the North London (tube) – South London (TOC) divide when it comes to how much passengers pay for transport.

    This is one of these ideas that sounds attractive to politicians but creates all sorts of issues. Apart from anything else it introduces another time band when fares are different again from what is currently on offer. As Walthamstow Writer says, one could much more simply just start charging peak hour Oyster rates from 7.00 a.m. instead of 6.30 a.m. with much less fuss – but less of a political headline. You would still either need to either compensate the TOCs or create a more complicated system.

    On wonders whether people who suggest this realise how busy the tube can be prior to 7.30 a.m. There is, however, a more fundamental problem. With more frequent tube services and more people starting work early in the day we are approaching the situation where it is becoming a real problem to get all the tube trains out of the depot and in service by the time traffic has substantially built up. The Victoria line is probably the worst case of this with its single depot on a short busy line. In the case of the Victoria line this is not expected to be fully resolved until 2018. The Central line highlights a slightly different problem in that the main depots are some way out. So to get a full service by 6.30 a.m. in Central London the last train to be brought in service would need to leave Hainault depot by 6.00 a.m at the latest.

23. Politics is about the black art of getting elected, which requires telling the public things they will like — like one-hour bus tickets and half-price fares before 7am — as opposed to telling the public the reality of how bad London’s transport is getting and the substantial funds required to maintain and improve it to cope with the known growth ahead.

    CP, like the rest of the candidates (twelve in all) has to be elected before they could do anything, and that requires not scaring the electorate. We’ve discussed on LR many times the revenue shortfall which would follow from an one-hour ticket, but it “sounds good” to people ‘out there’ so it gets promoted by candidates. And whilst CP certainly has the benefit of a *London* political and GLA-related track record (which the others don’t) which should help her she doesn’t have quite the (single) name recognition of the two candidates likely to be in the final vote. Which is probably a pity as London politics could do with a shake-up.

24. “Driverless trains is the Tory answer to everything, but ultimately as you know – and as your readers know – the only way we’re getting driverless trains is with the New Tube for London, which will mean the Piccadilly line, the Bakerloo and the Central having all their trains replaced. And they will still have a cab, which will have to be taken off. And then you’ll still need to have platform edge doors, which you see on the Jubilee Line Extension, at every station, and then at that point you can take off those cabs and they become driverless trains. But you’ll still need a captain going up and down like on the DLR!”

    1st: Driverless trains doesn’t mean strike proof as the controllers in the SCC can still go on strike, as well as the maintainers (driverless train need a better level of maintenance). UTO means more flexible service and some extra passenger room.
    2nd: As far as I know, the new tube for London programme will be GOA4, which means UNATENDED train operation, so not like the DLR (see: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/board-160317-item12-ntfl-authority-2016-p1.pdf)
    3rd: Talking about driverless, I am disappointed that there is nothing about driverless cars and London’s strategy to lead the way.

25. For information. “Driverless” trains are discussed in a different londonreconnections article.

26. Alison W……. I recall the quote from LR’s valedictory interview with Sir Peter Hendy relating to your comment that “politics is about the black art of getting elected……”.

    He said (and has repeated the comment in other places since):

    “When Boris was elected we wrote down everything he said. And the first time I went to see him I said: ’Here’s a list of what we can do today – because that’s what politicians want to do – here’s a list of things we can do in a bit. Here’s the list of things that are more difficult. And here’s a little list of the things you probably shouldn’t have said and that we’re going to find bloody difficult. I didn’t say weren’t going to do them – but that we’ll find really difficult.”

    Whatever views or “fully costed programmes” candidates might have about their transport policies, assuming the successful one takes the TfL chair, then some of those policies might see the light of day, and others will sink without trace, because it’ll be certain that Mike Brown will have a similar conversation with whichever candidate wins. They will then have to deal with the realities of life.

27. This attack on our nominee passes by so many politicians really annoys me as a member of operational staff on LUL.

    The nominee pass is part of my negotiated pay and conditions. It’s not an extra cost, it’s part of my pay.

    So let’s have some honesty: these people believe that operational staff should be forced to take a pay cut.

    I won’t agree with it, but at least I’ll respect the honesty rather than this ridiculous dishonest pretence that somehow TFL is just giving away passes.

28. Anonymous 9 April 2016 at 20:09

    “The nominee pass is part of my negotiated pay and conditions. It’s not an extra cost, it’s part of my pay.”

    I used to know an MP who said the same about the 2nd home allowance. The 2nd home was in the London constituency, where he’d lived when first elected; the 1st home a hour away. This person was not a candidate at the next election.

    Nobody is going to buy your argument, because nobody else is paid that way.

29. @Alan Griffiths

    “Nobody is going to buy your argument, because nobody else is paid that way”

    On the contrary, many people, including me, get “benefits in kind” as part of their remuneration. Whether it’s health care, a tied cottage, or free travel (by public transport or a company car), and the tax system is well geared up to deal with it. Removing any part of your remuneration, whether pay, BIK, hours, or annual leave is a material change to your terms of employment and such changes cannot be imposed without agreement – as Jeremy Hunt is discovering – it is essentially a breach of contract.

30. I agree with timbeau and the anonymous staff member. Another way of making it clear that the proposal does amount to a pay cut is to note that the purpose is to save (or “avoid wasting”) money.

    A more equitable approach would be to estimate the cost of the passes, and replace them by sharing out the saved money as a pay rise. That might still not be acceptable to all staff, but at least it could be taken as a serious proposition.

    Comparison with MP’s second home allowance is invidious, because that allowance is now known to have been misused by some of its recipients. No-one is suggesting that nominee passes are misused to any significant extent (and if they were, there would be better remedies than blanket removal anyway).

31. @ PoP – I think there are a myriad issues associated with any tinkering of fares. You’ve covered several of them.

    – you risk complicating an already very complex fares structure.
    – making fares even cheaper prior to 0730 is bound to affect capping.
    – the Mayor cannot impose a reduction on NR services. As you rightly say this just causes even wider fare gaps and a sense of injustice in South London.
    – the Mayor and TfL are caught in obligations to the DfT where changing fares may cause problems on cross boundary / parallel routes (Abellio Greater Anglia and C2C largely). No candidate has explained how they’d deal with this.
    – I’d not be surprised if DfT have something to say about lowering peak fares on the Overground and TfL Rail services because of grant issues and the Crossrail Act.
    – There are almost certainly implications for future revenue flows on Crossrail and paying back some of the project’s borrowing. Ditto for future funding arrangements for CR2, Bakerloo Line extension and anything else.
    – As far as I understand things there is no early bird fare proposed for buses. You then get into issues about modal swap in some places where you don’t want it. The same question applies to Tramlink which charges bus fares and has transfer tickets to buses. No comments from any candidate about the implications here.
    – Your point about the service implications (depot roll outs) is very well made. There will also be consequences for driver rosters, numbers of drivers, station staffing, staff transport, maintenance / train prep etc. If you make stations crowded for more hours then you need more staff for longer. None of this comes for free.
    – Shifting travel on the tube also knocks on to the bus service where people use it to feed in to tube stations. When I was commuting I used to get a bus at 0640 – it was packed and I suspect it’ll be far worse now. The tube was not exactly devoid of passengers either but it wasn’t hell on earth. Overcrowding in the traditional peak has widened the AM peak anyway – you hardly need a fares incentive to widen it any more.

    It is noteworthy that all the above “issues” are not referred to by any candidate which instantly makes me question how their commitments can be “fully funded”. Perhaps the candidates would like to share their forecasts, predictions, assumptions and detailed financial calculations showing how these matters are covered?

    Oh look, clouds of tumbleweed. 😉

32. @Alan Griffiths
    As timbeau says, plenty of people are given benefits as part of their package. I know for a fact that Sky employees get free Sky subscriptions at home, for example, and Vodafone employees get a special staff tariff for them and a number of nominees. Employees at Formula 1 get a free pass to all the races and employees at Arsenal get free season tickets. Recently in the news there’s been upset about Cafe Nero employees losing free lunches because of the so-called living wage.

    Not only is it common for employers to provide perks based on their product or service, it makes great commercial sense, as generally the cash value of a product or service is more than the cost of providing it, after all that’s how they make money.
    In the case of the nominee pass, saying that it costs X amount is wholly theoretical, because it presumes that every single person who gets one would otherwise pay full price for the equivalent. Many nominee passes will be used rarely, off peak and in limited zones.

33. @ Malcolm / Timbeau / Anon – the suggested removal of nominee passes is one of those “simple” policies that are so attractive to politicians. However the possible consequences could be out of proportion to any realistic financial saving. As Timbeau rightly points out there are all sorts of “perks” in a vast range of occupations. Are they all going to be scrapped too? I am very sceptical about the quoted numbers for the alleged “extortionate” cost of nominee passes and if the Unions demand a larger pay increase to “compensate” for the loss (a highly likely scenario) then the cost will be vastly higher and would have implications for other costs like pensions (the TfL scheme). There is also the small issue of the affect of staff morale. If you want a really “upset” (ahem) workforce then going after benefits like this is a good way to achieve it. Not the best thing to do when you want your new policies introduced smoothly and working well.

    When I held a staff pass I was under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that it was a discretionary benefit that TfL could withdraw at any time. Now it may be different for operational staff and their T&Cs. One thing you didn’t do, if you had any sense, was to abuse the facility (or allow anyone like a nominee pass holder to do the same). The risk of losing the staff pass meant it was just not worth it. TfL can see where and how they are used as they’re all Oyster passes.

34. @ 100andthirty – I note your reference to the Sir Peter Hendy interview and how the Mayor’s policies were reviewed by TfL. While I am sure the same approach will be attempted I think we do need to seriously consider what some of the candidates might do if they were to win. I can see some of them wanting a clean slate in several parts of the “empire” they will lead. I have nothing against Mike Brown (I always got on very well with him) but I could see him being put on probation and possibly kicked out within a year. Ditto other senior TfL people plus others in the Met Police, Fire service and elsewhere. The choice of Deputy Mayors will be key in what happens here. The desire from a new Mayor to create a “new beginning” will be very tempting (even though it has enormous risks too).

35. That’s why I’m particularly concerned about mr khans fare 1 year fare cut and 4 year freeze all to be paid for by closing the cable car and efficiencies. The effect on tfl could be disastrous. Potentially it could set the tfl at war with with central government over future grants. I cant see them granting further capital spending just to subsidise fares.

    It may suit mr khan to be at with a tory government and hope the electorate blame them for not paying for his price freeze, but I can’t see it being good for London.

36. WW I don’t disagree with what you fear (?) might happen, but whatever the outcome, TfL will lay out the facts together with the likely consequences of the various policies. TfL is pretty good (although not infallible) with its financial forecasting. Therefore if the new Mayor does decide on a clean sweep, they will, at least, know the facts.

    Perhaps tbe Mayor will choose the worst of all the options available (remember PPP), we must wait and see!

37. Rational Plan: Yes, that is a cause for concern. But I would suggest that we should not feel surprised. As a member of the Opposition party, he has to differentiate his offering. If the system permits London and the UK to be led by different parties, and it does, then that’s going to happen from time to time.

    As we have already seen, there can be disagreement between the mayor and the national government, even when they are in the same party. But they are all politicians. Things get worked out.

38. Perhaps we are being a little unfair on CP. She clearly has good knowledge of the transport system (seemingly a lot stronger than many of the other candidates!) but one could argue that nobody can get “technical” enough to satisfy the mix of enthusiasts and industry professionals who frequent LR.

    Personally, I would support the removal of the companion pass, to be replaced with a discounted Oyster card (⅓ off off-peak fares). This could encourage a very gentle shift away from peak travel by a very small group, but surely every little helps?

39. @timbeau: “a material change to your terms of employment and such changes cannot be imposed without agreement – as Jeremy Hunt is discovering – it is essentially a breach of contract.”

    I don’t mean to go off-topic, but the vast majority of junior doctors have 1-year contracts, so Jeremy Hunt can do whatever he likes whether the doctors agree or not, and all they can do is move to Australia.

40. Anonymous at 09:19. I cannot find any trace on line of a London Companion pass. If you are referring to the national bus pass scheme, that has a scheme where some disabled people can be accompanied by a companion. Restricting that would not be within the powers of a London Mayor. In any case, targeting disabled people to save a little bit of money has recently got George Osborne in a spot of bother (rightly so, in my view).

41. Perhaps Anonymous @ 09:19 is using the term “companion pass” to mean nominee pass?

42. As a worker on London Underground, I do despair of Tfl being used as a convenient football by local politicians.

    We have enough to deal with with internal management (metal in boots for a micro issue without even mentioning all the problems with fftfs – looking forward to a London Reconnections analysis a year or so down the line).

    tfl I imagine would be loathe to withdraw nominee passes – would impact the whole of tfl, bus operating employees as well as London Underground employees (and those that have retired with 20 years of service).

    Of course the £7m (tfl estimate of lost revenue) could be found elsewhere
    Garden Bridge project
    Scrapping Night tube (will be loss maker for years )
    Getting rid of private health care discounted schemes benefits for management grades
    Getting rid of the 60 plus pass (especially during peak hours)
    Getting rid of the free travel for off duty police from various areas (some have oyster some don’t but are entitled to free travel even when not working ie the same as tfl staff)

    I could go on but I won’t (dread to think how much money spent on external consultants) the reason the nominee pass is targeted is that it is an easy score, great headlines in the Evening Standard and doesn’t provoke anger in the general population.

    Guessing that the lib dems and the Tories figure that they will not get tfl staff vote anyway and many live outside of London (I could not afford to move back in).

    Within the transport rail industry free travel for family is still a fairly standard perk – just a shame that politicians try to make a cheap headline by diminishing workers conditions.

    (On a personal level would make a difference of around £100 per year for me – if that as my partner rarely uses. )

43. @Bored of football – 10 April 2016 at 11:38

    Of course the £7m (tfl estimate of lost revenue [from nominee passes] ) could be found elsewhere

    I am not sure how the ‘loss’ has been calculated, but if it is on the assumption that the value = an annual all zones pass, the erroneous assumption is then made that without such a pass the nominee would still make a number of journeys equivalent to the value of that pass. I suspect that if withdrawn and the nominee had to pay for each journey, the actual revenue would be far less in most cases.

44. @Mike @Malcolm

    Apologies, I did indeed mean the nominee pass. Slip of the tongue!

45. This is the update I have promised.

    Not many things I can say about, so some simple points.

    A. The primary reason of private transport in central London is that rich people do not want to travel with others (the inconvenience, safety, etc.). Increasing congestion charge won’t work, because it is difficult to correctly estimate their affordability.

    Considering that, things have to be dealt with in a different way. Planning is the key – not only the transport structures, but also where people live and work. Diverting demand to wherever affordable is always a better thing to do.

    It’s slightly unfortunate that Ms Pidgeon didn’t manage to address this aspect enough. As far as I see the Barking Riverside project is the only planning part she had made serious comment on.

    B. From what I personally experienced, segregated cycle lanes could have been done better. For example, making some back streets cycle-only is probably a better idea than forcing the way through main roads.

    Maybe it’s Boris who messed that up, but it’s nonetheless a good thing that Ms Pidgeon didn’t try to take too much credit from the council’s effort.

    C. The practicality of one-hour bus tickets really depends on how long a *desired* (note it’s different from “average”) bus journey take.

    Pity that London doesn’t charge bus journeys according to the distance travelled – of course I know outer London journeys’ distance would go up exponentially, but I think (re-)introducing fare differentiation would be more productive than charging a flat fare across the area. Can you imagine by paying the same amount of money, one can travel on the X26 all the same as some short feeder routes?

    To be frank this is the main reason that I chose to walk as much as possible when I was in London. Of course I am being a good kid here, but imagine if it’s someone who owns a car and is in London for a living.

46. @ Rational Plan – we already know that TfL did not get the capital grant funding it wanted (Ms Dedring said as much to the London Assembly). We also know that the revenue grant is going two years earlier than had been previously agreed (that would be the secret agreement that was not made public [1]). Now we also know, courtesy of the DfT letter to Mayor Johnson about the last funding settlement, that the DfT will NOT provide any compensation / extra grant if a future Mayor decides to reduce fares. That letter also includes various other statements about future agreement which imply funds moving *from* TfL to DfT (e.g. Crossrail running to Reading – the FGW franchise has to be kept “financially whole” if passengers transfer to Crossrail from FGW services).

    [1] previous funding letters do not disclose the general grant phasing for later years.

47. Patrickov,

    We have been through this before but I think it highly unlikely fares would go up “exponentially” which has a very specific meaning (and doesn’t imply large – merely describes the type of growth). I am not sure which word you mean. Proportionally? Disproportionally? Drastically?

48. @PoP:

    Sorry for my wrong use of words.

    What I meant is that, as outer locations tend to be farther away from each other, if bus routes there are fared according to the distance, the fare they charge may be significantly higher than those confined to inner London boroughs. And regardless of the number of journeys involved, this faring model may make orbital travel prohibitive.

49. @Patrickov
    It would be quite possible to have distance-related fares where the pence per mile rate differed according to what area of London you were in. So a £2 would get you a mile in central London, but three in the outer suburbs. (Essentially, we charge for the number of fare stages passed through, but make the stages shorter in central London)

    But anything other than a flat fare system will require people to touch out when they leave a bus – which will be a new habit people will have to learn, as they have never had to do so on leaving a bus (even pre-Oyster, there was no need to show your ticket on alighting: the conductor might challenge you if he remembered what ticket you’d bought and realised you were over-riding.

50. Sorry, i may have kept ahead a few stages. Mr khan has said his freeze will only cost £457 million, tfl say £1.9 billion. its is not believable that this can be paid for from efficiencies. So it will either have to come from increasing the mayors precept on the council tax bill, or slashing tfls capital budget. It does not take genius to guess how this can play out. This is his central populist pledge, if he does not do it he is destroyed, unless he can blame someone else. He could blame central government for not respecting his mandate of the people of London, blame the cut in grant that is already known about. Such a poisonous relationship will not prove conducive for any extra money for London.

    It may suit Mr khan to be at war with central government, it did ken little harm. If the tube investment programme collapses , then he’ll blame the cut in grant not his fare freeze. If the Piccadilly grinds to a halt, then it wont be fault etc, just the tories neglect of London.

51. timbeau 9 April 2016 at 22:39

    “On the contrary, many people, including me, get “benefits in kind” as part of their remuneration”

    Perhaps my point didn’t come across very clearly. I was intending to suggest that there wouldn’t be much more than verbal solidarity from other trade unionists if, for example, nominee passes weren’t included in any new job offers.

    Benefits in kind for someone other than the employee are scare, certainly in the trading public sector.

    A home on the job, such as for resident housing caretakers and for Schoolkeepers, is generally regarded as a restriction rather than a benefit, and the numbers of both are not what they were.

52. Alan Griffiths: Good to see a bit of rowing back, restricting the removal of nominee passes to new job offers only. (Though that would make the immediate cash saving much less, which might make the game less worth the candle).

    I think the logic of nominee passes, although they in a sense are benefits to “someone other than the employee” is that they can make it possible for someone to accept a job, say as a train driver based at Upminster, when they may have a partner whose skills make them unemployable in the Upminster area, but who have, or can get, a job in Stratford (say). And, as has been pointed out, they can be offered by the operator at “cost price”, just like free burgers can at Macdonalds (say, though I’ve no idea if they do).

53. @WW and others

    Assuming the following:
    – Mr Kahn (and the other candidates) must make some change on fares;
    – the government position does not change (it won’t);
    – Kahn (and Pigeon, as discussed above) is in a position to row back his/her existing fares policy to an extent,
    – and that the new mayor (of whatever party) wants to limit any fight with the government,

    What, if any, scope exists for playing with fares?

54. Benefits in kind — like nominee passes — have a *value* which is out of proportion to their *cost*, with the former much higher than the latter. They also tend to be tax-efficient for the recipient because of this. Removing it from the staff package would therefore cost a lot both financially and in the staff-company relationship sense. Its existence is, though, likely to enable staff to find somewhere affordable to live within the TfL area to commute from; without it that might not happen.

    Removing the 60+ option would save a little from the GLA budget but, in a similar manner to the nominee pass, won’t be used by the majority of recipients every day in the rush hour. (If it wasn’t for the fact I have a disabled pass I’d be getting mine next week though :0 )

    Realistically, we (the traveling public and the transport connoisseurs alike) will be stuck with whomever gets elected and transport isn’t likely to be the decision most voters make that choice on.

55. @Patrickov
    The traffic issue in central London is no longer private cars. These now make up less than 5% of peak hour traffic. While it’s true to say that the congestion charge would have to be increased very substantially to affect many of these, this is not because they are ‘rich’ but more because they have free reserved parking places provided by their employer. There is a very strong correlation between journeys to work in central London by car and free off-street parking.

    The bigger issue in central London is now light goods vehicles (white vans). Increasing the congestion charge will have an effect here, albeit not quite in the same way as it has had on cars.

56. Having recently watched “The Tube – Going Underground” ep 2 & 3 and as a regular user of ‘heavy rail’ as well as buses, Underground and Overground ‘outer circle’ services:

    1 the nominee pass is a rounding error in the accounts; abolition would be the perfect way to upset the people you rely on.

    2 messing with the financial settlement mid programme would be a “brave decision”

    3 triage a la Hendy is absolutely the right approach. I hope Mike Brown’s people are preparing lists (& yes, it’s a deliberate reference to “The Mikado”)

    4 I hope (& would like to believe) that Mike Brown is a better manager than he appeared on the programme (see, eg, ‘District Dave’, passim).

    5 Caroline looks a much better bet (at least from a transport pov) than “We had intended you to be
    The next prime minister but three…” (Hilaire Belloc) candidates from the red and blue teams.

    6 I wish our esteemed editor well in his Titanic efforts to bring us similar reports from those candidates.

57. @ Answer=42 – well if I was going to do something on fares I’d want to do the following. It would cost something to do but unlikely to be as potentially controversial as some of the schemes.

    1. I would keep to RPI annual increases. Sorry but you need the money to keep coming in. Any increases in the TfL precent would be capped and it only raises £6m per annum anyway.

    2. I would recreate a proper price differential in peak and off peak caps. I don’t agree with the change that priced up the off peak and effectively cut the peak daily cost. I think it was perverse to effectively cut the cost of travel at the most congested time of the day.

    3. I would restore the Z26 / Z29 caps and daily travelcards. I actually think this would be very popular and not overly expensive.

    4. I might price up the AM peak on the buses (and trams) given buses are now cashless.

    5. I would consider having a 1 hour bus ticket but it would be priced higher than a single fare. This is to lower the cost impact of implementing such a scheme. I might also price up the bus and tram daily cap marginally to create “space” in the tariff between single / 1 hour / daily cap prices. Let’s say the single fare is £1.50 then the 1 hour ticket would be £2.50 (second jny charged at £1, subsequent ones zero if within one hour of first touch in) and daily cap say £4.70 (an increase from now).

    6. I would consider creating a genuine off peak Travelcard season / weekly cap. There are enforcement issues here and it would require much better enforcement of ticket gates. There would also be significant issues here for National Rail and revenue compensation to the DfT. It would depend on the pricing structure and market elasticity / peak spread. However done properly it could grow a new market segment and ease some aspects of peak congestion (if people can shift travel times).

    7. I would negotiate a 4 year plan with government to get rid of the three tariffs that apply to tube / rail / DLR / Overground and just have 1 rail PAYG tariff. I’d also want the Z1 add on fare for NR / tube through journeys gone. Given the likely absorption of suburban services by TfL there is a ready made programme to refinance / rebase the revenue aspects of South London franchises. I think this would go a long way to easing affordability complaints for a significant number of people.

    8. I would want the amended Oyster system brought in as quickly as possible to provide a flexible platform to extend Oyster to some places outside the zonal area and to give pricing and product flexibility.

    I would NOT set about faffing around with zone boundaries.

    The aim with the above ideas would be to not fall foul of obligations to the DfT or to screw up the revenue base (essential for part funding future projects). There is a recognition that you need to balance discounts in some areas with possible pricing up where the market can take it. I’m not saying any of the above is easy but I think it is more “saleable” to people as an all round package. I also think it is less open to “attack” on the usual political lines as it would benefit a number of different categories of passengers without denting the TfL budget too severely (I hope!). And now for the LR commentariat criticism. 😉

58. @WW
    “I would NOT set about faffing around with zone boundaries”
    That’s my vote lost , for one!
    It is high time these were reviewed. There are anomalies, and such issues should not be ducked as “too difficult” or “too minor” or too local. We all pay our council tax. We all pay our council tax. We all have a vote.
    If mucking around with caps, which only affects a few people who happen to have certain travel habits matters, so does reviewing zone boundaries, although they may also only affect a few people.

59. @AlisonW: Politics is about the black art of getting elected, which requires telling the public things they will like

    I’m not sure I agree – a well-tried political technique is to say that everything is going to hell in a handcart and that drastic action is needed to Make [Wherever] Great Again. For whatever reason none of the candidates this time around have chosen to do a “transport misery”-type campaign, but I’m sure someone will try it one day.

    @Rational Plan: Mr khan has said his freeze will only cost £457 million, tfl say £1.9 billion

    TfL aren’t comparing like with like – they are counting over a 5 year business plan period not a 4 year mayoral term, are including projected foregone additional revenue from Crossrail etc, and are assuming an RPI+1% fare increase every year, which itself would cause issues, given central government policy to keep national rail fares at RPI.

    Note that the current mayor has only increased fares by RPI, not RPI+1%, but has put RPI+1% increases in the forward business plan. Apres moi le fares hike, as Louis XV would say.

    An aside – using RPI, a mathematically flawed index deprecated by the Office for National Statistics, is itself pretty dubious, though it suits both sides of politics as it tends to overstate inflation. At the moment RPI is 1% higher than CPI.

    @WW: There was an interesting interview with TfL’s head ticketing person in Modern Railways recently that mentioned that TfL now think weekly capping on Oyster PAYG is feasible. If weekly seasons were withdrawn and replaced by a slightly higher weekly PAYG cap, does that count as a fare increase?

    The interview also suggested that Crossrail reaching Reading is the deadline for the change to Oyster to allow more outboundary fares etc – that there won’t be more zones as such created, so the system has to get more flexible. The tricky thing being the millions of cards already out there that may not work with a new system.

    Fares outside Greater London are another potential area for fudging promises on fares freezes.

60. @timbeau: the problem with removing anomalies in the zone boundaries in the context of heavy pressure on revenue is that anomalies are likely to be removed by equalising everyone in the upwards direction. Be careful what you wish for!

61. Walthamstow Writer
    ” I would consider having a 1 hour bus ticket but it would be priced higher than a single fare.”

    Would this be as a replacement for the current journeys? I assume not, based on your comments about the second journey costing £1. But to limit the cost of the scheme in terms of multiple journeys within the hour might it be necessary to do so? Seeing the data on journeys would be interesting to model what kind of price you’d need to get it to be revenue-neutral. Four effects strike me as pertinent:

    1. The loss of revenue from those who’d otherwise buy a second ticket within the hour.
    2. The loss of revenue from those who’d no longer travel by bus at all if they had to pay more for a single ticket (assuming hourly tickets replacing single ones rather than complementing them).
    3. Additional revenue from those who upgrade from a single to an hourly ticket because of the price cut.
    4. Additional revenue from those who start travelling by bus because the hourly ticket makes it worthwhile whereas another non-bus option was previously better.

    If hourly ticket replace single trip tickets, my guess is that their bluntness as a pricing mechanism makes them less useful than single tickets. If they complement hourly tickets then their effect seems to be a discounted pre-paid pair of tickets. The additional fare structure complexity doesn’t seem worth it to me.

    But, having said all that, I must say that all the rest seems eminently sensible. And with that I’ve perhaps tarred your campaign for the LR commentariat vote!

62. Pricing is a tough nut to crack.

    The “1-hour ticket” suggestions miss a fundamental point: London is a city of two, very different, halves. North of the Thames, you have 90% of the Tube network, any number of dual- (and even triple-) carriageways, flyovers, dive-unders, etc. South of the river, you got diddly-squat.

    A one-hour ticket north of the river will get you a lot further than a one-hour ticket south of the river.

    For such a ticketing system to work, you really do need a balanced infrastructure right across the city. Paris, Berlin, Rome, etc. have such infrastructure. London does not. Try and impose such a system and south Londoners will rise up in revolt.

    That’s not to say a time-based tariff couldn’t work, but it cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution like a simple 1-hour ticket.

63. Oh my goodness
    I seem to have started a trend for numbered paragraphs. Apologies to all.

    ‘In $Deity I trust; all others must bring data’ is a good principle. I imagine that a structured query (or ten or one hundred) on the Oyster/contactless data base (two words for a reason) could tell the commentariat a *lot* about the quantum of the proposed changes, *assuming unchanged behaviour*.

    Luckily, economists have made quite some progress examining how behaviour changes in response to price signals. And we have evidence from the most recent Tube strile, at least on behavioural change when lines and stns are not avaa2

    Wouldn’t it be lovely if some people (I am *not* volunteering) subjected these proposals to fact-based tests. *Of course* there will be ppl who disagree. Fine; please propose an alternative method (not ‘methodology’, pace Maureen Lipman in her 1980s (? 90s?) telecom advertising guise?

64. @Anomnibus: Both North and South London have bus routes and a similar level (and average speed) of bus service. The major beneficiaries of the proposed one-hour bus ticket would be people who have to change buses, who currently pay two fares.

    The question of how far you can get in a hour is irrelevant – the thinking behind timed tickets is that a given span of time is a proxy for one journey (however many vehicles it takes). The 1 hour (or 90 minute or whatever) time element is simply intended to designate one journey and to cover all stages of that journey on a single fare. The other way of doing this is to give out free transfer tickets on the first vehicle, but these are prone to fraud.

    The attractive thing about such a ticket from TfL’s point of view would be that by removing the financial penalty from interchanging, it becomes less politically toxic to propose network changes which increase the need for interchange between bus routes.

    @Old Buccaneer: I expect TfL will already be modelling a wide range of scenarios for the incoming mayor’s consideration, including modelling likely behavioural changes from different fares options, and calculating the implications for revenue, overcrowding, costs etc. This would include options compatible with the manifestos of the two main candidates, but probably not Caroline Pidgeon’s.

65. @harry Crayola
    “[Walthamstow Writer ]…would consider having a 1 hour bus ticket but it would be priced higher than a single fare.
    Would this be as a replacement for the current journeys? I assume not, based on your comments about the second journey costing £1. But to limit the cost of the scheme in terms of multiple journeys within the hour might it be necessary to do so?
    Four effects strike me as pertinent:

    1. The loss of revenue from those who’d otherwise buy a second ticket within the hour.
    2. The loss of revenue from those who’d no longer travel by bus at all if they had to pay more for a single ticket (assuming hourly tickets replacing single ones rather than complementing them).”

    You forget that “tickets” no longer exist on the buses. Oyster/contactless would simply charge a lower price if it detects that you are touching in on a bus within an hour of having previously done so. So an hourly ticket is simply an add-on to the single ticket you have already paid for, applied if, and only if, you use a second bus. No need to decide when boarding the first bus which you need.
    Note also that, as at the moment, once you have touched in you can stay on the bus as long as you like – it is touching in within an hour of the first touch in that is measured.
    This may lead to some oddities, if you have a journey made up of a twenty minute ride and a 65 minute ride, as the outward trip your second touch-in will be within the hour but on the return it won’t.

66. quinlet
    Are you sure about the “white vans”?
    I was under the impression that there has been a significantly large increase in the number of hire-vehicles ( Yes, I can spell Uber ) on the roads …
    IMHO a n other reason for levelling the “playing field” regarding “for hire” traffic.

    Anomnibus
    South of the river, you got diddly-squat.
    Ah so the ex-LSWR main line does not count, & nor do the A3, A316, A2 & A20 I presume, or are figments of my imagination?

67. Comparisons between North and South London are not very interesting in themselves. When they are anchored to a particular claim, such as we had here (that a one hour bus ticket would have a differential impact on the two moieties) then they become cogent. But the discussion should then be based, to make sense, on total statistics (such as the total number of tube stations each side of the river, or the average bus speed), rather than trading pointless lists of individual (“anecdotal”) items, such as 4-track roads or railways. Please.

68. Who are the folk who would potentially benefit from a 1-hr bus ticket? If they are regular commuters who take a two-bus journey to work, then presumably they make the same journey at the end of the day too. And given contactless bus travel is capped at £4.50 a day anyway, doesn’t that effectively already do the job of two 1-hr tickets?

69. @WW
    Thank you for a very comprehensive answer. Hopefully, people in City Hall and the various campaign advisors are reading.

    I’m with Ian J on the replacement of RPI with CPI in the fares formula. It’s not entirely straightforward, so constitutes an additional task.

    I think simplicity and politics will both dictate that the one hour bus ticket would have to replace the existing ticket. Two sources of (partial?) replacement revenue are your proposal for a peak hour price differential; and the additional revenue consequent on restructuring bus routes as you described earlier.

    Timbeau’s oddity is actually a reasonable reflection in price of the journey length. The passenger still makes a saving.

70. @timbeau
    “You forget that “tickets” no longer exist on the buses. Oyster/contactless would simply charge a lower price if it detects that you are touching in on a bus within an hour”

    Tickets do still exist, but it’s somewhat difficult to forget the fact they’re wholly electronic now! Instead, I was making assumptions about the hourly ticket (whether an electronic ticket via a contactless card, or some other form) under the complementary scenario that, as you imply, would not be practical – ie, having a choice at the beginning of the first journey, rather than it operating as a price cap.

    Perhaps it would be useful to have a distinction in terminology between
    1. “1 hour tickets” to refer to either
    a) the replacement of single tickets with hour long tickets, or
    b) a system which allowed passengers to choose at the beginning which ticket they wanted, and…
    2. “1 hour price capping” to refer to retaining the single ticket pricing but capping the price paid for subsequent journeys within the hour

71. @ Timbeau – I excluded changing the zones in the full knowledge that you wouldn’t like it. 😉 The problem is that so many groups and MPs and others think their particular circumstance is “unfair” that I don’t believe you can start tackling the issue without causing a stampede of demands. Once that starts everyone will join in and you simply can’t get to a solution that doesn’t upset someone or disadvantage people who were previously perfectly happy. I also think any changes would have to be tied to franchise changes with bidders being required to provide bids that cater for a possible zonal change(s). This way the competitive process can probably deliver a more affordable solution that dealing with an incumbent operator whose only incentive is to say “more, more, more (sucks teeth) sorry even more money”. Even where TfL may take over inner suburban services you still have a parallel TOC running on the fast lines and their finances would be affected so you need a co-ordinated approach or else it’s back to dealing with an incumbet with a begging bowl.

    @ H Crayola – my proposal with bus fares was to keep the single fare broadly unchanged, then have a 1 hour ticket but at a price less than the cost of 2 single fares and then to have a daily cap that was priced up slightly from the current £4.50. We know from past Mayor’s Answers plus previously disclosed “Fares Advice to the Mayor” papers that the cost of a 1 hour bus ticket varies between £50m-£70m per annum depending on the scale of discount offered. I was aiming to limit the extent of additional subsidy by not discounting the second (or subsequent trips) too aggressively. Pricing up the daily cap is also part of trying to offset the scale of susbidy needed. I can’t possibly say whether my idea would be revenue neutral but I suspect it wouldn’t be. Clearly some of the Mayoral candidates are proposing a 1 hour ticket at the cost of a current single fare which implies extra subsidy of about 4-5% of the expected total bus revenue in 2016/17 (approx £70m out of £1.56bn – source Mayor’s Answer / TfL business plan).

    @ Old Bucaneer – I often write answers using numbered paras so don’t beat yourself up. I wasn’t following a trend.

    @ Ian J – Boris increased fares by RPI+2 and RPI+1 in his early years. It is only when the Government got cold feet over going to RPI+3% that we got to a position of only RPI increases. I think that’s applied for the last 3 years. Only in two of those three years have Government provided additional grant funding to “fill in the hole” left by not increasing by the extra 1 percent. You will recall the headlines about Boris and George being “at war” and TfL having to juggle the budget to find the money because of no extra money from the Treasury.

    Let’s be honest – Boris was more than happy to ramp up fares because he wanted to get subsidy down without too much impact on services. Network bus susbidy has fallen by nearly £200m a year since 2008 with subsidy per passenger journey being 15p (2013/14 figures). He’s been very lucky in that population increases and general economic performance have kept transport demand bouyant throughout most of his Mayoralty. It could have much much harder without that beneficial backdrop. It is only very recently that things have gone awry on the buses but I doubt he cares very much about that.

    @ Anomnibus – I don’t know where you get your ideas at times. North London has very busy bus services regardless of the tube’s existence. Using the most recent TfL numbers (2014/15) the top 14 busiest bus routes all run north of the Thames. There are loads of journeys that are simply not very practical by tube or rail. The other issue is demographics and there are plenty of people across London who simply can’t afford to use rail transport. They therefore use the buses and would likely benefit from the 1 hour bus ticket. Even relatively well off areas like Kingston or Ealing have bouyant bus usage.

72. @Greg
    “South of the river, you got diddly-squat.
    Ah so the ex-LSWR main line does not count, & nor do the A3, A316, A2 & A20 I presume, or are figments of my imagination?”

    @Malcolm
    “But the discussion should then be based, to make sense, on total statistics (such as the total number of tube stations each side of the river, or the average bus speed), ”

    Greg is not comparing like with like – most of the ex-SR lines whizz through inner London without stopping (e.g first stop New Cross, Denmark Hill) or, where there is an inner London station, it has a very low frequency service by Tube standards(Queenstown Road, Brixton). As for arterial roads (and, Anon, I know of no triple-carriageway roads unless you count service roads) it is certainly true that Middlesex was more proactive than Essex, Surrey or Kent in pre-war days, with a mcuih denbser network of multi-lane dual carriageways such as the A316 Great Chertsey Road (Greg’s may care to note!) generally extending much closer to central London than they do in the south – the most obvious comparison being between the North and South Circular Roads.

    But what this has to do with bus speeds I am not sure – for very good reasons buses tend to use local roads rather than bypasses, and act as feeders to rail services (whether operated by tfL or some French, Dutch, Scottish or other non-local interest) rather than compete with them.

    However, this is mainly due to geography rather than politics – as London is in the SE corner of the country, there is inevitably more traffic, and therefore major roads, running through the NW suburbs – this also accounts for the differences in rail networks, with the northern and western companies much less reliant on commuter traffic to pay their way.

73. In many German cities where zonal fares and time-based tickets are almost universal, there is often another layer of ticketing the ‘Kurzstrecke’ (short trip). This normally covers between three and six stops (depending on mode, as trams/U-Bahn are normally included with buses. WW’s idea of an hourly ticket on top of the current single bus ticket would create something vaguely similar in London. However, what looks like the simplest way of implementing it with Oyster/Contactless – ie charging a reduced fare for a second journey start within a specified time- makes it somewhat similar to the Transfer tickets that some US public transport systems offer.

    As has been said already, the benefit (if priced OK) will be to allow changes to the routes so that interchange becomes a more accepted way of travelling than it is now with what is currently a significant penalty deterring people from changing buses.

74. The one hour bus ticket is only fixing half a problem. I’d much rather see a single multimodal journey charge when using buses.
    With Oyster, it can’t be difficult to work out and charge appropriately.

    An example – I live in Zone 3, so if the rail service is up the swanny, like it was this morning, I could conceivably and realistically get a bus to the tube station and continue from there. But instead of once charge of £1.70 for my Z3-Z2 ticket, I end up paying the £1.70 for the tube, plus the extra bus journey.
    Yes, I could buy a weekly travelcard, but for my commute to Z2 it doesn’t cost out.

75. @ Brad – having one universal tariff regardless of mode probably would not work in London without vastly curtailing short distance travel or damaging the bus network. The Green Party are proposing a single multi fare by 2025. The problem is that they don’t actually say what that fare would be. However you can get a clue from their proposal to lower fares for Z1-4, 1-5 and 1-6 but continuing to increase prices in Zones 1, 2 and 3. This suggests that the current Z1-3 fare would become the new flat fare. Do we really want a peak bus fare of £3.30 and off peak of £2.80 (using current fares)? That’s an increase of 120% in the peaks – that’s worthy of the Law Lords decision over Bromley’s challenge to the GLC’s low fares. I simply cannot see that sort of increase being acceptable. Heck it’d be a considerable hike of the Z1 tube fare and that’s not exactly cheap.

    The only other way round this scale of increase is to vastly increase fares subsidy to the network as a whole. That is not going to happen for a long while (we’ve just had it reduced to zero) and will require a change of government and tax increases of various forms. People don’t typically vote for tax increases in this country although they like the sorts of things that those increases would pay for. As I’ve said many times before transport, despite its overall importance to the economy, rarely features in voter priorities.

    btw I do completely understand the point you make about the unfairness of the structure when using alternative modes.

76. Ian J: Sadly, when you do an opinion poll asking people whether they would be happy to pay more tax in order to fund (whatever you want to fund) they regularly say yes. But in the privacy of the ballot booth they don’t. ‘Hostage to fortune’ applies to all pre-election political statements.

    Walthamstow Writer: I like your options, except that I’m not sure how you’d manage a one-hour ticket that wasn’t priced as a single journey. Charge the hour rate and refund if not used again within the 60 minutes? As regards zoning, anything which could sort out the mess towards Stratford (which is likely to be one day repeated towards OOC) would be most helpful.

    btw, I’d always presumed that “one-hour tickets” related solely to bus usage, but other some commentators seem to have different opinions … but either way I see the most beneficiaries of such an option as being tourists, not rate-paying Londoners. *Any* timed ticket will reduce overall TfL income though.

77. @Alison
    “Charge the hour rate and refund if not used again within the 60 minutes? ”

    Nothing so complicated: when you touch in the system determines whether you have already paid the single fare within the past hour. If not, it charges you the single fare. If you have already been charged the single fare, it charges you the extra to make it up to the hour fare. If you have already been charged the hour fare, it charges you nothing.

    Note that system needs to determine that you have paid the single fare within the past hour, not just the top up.

78. @ Timbeau – spot on. The logic is extremely simple really. The same thing is already done for rail journeys to make OSIs and also maximum journey times work. The system is perfectly capable of checking back in card history (for Oyster). Obviously for contactless it’s done in the “back room”. Obviously the respective systems would need to be updated and then tested so we’re talking about months for any scheme to be implemented although I expect TfL will have looked at the feasibility of the ideas proposed by real life politicians.

79. Or to put it even more simply, the system applies an hourly cap.

80. timbeau: yes, but the parallel to the daily cap would not be exact, as one is measured from touch-in, whereas the other expires the next time the clock strikes 04:30.

81. Just a plea to leave the 60+ Oyster alone. It compensates those who were charged half fares from when they were big enough to occupy a seat and full fare from age 14 (except for school “half pass” tickets) for the free travel now available to the young. If 60+ goes then the Zip should go as well.
    The fact that my 60+ Oyster card arrived in today’s post has not influenced my completely objective opinion.
    Of course I have no objection to a review in 6 years or so.

82. @ Malcolm – not strictly true as Oyster maintains three running totals on the card – bus running total, peak total, off peak total. The bus daily cap can cease to be relevant once a multi modal cap has been reached because the card holder has made enough rail journeys to trigger a higher value daily cap. Ooops – getting “technical”. 😛

83. I realise it has been said by many people (including people who would know) that the timed multi-bus fare would reduce revenue, but doesn’t this to some extent depend on the fare structure as a whole? There must be some scenarios where such a fare would lead to journeys being made and paid for that otherwise would not be?

    My speculation is that there are two likely ways a timed bus fare would be implemented:-
    1) As justification for a massive fare hike. e.g. The PAYG fare goes up to £2.50 but you get two hours on it. It gets spun as a reduction if you use two buses.
    2) To replace the bus/tram-only caps and passes – i.e. only the all-modes caps and travelcards would remain – not forgetting of course that even the cheapest period travelcards include all-zones bus travel.

    Both of these options would go at least some way to mitigating the revenue loss. Of course, the mayoral candidates won’t be mentioning them before polling day.

84. When it comes to public spending, I can always fall back onto a bit of childhood memory. The complaints of various elderly relatives about their high spending local authority, (they’d still vote for them as they would never vote for anyone else) when confronted by extremely large new pieces of civic art or shiny new civic centre, “Think of all the schools and hospitals you could have built with that”. It’s certainly the favourite phrase of the local paper.

    It’s these words that form the corner stones of public spending and will always have priority over everything else.

    I find the more sophisticated view of desire for higher taxation is, that people are happy about higher taxes, as long as it’s paid by people richer than them, Preferably quite a bit richer, as they hope to get promoted etc.

    The real problem is that high public spending requires high taxes on even quite ordinary incomes and no one wants to believe that.

85. I think that the idea of a second-bus-entry free within a certain time period would be very useful to make the short-hop use of buses a little less unfair.

    I’m thinking it might be useful for it work on the DLR too. For example, to visit my local Royal Mail sorting office (1.4 miles away) to pick up a “while you were out” means a trip from Stratford International DLR to Abbey Road DLR and back.

    This trip I did last week – twice – and both times it took less than 60 minutes from first entry to final exit (0804-0852 and 1052 to 1131) so I would be rather enamoured to this trip being charged as a single one.

    Again, the trip to the local supermarket (Asda at Layton, 0.9 miles away) I’m getting a bus at 1414 and then 1445 or 1243 then 1306. The £3 for this doesn’t seem that good values because…

    I also went to Highhams Park last week (7 miles away by car). That’s way away in Zone 4 from Zone 2/3 at Stratford. Going via Hackney Central the cost of both journeys is £3.80.

    Overground trip is 13km x 2 = 14.6p/km

    Bus trip: 1.3km x 2 = 115p/km

    DLR trip: 2.2km x 2 = 68p/km

    So, I conclude that a “fair fare” would be that any second bus trip that starts within 45 minutes of the first, or double DLR trip that is complete within an hour should be charged as a single fare.

86. Rational Plan
    We are about to have a Non-London test of that hypothesis, are we not?
    A population approximately 60% of “London” is being used as a test-bed.
    It’s called: Scotland.

    [ Hint – further discussion of Northumbrian / Pictish politics not to be countenanced, I think. ]

    [Correct, unless a clearly drawn parallel to London’s situation is made. LBM]

87. @ Anonymous Brio Expert
    It was, of course, the view that overall income would be reduced and that there would be massive fraud, that produced London Transport’s (as was) opposition to the one-day travelcard when it was first proposed in 1984. The actual outcome, though, was different.

88. @ Anonymous Brio Expert – I have dug out my copy of a Fares Briefing to the Mayor which includes TfL’s view (in 2012) of a 1 hour transfer ticket on the buses. There is nothing in the advice that suggests generation of lots of trips. I’ll cut and paste the commentary below.

    Bus transfer fare option

    5.2 A bus transfer discount would comprise a reduced PAYG fare charged when a second bus trip is started within an hour of an initial full fare trip, again perhaps starting at 90p in 2013. The second bus discount could be of any size and could be increased over time to give a half or ultimately a free transfer facility. The standard fare would apply to a third bus trip starting within an hour of the first. However, the new trip would open a further one hour window during which a trip would qualify for the transfer discount.

    5.3 Introducing a reduced fare of this kind for bus transfers would be a major step
    towards resolving the current anomaly whereby PAYG bus journeys of similar length attract higher fares if no direct bus service is available. This penalty does not apply in the case of Bus Passes orTravelcards or in the case of Tube single fares. As well as being a significant source of customer complaint, this would relieve one of the constraints on bus network planning.

    5.4 Transfer discounts would also help level the playing field in terms of fare paid per ride between the Bus Pass season and PAYG. Fare per ride is currently around 60p for Bus Pass seasons and over 100p for PAYG bus trips, even after allowing for daily capping.

    5.5 The costs of offering a free transfer would be substantial — over £50m pa at current fares. This is one reason why phasing in the discount to offer a free transfer by 2016, say, looks attractive. By 2016, the further option of offering free travel for all bus rides begun within an hour — essentially providing a one hour bus fare – should be technically possible. This would notionally cost a further £10m to £20m pa on top offering a free transfer confined to the second ride.

    Table 7: Projected impacts of bus fares and ticketing initiatives – £m
    Bus transfer fares

    2012/13 -4
    2013/14 -20
    2014/15 -41
    2015/16 -62
    2016/17 -66

    As you can see from the advice above from 2012 even a single transfer option costs a fair amount of extra subsidy a year. If you move to a full 1 hour ticket the cost increases. I can’t see any commentary from TfL about any strong generative effects from a 1 hour bus ticket. There may well be some effect but it obviously depends on a range of factors that may vary across London given the different network structures in different areas.

89. I recall that in the very first London mayoral election, Ken was unusual (for a politician) in being knowledgeable and vocal about transport, and believing it’s an important electoral issue within London. Most other politicians barely payed lip service to transport issues.
    It’s impressive that Ms Pidgeon seems relatively well versed on this topic, even if collective wisdom here is that some of her ideas would be troublesome to implement.
    Noting that the bookies believe that Ms Pidgeon isn’t likely to be the winner, have LR Towers invited Messrs Khan and Goldsmith along for a similar chat? Did they reply? It would be really good to know the depth (or otherwise) of their understanding of detail issues.
    Naughty subsidiary question. Did you promise not to quiz them on the sequence of central line stations?

90. ID
    Yes, from what we’ve already been told elsewhere amongst these pages, Kahn & Goldsmith’s “thoughts” ( You should excuse the word ) will also appear “shortly”

91. @ I Dweller / Greg – I would hope that Mssrs Khan and Goldsmith have sat down for a chat with LR but I’m not going to hold my breath. I fully expect Sian Berry will have done so but I’m sceptical about any of the other candidates even knowing of LR’s existence never mind wishing to talk to them. Just call me a cynic.

92. @IslandDweller

    Boris’s BIG election promise was abolishing Bendies and creating the Borismaster, so it’s not true that transport issues have just been given lip service

93. “I don’t support more road tunnels and crossings in east London unless it’s for pedestrians and cyclists like the Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf bridge, which I’ve been pushing and which is now in TfL’s plans.”

    Sorry, completely disagree, the existing crossings are a massive bottleneck in East London. Not everything can move around using public transport and bicycles.

94. @Mikey C

    Could everyone please hold their comments on additional east London river crossings as we have a post in preparation on the subject. LBM

95. @MikeyC. Yes, Boris did pay some attention to buses (for good or bad). But his transport interventions are nowhere near as radical as Ken and the introduction of a congestion charge. (I’m not trying to make a political point for or against the C charge – merely observe that it was politically bold).
    History will judge, but in the longer term I suspect Boris’s lasting transport legacy will be segregated cycle superhighways on major routes. Interestingly, I don’t think the version that’s been implemented (following the appointment of Andrew Gilligan) was set out in his manifesto. But others with better memories / access to documents might confirm/contradict that.

96. @ LBM I hope the forthcoming piece will include some of 853’s trenchant analysis on his blog.

97. @IslandDweller A bit more to it than that. In the 2008 manifesto, Cycle Superhighways were described as:

    “safe, direct, continuous, well marked and easily navigable routes along recognised commuter corridors”

    Which turned out to mean the blobs and stripes of blue paint on the A3/A24, A11, Grosvenor Road embankment and a handful of other places. They certainly got a load more people on bikes, but in many cases had a high casualty rate. Whether they match the original description is debatable.

    By the time 2012 came around, pressure on the Mayor was much increased, demonstrations thousands strong were taking place almost monthly for a time; although certainly the Cycling Vision document that Andrew Gilligan has been implementing wasn’t in the 2012 manifesto, in the run up to his re-election Johnson endorses London Cycling Campaign’s “Go Dutch” initiative which lays out broadly the same ideas. In essence they could no longer get away with building Cycle Superhighways to the previous standard, knowing that people were getting killed on them.

    The Superhighways may be his lasting legacy, but I suspect he’ll be remembered more for the bike hire scheme. Even though it was conceived under Ken’s mayoralty.

98. The debate has changed since 2008 & more so since 2000. The outgoing Mayor has, I believe, helped cyclists & cycling in ways that his competitors would not have done.

    The electoral choice is now, essentially, between SK and ZG. There is at least one ‘masters in philosophy’ thesis to be written about the track record & judgement of the people involved.

99. “Even though it was conceived under Ken’s mayoralty.”

    It seems everyone wants to take credit for it.
    http://www.libdemvoice.org/londons-bike-hire-scheme-20713.html

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaHwmy9WjE8
    (Livingstone in Feb 2008, announcing the cycle hire scheme and the cycle superhighways). This was six months after the pro-cycling Johnson had been selected as the Conservative candidate, and not long before the pre-election “purdah” started.

100. @ Hilltopper – in 2012 IIRC all the main mayoral candidates signed up for the London Cycling Campaign “Go Dutch” pledges.

     In 2016, to date only Caroline Pidgeon and Sian Berry have signed up to the updated London Cycling Campaign requests.

     Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan have been sitting on the fence so far with Goldsmith distinctly leaning towards the car side of the fence with his pronouncements on free parking, CS11, cars in bus lanes and the like.

     It will be interesting to see if either of them, more likely Khan than Goldsmith, signs up to the LCC requests at the last minute to provide some differentiation to the other.

     Again IIRC, in 2012 a number of the candidates only signed up at the last minute.

101. @Long Branch Mike

     Noted, but as a general point this is a specific mayoral pledge (as opposed to much of what else she’s said which is fairly vague) so worth highlighting in reviewing her policies.

102. @Reytnolds 953
     “cars in bus lanes”

     This is Goldsmith on LBC
     “I can’t see any reason in the short term as a perk, an incentive to get people to buy electric cars, this [allowing electric cars into bus lanes] shouldn’t happen. I think that if ……….we are going to see a massive shift in the type of cars people own, then within two or three years there will be no point having bus lanes because everybody is going to be driving these things around.”

     There seems to be a failure of logic here. The same one that led to the surge in demand for enormous hybrid cars, because all hybrids were initially exempt from the congestion charge.

     There may be some logic to encourage the use of certain vehicles by allowing them in special lanes. (Although I have never understood the logic in allowing certain chauffeur-driven cars to clog up bus lanes just because they are spot-hired and charge by the yard). But if the special lanes cease to be special because too many vehicles qualify to use them, the answer is not to abolish the special lanes but to tighten the qualifying rules to favour the most meritorious cases.

     Congestion and pollution are both important issues, but they are different. Replacing every diesel bus with fifty electric cars might improve air quality, but it won’t do much to ease congestion.

103. TBH, although I cycle to work more often than use public transport, I’m more disappointed with Zac & Sadiq’s lack of vision on the latter (and in clearing cars from the roads to make more room for it).

     Where’s the orbital rail? Where are the new and extended tram lines? Even mundane stuff like increasing frequency on hopelessly overcrowded suburban bus routes?

     At the moment it looks like the election is Sadiq’s to lose. It makes sense for him to play it safe, especially as his opponents seem intent on fighting dirty. My guess is, in terms of how it plays directly with the electorate, endorsing LCC requests is a vote winner for him – however it’s also something certain elements of the right wing press will try to use against him, in much the same way as they seem intent on using his (rather tenuous) links with Corbyn.

104. timbeau: I agree with your analysis, in particular the point that congestion and pollution are different issues, though complicated by being inter-related in various ways, some positive (diminishing total traffic will, other things being equal, diminish both) and some negative (e.g. the switch you mention which would increase one while decreasing the other).

     As an aside, nobody claims that letting taxis (but not various other things) use bus lanes is entirely logical. It is a pragmatic application of a historic legal duty (to respond to being hailed) which has the effect of balancing (or skewing, according to taste) the market between taxis and their rivals.

105. a historic legal duty (to respond to being hailed)

     Just as you can legally enter this bus lane to enter and leave the parking bays between it and the kerb.
     http://www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/resources/images/4500022.jpg?display=1&htype=0&type=mc3

     But woe betide you if you stay in the bus lane longer than necessary to do so.

106. @ timbeau – taking Goldsmith at his word and assuming he was thinking of electric cars in bus lanes being “short term as a perk”, the thing about perks is that politicians love giving them out, but taking them away becomes a lot more difficult…

     An unintended consequence of this “perk” could have been the likes of Addison Lee and Uber drivers converting en masse to electric vehicles and the bus network grinding to a halt.

     @ Hilltopper – my guess is that if Khan does endorse the LCC requests, it will be at the last minute, like some of the candidates in 2012, so enough time to get the word out to voters, but not enough time for the press to work up much of a head of steam, given the candidate positions would be “pro vs equivocal” rather than “pro vs anti”.

107. @ Mikey C – where to start in terms of Bojo’s transport legacy?

     – Spending >£350m on a bus that carries, on average, 6% fewer people than the vehicles it replaced (d decks not bendies).

     – introducing a cycle hire scheme that requires massive subsidy and which TfL can’t afford to extend. [I’m sure the same criticism would be levied at whoever brought the scheme in. I just don’t think the concept works in London when TfL is required to run without subsidy.]

     – Doing very little about the tube until 2011 when he twigged it might become an electoral issue in 2012 then a “panic stations” intervention. Since then reliability has improved so some good has come of the “panic”.

     – “building” cycle superhighways that were not fit for purpose and then having to reverse policy and then lumber London with huge disruption to meet a false completion deadline. The segregated CSH works could have been phased to reduce the multiple traffic impacts in central London. Ditto works to remove gyratories.

     – requiring TfL to release open day and “live bus departure” info. That’s a plus!

     – extending the Overground round the SLL to C Junction. That’s a plus!

     – eventually getting a deal to electrify Barking to Gospel Oak. That’s a plus!

     – not arguing about funding 5 car trains and infrastructure changes on the core Overground network. That’s a plus!

     – Not ordering any new tube trains for 8 years.

     – Scrapping the road user hierarchy which has worsened traffic conditions and bus reliability.

     – Not funding any demonstrable bus service expansion for seven years. The few improvements that did happen where by virtue of good contract prices / competition for bus contracts.

     – Not undertaking any long term or strategic transport planning for about 6 years is something we will all come to rue in a few years time. No “conveyor belt” of projects for his successors. I’m sceptical about the genuine value of the Battersea / Watford Junction tube extensions although they were started by Bojo.

     – Bequeathing his successors a reduced transport budget and no revenue grant.

     – Shoving fares up for years on end.

     – Amazingly not scrapping fare concessions and in fact extending some. Debateable as to whether good or bad.

     – Wasting money of electric car charging infrastructure when the takeup has been palpably low.

     – No real action of air quality issues which are strongly linked to traffic volumes.

     – A confused and patchy response to the taxi trade and failure to secure (from government) the ability to regulate numbers of private hire vehicles on London roads.

     It’s a very mixed bag if you ask me. There are one or two highlights which I’m very happy to give him credit for but the loss of momentum for so many years in key areas is a real problem. In some ways it’s hidden except for the chronic delays in certain key programmes like the Line Upgrades plus the lack of attention to key modes like buses. I’ve no doubt it could have been vastly worse without some tenacious lobbying from Assembly politicians and key people in TfL. Still only 4 more weeks of his term left and then we can “mark” (ahem) his passing from City Hall.

108. @Walthamstow Writer – you missed scrapping the Congestion Charge Western Extension, the dangle way and his endorsement of the Garden Bridge. 😉

109. @ Reynolds 953 – I could have droned on for a long time but there’s a limit to people’s tolerance but yes fair comment on those items. 😛

110. @WW “introducing a cycle hire scheme that requires massive subsidy and which TfL can’t afford to extend. [I’m sure the same criticism would be levied at whoever brought the scheme in. I just don’t think the concept works in London when TfL is required to run without subsidy.]”

     An acquaintance of mine worked for a certain French company who run outdoor advertising hoardings and bicycle hire schemes. Prior to the 2008 Mayoral election they were involved in negotiations for being involved in the London cycle hire scheme. Their proposal involved an increase in the number of advertising frames across TfL property, but crucially, it proposed that the scheme would not need a subsidy as a result of this. These negotiations were still underway in May 2008, but everything was thrown out when the new mayor took office, in favour of a fast-tracked, but less financially beneficial structure.

111. marckee: that story shows how disruptive the arrival of a new mayor can be. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether the negotiations, if not interrupted, would have come to a successful conclusion, nor indeed how financially beneficial they would have turned out, in the end, to be.

     But we are stuck with the history we got. Boris was voted in, and he did what he did. However much we might be unimpressed by his legacy, the task now is to try to make the choice which best suits the future – in what looks like a fairly grim set of constraints.

112. @Walthamstow Writer
     I’d agree Boris’s legacy is mixed, but in the interest of fairness (and trying not to get too off topic) it has to be pointed out that he took over just as the UK economy collapsed, and public finances became a lot tighter

     In reality, transport projects are long term, especially rail projects and it’s hard to give credit/blame to an individual when final approval and construction may take decades, and much of what happens is down to TfL (LRT/LT/DfT etc)

     -The Borismaster might have its flaws but was an election promise, and a politician keeping to his/her promises is a rare moment indeed. The loss of seating due to the 3rd door and second staircase does presumably lead to slightly quicker boarding times. It’s notable that the latest London double deckers are adopting the styling of the NBfL and some of the interior features
     -The cycle hire scheme is clearly popular with many people, and seems to be something that most cities around the world now have
     -Progression on East London river crossings (albeit after Boris cancelled the earlier crossing that Ken proposed)
     -Apart from the Battersea and Watford extensions, there has been progress of sorts on the Bakerloo extensions, Crossrail 2 has progressed a bit, the NTfL has moved further forward.
     -Similarly, TfL taking over London rail franchises or at least being responsible for them may have happened under any Mayor, but has moved on significantly under Boris’s watch.

113. @Malcolm To a certain extent. By 2008, there were at least a dozen cycle hire schemes in operation run by the same company, all using a similar framework of contract, in which the quid pro quo is a 10-year contract to run the city’s advertising space.

     However, the feasibility study, released in November 2008 specifically rules out an advertising space-based arrangement (no explanation is given as to why).

     http://content.tfl.gov.uk/cycle-hire-scheme-feasibility-full-report-nov2008.pdf

     “20. It is not recommended to hand over advertising space to help finance the scheme as this is not supported by the central London boroughs, The Royal Parks or TfL. This would mean, however, that some share of the costs involved would fall on the public purse. It is recommended that other alternatives such as on bike sponsorship are investigated.”

     Although it may be that TfL wanted to keep their advertising contracts separate, and on a shorter time period, eg: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/billion-pound-battle-tfls-tube-advertising-contract/1386594

114. @WW
     ” I’m sceptical about the genuine value of the Battersea / Watford Junction tube extensions ”

     The value of the Croxley link to London is probably negative, as TfL has now taken on responsibility for it but it is entirely in Hertfordshire.

     Two other projects which have been started in his incumbency (or maybe encumbrancy?) are the two separate projects at Bank – the new Walbrook entrance, and the new southbound Northern Line platform.

     To channel the People’s Front of Judea (or maybe the JPF)
     “But apart from the cycle hire, and the Battersea extension, and the Walbrook entrance, and the cycle superhighways, and the Overground via Denmark Hill, and the electric Goblin, ………, what has Boris ever done for us?

115. @Mikey C
     ” a politician keeping to his/her promises is a rare moment indeed. ”

     Livingstone promised to keep the Routemaster
     Johnson promised to replace the bendies.

     One of those promises was kept – sadly it was the wrong one

116. @ Marckee – I wasn’t aware of that proposal (I assume from JC Decaux) for the London scheme. I am, though, not surprised that TfL would not want to lock itself into a 10 year advertising contract as a quid pro quo. TfL’s estate and customer base is massively valuable for advertising and given a “bad experience” in recent years it will want to keep the marketplace on its toes.

     While I understand why the first 30 mins of a cycle hire is free I do actually think that is a flaw in the system. It becomes extremely difficult to move away from that concept without wrecking usage. One could legitimately ask why any transport cost would be free at peak times – it makes little sense. I’d rather the scheme started off charging 30p or 50p for that first period of use with tapered charges after that. It’s also a shame that it’s going to almost 10 years to get the system in line with Oyster and contactless payment options (it’s being worked on at the moment). I also understand that there has been criticism of the highly peaked operation of the cycle hire scheme with vast efforts needed to manage the dispersal / collection of cycles from terminal stations like Waterloo. The other complaint is that the demographic of users of the scheme is rather narrow – white, young, reasonably well off males travelling between station and office. (And yes Timbeau I know you use it and probably don’t tick all those boxes!). I also think the scheme design is cumbersome and not easy to use – I’ve thought about possibly using it but never, ever have. It’s all too much of a faff – not knowing if there will be a space in a rack at / near your destination or even necessarily knowing where the racks are. You have to have a level of commitment to it in order to use it effectively.

     If the next Mayor does decide cycle hire needs “reform” then I think they are going to find it very difficult. My view, though, remains that the scale of subsidy is out of all proportion to other modes and is not justified when the transport budget is under such severe financial strain.

     @ Mikey C – I’m sorry but I didn’t notice TfL’s finances being particularly under strain in 2008/9. Any drop in revenue was temporary as the overall market held up remarkably well compared to previous recessions. The bounce back in patronage and revenue has also been much stronger and more sustained as London has outperformed the rest of the UK, tourism has been bouyant for several years and population growth always helps push transport demand.

     TfL have made no great claims about reduced stop dwell times as a result of the NB4L. There have been no moves to cut the numbers of buses on NB4L routes because buses are making a round trip faster than previously.

     I am afraid I must disagree about things “moving on”. It took Boris 5 years to twig that you needed planning done in order to then convince people to cough up money, grant powers and then get things built. He was immensely stupid to stop all the schemes that he did when he arrived in City Hall. It’s clear that he wanted to start afresh but not having run anything in local government before he made a series of errors that could have been avoided. Ken Livingstone is on record as having offered to keep the key players from his team in place to keep things ticking over until Boris had made his own appointments. I don’t detect political malice or game playing in that offer – Ken believes in London government too much to want to see it fail regardless of who was in charge. Instead we got a series of dubious and failed appointments and it was only when Sir Simon Milton got to City Hall that some competence emerged. As Malcolm has observed the sharp “switchover” between Mayors is a potential flaw in the system when there is not the same preparation as there is with the Civil Service who prepare for potential changes in national government. I fear we will have to disagree about the “value” of the “planning” for the Bakerloo extension and CR2. I’m afraid my nasty old cynicism gets in the way of me seeing much value in what’s been done to date plus the likelihood of either scheme ever being funded.

     I think the issue of road crossings in East London will be contentious forever. I can see the transport benefits but we also know that major pieces of road construction in urban areas trigger massive traffic growth and unhelpful development. You have a lot of people who are fed up with the congestion and pollution caused by the Blackwall Tunnel. They don’t want any more. You have people in Bexley who certainly don’t want a motorway on their doorsteps and now you have people in Kent and Thurrock who are also objecting to a proposed link in their area. I really don’t see how you build a crossing that can take road vehicles without triggering the negative consequences. I’ll readily admit I don’t have the answer to that particular thorny question. I also think that TfL have their doubts as to how the proposed Silvertown Tunnel can be funded. They don’t have the money and PFIs are not exactly in vogue any more.

     I agree that the argument over rail devolution appears to have been won but I suspect a lot of that is down to some sterling work by key people in TfL in the face of a lot of opposition. I still think the prospects of actually seeing more services transfer to TfL is at risk from small minded political lobbying from particular MPs but that’s just me. I also think that Boris demonstrably got in the way of devolution of South Eastern services because of his airport plans and his attitude to people in Kent. If that hadn’t got in the way TfL would now be in control of South Eastern inner suburban services, more trains would be on order, stations would be being refurbed and plans under way to improve off peak, evening and Sunday services (London Bridge works permitting). I rather suspect he would have got something of a political bounce from people in SE London if that had happened.

     Anyway he’s nearly done his time and we can forget about him and his “legacy”. We just need someone to undo the worst bits of that legacy and deliver some genuine improvements. If Mr Khan gets in he’ll make me redundant at LR Towers – no more “Fares Increase” articles to write. 😉

117. WW: Some very cogent observations there. But (and this applies to others too) when you have as much to say as this, we’d prefer it split into several somewhat shorter comments. Please.

118. WW: one advantage of the demographic (combined with open data) is that there are lots of apps showing the state of the racks (bikes and slots).

119. @ Malcolm – genuine question, and not a challenge or complaint, could you say why you would like shorter replies?

120. WW: well since you ask, the main reason for the request is because it makes it easier to carry out any necessary moderation. Your comments have rarely, if ever, needed snips etc, but there may always be a first time.

     I also happen to think (as a secondary reason) that it makes it a little easier for other readers, but this is only my personal view; others may disagree with that.

121. @WW

     Shorter responses to individual commentators assists other readers to find the original comment, as well as for the original commentator to identify their name in a long comment.

122. Walthamstow Writer,

     Another benefit of shorter comments is when the long comment covers multiple issues that are not especially related. If someone is not interested in the subject of first paragraph then they may well skip the entire comment believing all of the comment to be about this initial subject.

123. Not sure that the demographic stereotyping around Boris Bikes is as true as it once was. Lately I see lots of youngish black Brits of both sexes riding them around near the river. Quite a recent thing though, last year or two.

     And I’ve no doubt absolute hordes of tourists will be on them this summer with the Cycle Superhighway fully open. Probably to the extent that the time-triallist-commuter lot (aerodynamic handlebars, £1500 wheels) will get somewhat annoyed at them.

     Whether it’s TfL’s job to provide a tourist leisure facility is debatable, but on the plus side they’ll mostly be the longer and more expensive hire tiers.

124. @WW
     “white, young, reasonably well off males travelling between station and office. (And yes Timbeau I know you use it and probably don’t tick all those boxes!)”

     All but one!

125. @ LR Team – thank you for the clarification.

     @ Timbeau – 🙂

126. Hilltopper: partly because there’s been an expansion of rack sites along the Souf Bank perhaps? Even unto Putney, last I heard.

     I got a bit upset with tourists in Hyde Park who didn’t know the rule of the road in 2012. At least they weren’t applying it.

127. Quite a numbet of time trial commuters seem to be fitted with metaphorical hair trigger trembler switches making them liable to explode without warning. Probably quite dangerous underground.

128. In case an interview with Sian Berry isn’t able to be arranged, here are some of her thoughts on transport in the capital:

     http://www.citymetric.com/politics/green-candidate-londons-mayoralty-zac-and-sadiqs-troubling-lack-vision-1999

     (obviously feel free to snip this if a future article is a more appropriate place to discuss a single zone London and a ONE ticket – I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on how these would affect demand, especially during the peaks)

129. @marckee
     I’ve just read Ms Berry’s interview in this august periodical…..

     http://shop.londonreconnections.com/collections/back-issues/products/issue-3-peace-on-our-line

130. @timbeau I should probably get around to actually reading it then!

131. I look forward to seeing the interview with Zac Goldsmith. While I applaud his commitment to continuing investment in rail services, some of his other proposals (free parking in every town centre, loads more river crossings by road in East London, no extension of congestion charging, for example) seem to smack of cheap populism without serious understanding of the issues. I hope the LR interview will prove this wrong.

132. @ quinlet I guess the ZG interview ain’t gonna happen. Though I firmly believe it *should* for a variety of reasons, mostly off topic or subject to vorpal blades.

     For ZG add SK too.

133. @ Marckee – when the Green Party “single integrated fare” idea was splashed a few weeks ago I had a skim read of the proposal (skim being the operative word). While I understand the basic idea and that it works in many places I’m afraid I don’t see it working in London.

     1. The single fare would be too high – my guess is £3.20.
     2. A higher fare would seriously damage short distance travel and bus / tram travel in particular.
     3. The Green Party acknowledged the need for extra funding but there were no numbers indicating how much was needed.
     4. I believe the base level of transport demand in London is too high to bare massive pricing up in Zones 1 to 3 but cuts for trips into Zones 4,5 and 6. The political fall out would be enormous and not just in London.
     5. Some of the identified funding mechanisms would require government support and I don’t see how the Green Party could ever deliver that.
     6. There was a palpable lack of clarity as to what investment would be needed *if* the single fare concept triggered more demand.

     Systems that have full multi modal ticketing tend to have few modeal overlaps, there is mandatory interchange between modes and there is usually a planned hierarchy of service – bus, tram, metro, rail – which combine to give a network.

     In London we have massive overlaps between modes because we need that huge level of capacity to meet the sheer scale and complexity of journey demand. The proposals didn’t suggest a network restructuring to mimic what happens in France, Germany and Switzerland. I suspect that’s because it simply wouldn’t work in London without massive rail and tram investment over several decades. Where’s the money for that?

134. WW
     I really don’t see how you build a crossing that can take road vehicles without triggering the negative consequences.
     Simples: build a rail / tram / DLR crossing instead!

     [SNIP]

135. @ WW
     2. is a particularly double edged sword. On the one hand, the elderly and disabled people who need short hops most get free bus travel anyway. Encouraging able-bodied people to walk or cycle those short trips would speed up the buses & reduce crowding. On the down side, price them off the buses & I guess some may choose to drive instead – especially true of families.

     The Greens are in a tricky position here. If buses are to compete successfully against private cars – which is surely the right thing to do from an environmental point of view – they need to be cheap (at least not significantly more expensive than today), more frequent & less crowded. All of which costs money – indeed I’m not sure any of the candidates realise just how overcrowded a lot of routes have become.

136. @ hilltopper – of course one way to influence the choice between buses and private cars would be to increase charges for private cars.

     Goldsmith and Khan have shied away from road pricing and parking levies undoubtedly because they think it would be political suicide.

     I’m not so sure… I think it is an idea whose time is coming, if not in 2016, maybe in 2020.

     Berry’s manifesto says they will consult on a London-wide congestion charging scheme but doesn’t commit to implement and I think this is fair enough.

     It really would be head in the sand if the next mayor refuses to consider such a scheme so there aren’t any TfL people looking at the options for what such a scheme could be.

137. @ Hilltopper – one of my key concerns with all the candidates, even those who I’m more likely to agree with, is there is a lack of clarity as to what they think each transport mode should do / contribute to London’s mobility. I think most reasonably minded people would like to see a pleasant and safe walking environment and decent provision for cyclists. The problem comes next in that there is no discourse as to whether there is a legitimate role for the car / private vehicles. We then have a “gap” about what buses do other than trundle along in the background. We then leap forward to the tube and trains which all politicians seem to be in love with (no surprise there). There’s little commentary about river transport, freight or aviation (other than an opinion about Heathrow) despite the Mayor having an influence on all of these.

     To develop policies that work overall you need some structure or view about the role of each mode. I’m not expecting “equal” treatment for each one – it’s not practical or affordable or desirable. However a basic level of commentary on each would be something I’d like to see. I know it won’t happen, to avoid “scaring” some of the voters, but I can dream! 😉

138. Hilltopper says “ On the down side, price them off the buses & I guess some may choose to drive instead – especially true of families”

     My reaction to this was that anyone with access to a car, wanting to make a journey for which a car was reasonably feasible, would probably be already using the car regardless of the price of a bus alternative.

     But then I thought on a bit. If a car was possible but inconvenient, say because it means waiting until the evening when another household member has finished with it, or doing the trip with 2 people because the one who needs to travel does not drive, or paying a fortune/risking a fine for parking, or something, then shifting to a car because the bus fare has gone up suddenly sounds quite probable.

139. Malcolm
     A lot of people in London, esp. outer-London have cars, as do I. But, they often/usually only use those cars for longer or out-of-town journeys, because of both traffic congestion & parking problems. I don’t think that’s going to change much …
     But, the “all-London flat fare” seems to be a n other of the “Greens” wonderful-until-examined ides, that turn out to be … somewhat impractical shall we say?

     WW
     Can I echo your call for “joined-up-thinking”? And add that pedestrians seem to be losing out, again, especially contrasted against the current fashionable drive for all things on 2 wheels being utterly wonderful. Every time there is a cyclist’ death there is an outcry, but how many pedestrians are killed each year?
     I think a sense of proportion has be lost here, or maybe it was never there in the first place?

140. @Greg Tingey – I was at a talk by Andrew Gilligan last month and while he refused to speculate about his own future given he is a political appointee, he did say there had been some talk within TfL that instead of a cycling commissioner, there should be an “active travel” commissioner covering both pedestrians and cyclists.

141. @ Greg – The culling of pedestrians and the scale of death and injuries to car drivers and their fellow passengers has been “ignored” for a very long time. The cycling lobby in London has the benefit that some of its members work for the media or large influential businesses who support their employees in being healthy. It’s also true that a number of very skilled and talented young people cycle which makes their loss (if they’re killed while riding) even more stark. That has featured fairly prominently in media coverage.

     Pedestrians tend not to have the same media prominence in terms of “routine” death and injury accidents. The only person who has gained prominence and political support has been Mr Kearney who was injured by a bus in Oxford St. While I have some sympathy for what happened to him I have found his campaign to be misguided and inaccurate. Where we’ve got to is TfL feeling they have to spend to a small fortune on technology and training which will reduce the efficiency of the bus network and increase the cost of operation. That makes the bus less attractive as a mode of travel which means some people will turn to more polluting and less safe modes. “In the round” that makes no sense (at least to me). Yes there have been some very unfortunate accidents involving buses but not every one is the fault of the driver or down to the mechanical quality of the bus. This is not acknowledged by campaigners nor is the overall safety of using buses.

     I am loathe to push your argument much further simply because you are enraged by what Waltham Forest Council are doing and it’s been mentioned a hundred times already. The wider issue is that car owners are in the majority in terms of road and parking space given over to them. Not unexpectedly they don’t want to “give up” one inch of space to any other form of transport. Worse their attitudes then extend to preventing the extension of bus services into areas well away from the bus network. I’ve been trawling through some old cases recently and it is immensely depressing stuff. 55 signatures and shouting at local councillors is enough to deprive hundreds of households and the “unspoken” from having more convenient access to a bus service. It’s ridiculous but then I would say that wouldn’t I? We are in the midst of a “battle” around who “owns” (in the abstract sense) road space and has rights to “control” and “use” it. This will no doubt carry on for another 4 or 8 years. I can’t see an end to it.

142. WW
     I agree with you about buses. In fact it is even worse than you say (IMHO) in that not only in WF but many other places too, buses are already less than welcoming to the old/infirm/frail/ill, not because of any intrinsic faults, but because of increased congestion ( = increased journey times )
     Joined-up thinking? What’s that?

     [Usual over-repeated arguments, as usual, snipped. Next time the entire comment will be snipped. LBM]

143. And buses have also become less convenient to use over the years as the passengers have been protected against their own foolhardiness by shutting them in except at stops whose positions are moved ever further away from convenient interchange points due to an over-abundance of caution.

144. @WW
     I agree that the issue is allocation of road space. To all intents and purposes the amount of road space in London is fixed in that the additional capacity that is likely to be/could practicably be added is tiny in percentage terms. At the same time demands for road space are increasing both with increases in population – and hence demand for movement – and demands to reduce the impact of traffic. The rational approach would be to do everything possible to encourage the more efficient users of road space. That is, pedestrians, cyclists and buses. But this does mean taking road space away from cars. While cars are now frequently minority road users at peak times this is still politically difficult and hence the more aggressive bus priority measures that could be introduced are not. The default position, therefore, is ‘first come, first served’ and this means increased congestion for all.

     While some politicians can talk glibly of reducing congestion, in London, for the foreseeable future, this is just not achievable without draconian road pricing. What is achievable is reducing the number of people who are badly impacted by congestion, but this will be car users, the saving grace being that their share of the transport market will continue to decline.

145. quinlet
     Highly unfashionable question.
     Is allocating road-space to cyclists really, actually “efficient” given that (approx) 2 cyclists = 1 car in terms of road-space.
     Compared to buses & pedestrians, that is.
     And please remember that I cycle, too!

146. The reallocation of road space being politically difficult? I agree that accepted wisdom says that. But when the first Mayor of London proposed a congestion charge, that was considered electoral suicide – yet London has accepted it with barely a hiccup.
     In the inner London boroughs, the number of households with access to a car is about one third. Put the other way – the overwhelming majority do not use cars in London.
     Would this reallocation of road space (certainly in central London) really be as unpopular as politicians fear?

147. GT: 2 cycles = 1 car in terms of roadspace? I think not – given that cycles can travel much closer together and require much less width, more like 4 or 6:1, therefore much more efficient, especially since the average occupancy of a car is less than 50%, of a bike 100%.

148. TfL traffic modelling uses “Passenger Car Units” (PCUs)

     An ordinary car is treated as 1 PCU, a push bike as 0.2 PCU, a motorbike as 0.4 PCU, a bus as 2 PCU and HGV as 2.3 PCU.

     So from a TfL perspective, 5 bikes can fit into the space of one passenger car.

149. Island Dweller: Good point. The political calculus, though, has to include the whole electorate, so the large number of people in the suburbs who have cars must be included.

150. I wonder whether attitudes to cars are changing significantly, in the suburbs as well as the centre.

     Here are some factors pushing people away from cars:

     1: huge cost of car insurance for the young;
     2: lack of disposable income because housing “insanity” (ie worse than a crisis);
     3: dense public transport network;
     4: public transport increasingly easy to use, because apps;
     5: free buses while at school;
     6: concern about climate change.

     “Pull” factors, which are not new:

     1: tradesmen with a lot of tools (okay, vans not cars)
     2: poor public transport (Bexley, I’m looking at you)
     3: independence
     4: convenience
     5: family needs (small children, aging parents)

     If so, then perhaps as soon as 2020 the road space issue will become more important.

151. However, for this to happen, you need lots of the people who actually vote (or are seen as likely to vote) to identify it as an issue, and, crucially, to be prepared to choose a candidate based in part on this issue.

152. @Old Buccaneer – and I would add to your push factors,the lack of parking (especially in/near the sorts of homes that many young people can afford), together with an associated security risk of leaving cars on streets for lengthy periods. In my last employment, it was noticeable how many of the young -professional – staff had no car, relying on hiring when they went on holiday.

153. @Old Buccaneer – I think there will be a range of opinions from those who have cars.

     At one extreme are people who will object to anything that stops them driving or parking where ever they want.

     However I wonder how many car owners in London are a “conscript army”? They may have a car because of the pull factors you have listed but that doesn’t mean they are happy with the cost and dependency of ownership therefore may see the advantages of reallocation of resources away from private cars.

     The former are far more likely to create noise than the latter but it would be interesting to know what the numbers are.

154. @Reynolds 953: ‘interesting to know what the numbers are’: yes, but political ppl aren’t very data-driven. My hunch is that “staff officers” (must have staff car) would be outnumbered by ‘conscripts’ by between 10 to one and 50 to one (other wild guesses are available) and that the staff officers’ political influence would be greater than the conscripts by some margin at council ward level in selected wards but less at London wide level.

155. Which is why the Mayoral/GLA elections are interesting. And kind of explains Kensington and Chelsea forcing cyclists onto the (Mayor controlled, I think) Westway. See, eg ‘Gilligan and the Guards’ on this site for a more extended discussion. Actually, given your handle, you probably know a *lot* more about that topic than I do, 953.

156. @Reynplds953
     ” a range of opinions from those who have cars.”

     Not to mention those who have cars but also regularly cycle and travel by bus. I use my car on maybe three days in a typical week. I cycle typically on six days a week. I use the bus when it’s too wet to cycle.

157. @ Island Dweller – the problem with the congestion charge now is that it has become “priced in” to some costs. There may be some car drivers who are still deterred but I don’t think it is as effective as before. It needs a sharp hike to restore some “bite”. Naturally enough that’s unlikely to feature as an upfront policy for some Mayoral candidates (others have this as a specific pledge).

     I would have agreed with you about roadspace issues 2 years ago. Unfortunately the turmoil and congestion in Central London in the last 2 years has reignited the debate. It is now inextricably linked with cycle lanes and removing gyratories and also with damage to the black cab trade. To a lesser extent big works for Crossrail and Tube station rebuilds have also been part of the problem. That’s a fairly toxic mix for politicians and it’s one of the nastier bits of Boris’s legacy for whoever takes over and has to continue similar policies. This may explain why Labour and Tory candidates have been less than effusive about more cycle lanes.

158. @ Old Buccaneer – I broadly agree with that list of factors. I am not sure I would say the transport network in the outer suburbs is particular dense. It varies widely to be honest and there are large areas without convenient bus services other than on main roads. Regrettably it is the “older, car owning and driving, we always vote” who go into extreme NIMBY mode to resist plans for bus routes to run into their residential areas. The fact they are deprived old and young alike from accessing public transport doesn’t seem to register in their heads. It’s a pity TfL are “too nice” and will usually back off in the light of these public campaigns even though they have powers to introduce routes and stops where they like (within reason and subject to safety issues). If Outer London is to be wedded off its car dependence then this “NIMBY-ism” must be overcome. Most of the arguments put forward are borderline hysteria anyway – “thieves use buses and will rob our houses, our children will be mown down, people will stare in our bedrooms, vibration will cause our homes to collapse, we will get migraines from the noise of the buses”. If all this was even 10% true then London would be a utter wasteland. Of course it isn’t. I expect we will hear similar nonsense if we ever get to the point of Tramlink being extended into Sutton.

     At some point the balance may tip towards the younger generation who don’t have access to cars and who want something better. However they need to make sure they vote so they have political influence. At the moment the outer boroughs hold the key to winning Mayoral elections which is why nothing controversial is ever proposed for them!

159. Timbeau you neatly encapsulate the analytical problem for students of politics.

160. @WW @ 1829: re: “bite”. People said the same thing about income tax; how wrong they were. Working ‘with the grain’ of human nature tends to help you achieve better outcomes, more sustainably, than turning up the voltage on a cattle prod. Your mileage may vary (YMMV).

161. WW @ 1844: thanks. Everything you wrote was in my heart and mind when I wrote the post. But you said it way better.

     For the ‘outer’ boroughs, I agree and I would add that perhaps a bit of work looking at “desire lines” (you can look it up, in speech marks, on DuckDuckGo or Bing – other search engines are available) might pay dividends if you are looking at your bus and rail networks.

162. Rail 798 has articles on small schemes in Hounslow (Wolmar) and ‘getting the BMW drivers out of their cars’ (new Northern/Transpennine franchises) which are germane to this discussion.

     The latter makes the point, strongly, that ‘the North is not London’. So yeah, the question isn’t the same and the answers aren’t the same, but we can learn from each other.

163. timbeau
     Following your example.
     I use my “car” once or twice a week, I walk every day, I use “railways” in the broadest sense 2- 5 times a week, I cycle once or sometimes twice a week. I use buses when there is no other alternative, especially given the discomfort & pain under circumstances I wont’t re-elaborate upon.

164. Another long-term push factor is surely that new housing blocks seem to have very few parking spaces allowed by the planners to be included, at any rate here in Southwark. And quite right too in my view. This is a sharp change from e.g. the old block I live in, which has a vast underground carpark (which I resent having effectively paid my share of, since I never use it, not possessing a motorcar). Gradually, as more and more housing is created with virtually no parking spaces, people on average will feel less and less incentive to run a car unless their job absolutely requires it.

165. A clear ‘pull’ factor not so far mentioned is that the real cost of driving has been continuously declining, mainly through the declining real cost of owning a car. The increase in fuel efficiency of cars combined, recently, with declining real costs of fuel have helped. Compared to this the real cost of using public transport has, at best, stayed constant and, until recently, been rising consistently. Can it be any surprise that there is a greater propensity for car use – all other things being equal – when public policy is to make it constantly and increasingly relatively cheaper than public transport?

166. quinlet: I think you need to be quite careful with “real” costs.

     Tl;dr: I don’t agree with you, for the reasons below. I haven’t calculated “hours worked per mile travelled” but that’s a good metric; a similar one for eg pensioners would be “miles per periodic payment”.

     The measures I’ve chosen would vary for a number of reasons. For example:

     1 wages per hour after taking account of consumer price inflation (CPI) are flat to lower, comparing 2008 with 2015; but pensions are up.

     2 the retail price index for the UK (RPI) handles housing costs badly from a London point of view

     3 total cost of ownership of a car includes, eg, parking costs for many (resident’s permit, implied cost of property with own space, see PZT above) and, crucially, insurance.

     4 car insurance costs have been pushed up by, inter alia, claim farming (& perhaps fraud in a few cases) as well as insurance premium tax

     5 often, much of the so called ‘cheaper in real terms’ effect is actually a car for the same cash price (or more) with more “features” (including safety features, airbags gor occupants and dformanle plastic bumpers for non-occupants), or functionality like the engine automatically stopping when thr car is stationary.

     Fuel cost per mile driven is a function of the fuel efficiency of the vehicle and the congestion on the routes on which it is driven. But it is not the only cost.

     Hope that helps!

167. I think what drives behaviour vis a vis cars is whether, as a household, you regard an available car of your own as a “must have” like water, sewage, food or a “luxury” (insert referred luxury here). Travel to work is a must have, but Londoners have a wide choice of modes.

168. And political beliefs and behaviour plug in to that model.

169. I certainly know who my first preference vote will be going to – as a Labour Party member (who drifted to the LD’s in the middle of the last Labour government, and stood as a LD council candidate in Westminster) I will certainly vote for Caroline. She has a real understanding of the needs for London and the transport requirements.
     Khan’s claims to understand transport and his constant references to his bus driving dad are sadly annoying and I don’t feel that he has an understanding of what is needed. Loads of rhetoric and sound bites, but not a lot else.
     Even more annoying, I fear we will end up with ZG as mayor due to this.

     [Very close to being too overtly political. We really don’t want to know how people are going to vote and comments like “She has a real understanding of the needs for London and the transport requirements” don’t add anything if not backed up by reasoning. I have let this go but the moderator-in-chief might not. PoP]

170. Looking at the objections on local authority planning apps for new housing, it is noticeable that many motorists are hostile to car-free developments.

     Seems illogical at first sight, but might suggest they are fearful of incomers, who might be supportive of further restrictions on cars.

171. Anonymous: without knowing more detail about your research base, it’s hard to be definite.

     In the absence of sentences brginning: “as a motorist, I object…” it would be difficult to be sure that the objectors are objecting on those grounds, rather than, for example, because of the impact on local buses, or local schools, or because of wider objections to development in general, or the specific proposed development in particular.

     The notion, in your second paragraph, that the objections are based on beliefs that the likely occupiers of the new properties will take political action against the interests of local car users would need a lot more supporting evidence before I could bring myself to accept it.

172. @Anonymous – certainly some objections to developments with limited car parking spaces seem contradictory: “more people will mean more traffic and congestion… and there’s not enough car parking spaces!”

     I think objections to lack of car parking spaces may be because they think new residents will have cars and will park them on the objectors streets!

173. Reynolds 953: fully agree. An interesting variant on NIMBY!

174. @Old Buccaneer, Reynolds Number 953

     Indeed, they are NIMPS – Not In My Parking Spot!

175. “many motorists are hostile to car-free developments […] Seems illogical at first sight…”

     This supposes that the motorists in question are being rational. More likely they are victims of the mindset called “car culture” which is more akin to a religion, and they feel threatened by the realisation that their religion is gradually losing adherents.

176. Research from Shelter showing objections to new housing mainly concerned with freedom to drive and park.https://mobile.twitter.com/thomasforth/status/720612086934605824

177. The point about new housing developments not having car parking provision is germane to the comments about reduced car dependency in London. Here on the Isle of Dogs, most new housing blocks (and we have loads of towers going up….!) are built with a very small car park (much less spaces than the number of units) plus a covenant on the property that prevents the occupier from applying for a resident street parking permit. Anyone who knows more about local government know if this restriction on residents parking permits is specific is LB Tower Hamlets or now common practice across inner London?

178. Arrangements to prevent new occupants from getting a resident street parking permit sound fine. I’m a bit puzzled by the suggestion that it’s a covenant. These are notorious for being difficult to enforce. If a new occupant does apply, what is the remedy, and who implements it? Whereas if such an application is known to always be rejected (by arrangement with the authority charged with granting them), then such new occupants will not bother to apply.

179. The developer/landlord is obliged by the terms of the permission to inform potential residents that it is a car free site and they will not be eligible for a street permit.

     The planning department informs the parking service, who must ensure that no permits are issued. (In the early days this didn’t always happen!!).

     The development is nearly always in an area with a high PTAL and with a CPZ in existence or being set up- normally paid for by the developer as part of s106 agreement.

     Should add that most LAs will have disabled parking spaces on site.

180. – last para shoud read “most LAs will insist on some disabled parking bays being installed on site as one of the conditions of approval”

181. @Island Dweller
     Many inner London boroughs now stipulate car-free housing in sites which are well served by public transport. The precise mechanism does vary and a covenant may be one good way of ensuring any potential purchaser is aware of the restrictions in advance. These days I would have thought a good search would bring the matter to light in any case, but perhaps I am expecting too much from a solicitor.

182. A bare minimum of infrastructure is a necessary evil. As London’s population increases, so must that infrastructure. This is a quart/pint-pot thing; one simply cannot expect London’s transport networks to continue to remain preserved in amber. This includes roads. Lest we forget, buses also use roads.

     The more Lewishams that are built – and Old Oak Common looks like it’ll be another high-density scheme – the more need for infrastructure improvements to keep up with the demand.

     [There then followed discussion of some of this contributor’s favourite themes. Regular readers will know what they are. They have been snipped to emphasise that this topic is about particular mayoral candidates’ views and statements; its comment area is not to be used to promote anything and everything. Malcolm]
     

183. ………….and what happens when one of the residents then gets a job for which a car is essential?

184. timbeau asks about a resident getting a car-essential job.

     If they cannot find somewhere to park it (perhaps paying) or move house to somewhere with parking, then they cannot do the job. Which puts them in the same position as someone prevented from driving by one of the many other reasons (e.g. epilepsy).

185. @Malcolm at 1917. Apologies. I thought this was enforced by a covenant in LB Tower Hamlets, but housing isn’t my speciality so I might have got the implementation / enforcement details wrong.

186. IslandDweller: apology not necessary. Quinlet has explained what is probably the general mechanism, it seems that a covenant could indeed be part of it (though maybe not the main part), and that details probably do vary from borough to borough.

     Housing is not my speciality either, but I happen to live in a house which has a covenant (not about parking) which cannot be enforced, as the other party to it, some sort of agent for the original builder, no longer exists: apparently such situations are quite common.

187. On housing objections: the arguments people give in objecting to planning applications are not necessarily their main motivations for opposing the proposal – if you say to your local council “I don’t like the look of it” or “I think it’s too big”, you won’t get very far (and if the council reject it on those grounds they will just be overruled on appeal), but if you say “it will cause traffic problems”, that gives a concrete issue that the council might choose to use to reject the proposal.

     @Chris Hall: Even more annoying, I fear we will end up with ZG as mayor due to this.

     Without getting into the political statements you made, if you are suggesting that the appealingness (or otherwise) of the LibDem candidate will have an influence on the eventual outcome between Labour and the Conservatives, then this is unlikely, given the second preference system used for Mayoral elections. For LibDem voters like yourself, it is your second preference vote that will actually count towards the final outcome (absent a late Pidgeon surge to a top two place).

188. Malcolm at 23:33: someone who hasn’t got a valid current driving licence (eg for medical reasons) wouldn’t get a job requiring use of a car because they wouldn’t be qualified. That’s not the same as someone with a valid licence living in a ‘no car’ house and having to move house for work.

189. Ian J, housing objections: yes, which is why documentary (as opposed to circumstantial or anecdotal) evidence to support the original post will be harder to come by.

190. I live in a newbuild set of flats in LB Greenwich that has a limited number of residents’ spaces, and a bar on us applying for a residents’ permit for on-street parking. I don’t know the technicalities of how it’s enforced, but it was clearly a planning requirement from the council. As is the provision of three or four car club spaces in our car park, and five years’ free membership for all residents (at least, for us first owners—perhaps it’s membership for the first five years after the flats were originally sold). I already used the car club before I moved in, so I got a handy five-year extension free of charge, which was nice.

     We were able to buy a space in the residents’ car park when we bought the flats—not owning a car any more, I didn’t investigate it, but I think they were in the region of £20k. For 259 flats there are something like 50 or 60 spaces—of which about 50–60% seem to be used—at, I think, a maximum of one space per household.

     The development is smack-bang in the town centre, just across the square from the station, so the PTAL is high—we’re a 6a, possibly even a 6b I think.

191. The zone 1 area, and to a reasonable extent zone 2 aswell, are reasonably served by interlaced tube and bus routes providing a level of ‘mesh’ connections. Once you reach zone 3, however, this falls down significantly, increasingly meaning that there are radial routes only. Owning and operating a car if you live in the middle (aka Central Congestion Zone) is mostly unnecessary *if* you work and play within central London, but for the rest of us (my road is the zone boundary between 2 & 3) there is a trade-off between journeys sensible to make by public transport, and those which aren’t. And that is less about cost but more about time.

     When I worked out near Brentford it would have been _possible_ to get there by public transport (bus then tube then train then longish walk) but not at all sensible. Expanding the CC area eventually becomes self-defeating as you have to provide some sort of compensation to those already living in the newly-added area (‘a discount’) meaning that unless you make them *separate* sections (in the way the Western Extension wasn’t) you enable drivers in those CC areas to more easily drive around.

192. @AlisonW: Fair points, well made. I read a piece recently (mostly about possibly reopening the line S of Southall to a passenger shuttle to Transport Avenue for £41mn) which suggested that even against the peak flow ppl travelling *to* stations on the Hounslow Loop were struggling to board at CLJ in the peak.

     The snag with driving to work in London (& I haven’t done it for 20+ years) seems to me to be the unpredictability of how long it will take, at least in the peaks. But I have no relevant Zone 3 experience.

193. Alison re sectioning zones: Wandsworth LBC are *extremely* good at slicing up residents’ parking zones in very small pieces. I imagine this expertise wouldd be useful in planning CC extension zones and any sub sections.

     I can see that a major expansion of CC would need careful planning; I imagine there would be *lots* of special pleading & plenty of politics involved.

194. @ Alison W – your comments show the big task facing TfL in providing a reasonably viable alternative to the private car in Outer London. Without a substantial increase in funding it will struggle to “densify” the bus network to give a “web” of services of sufficient frequency to allow people to change buses when required with confidence. Rail has a negligible role in orbital links further out but might be able to take up some slack off peak if (radial route) frequencies were decent every day and throughout the day.

     As I have already mentioned “local resistance” to buses also hinders the improvement of PTAL ratings in some areas while lowish usage rates makes it very hard for TfL to justify business cases for improvements because there is little revenue gain to offset the cost of extensions / new routes. A very telling tactic was used in the recent consultation on changes to Orpington’s bus network. Overall Orpington is pretty spoilt for buses if you compare it with a comparable town in deregulated Kent. TfL set out in the consultation for each route how much demand there was in an hour against the capacity being provided. In most cases TfL was providing twice as much capacity as there was demand suggesting a considerable subsidy in the network. The proposed changes looked to me to be designed to be resource neutral – any proposed improvement (and there were some) was balanced by cuts / rationalisation somewhere else in the network. There was clearly a subtle message of “don’t complain too loudly about any cuts given how generous we are being in giving you twice the bus service you actually need”. I rather suspect that message would apply “in spades” in many areas of London if stark decisions had to be made. Obviously some places do have strong usage that justify the generous provision but not everywhere does.

195. All interesting and here’s my local tale. I live close to North Dulwich and Herne Hill stations serving London Bridge, the Thameslink City and Victoria, both Z2/3 boundary. Local bus services are pretty good as in being frequent, albeit noticeably slower overall for reasons mentioned before.

     Parking on-street is the norm. Southwark are introducing a parking zone to a another slice of our local roads, effective Mons-Fridays between noon and 2pm. Residents will have to pay an annual fee, whilst visitors and others, e.g. commuters who drive in from further out to take advantage of Zone 2 fares, will in future have to pay for those two hours. The concept here is to free the side roads of commuter parking for the local residents to find room to park their own cars.

     Whilst this appears to be a ploy to satisfy local residents, is it also persuasive to encourage those commuter visitors to pay more and get on the train in the Zone 3 area and thus not drive so far?

     Having asked that, two of my neighbours use their cars to commute – both over to work in the Heathrow area! They can do the trip far swifter and more conveniently than by public transport (so they tell me).

     @WW – Have a glance at an LT Country Bus map to illustrate how well Orpington used to be served in the olden days. If so encouraged, then move around to the Godstone/Westerham area and add the former Green Line routes.

196. Graham – very interesting. My experience with ‘railheading deterrent’ CPZs in Putney suggests that it ends up being a nice way of taxing static residents without making the number of ppl getting on the train any less! If ‘creating space for residents to park’ *really* was the policy objective you’d issue residents passes for a £10 ‘administrative fee’ and *insist* on cash for casual parkers, not allowing purchase of a ticket at 0900 to cover the period 1200-1400.

     Moving swiftly on, Citymapper (not perfect) reckons an hour and a quarter by car from Dulwich Park to T5, an hour and a half by public transport (assuming overpriced HEX), changing at Victoria and Paddington (or Victoria and Hammersmith with a slight time penalty). So I reckon your neighbours are right, as I believe there are parts of the Heathrow area outside the perimeter fence which aren’t particularly well served by public transport. Maybe in future the Thameslink-Farringdon-Crossrail route will be quicker…

197. WW / Alison / Rich Thomas
     PTAL numbers are very relevant here. I’m squarely in Z3 & my house’ PTAL is 6a, but I still need, really need a car, even though I don’t use it much. Something LBWF ( moans passim) don’t seem to get, nor the vociferous cycling lobby.
     It is all a matter of balance & no extreme solution is ever going to work, in spite of some people, both now & in the past [ As in close all the railways & build M-ways everywhere … ] never seem to realise.

     Graham F
     They can do the trip far swifter and more conveniently than by public transport (so they tell me). I wonder. Doing an actual timing would be interesting. And I wonder what the “nervous strain” wear & tear on them is – I found out about that when LB Bromley screwed with the earlier travelcard costs.

198. @Graham F
     “commuters who drive in from further out to take advantage of Zone 2 fares, will in future have to pay for those two hours.”
     They will only be able to do so if the machines will sell post-timed tickets. Most of the places I know with commuter-blocking parking schemes have residents only bays, with no or very few pay and display bays.

     @Alison
     “my road is the zone boundary between 2 & 3”
     How do you define the boundary? Since bus zones were abolished in 2004, zones are only defined at stations. Even in Graham F’s example, with two zone 2/3 stations close to each other, the boundary between the zones does not necessarily run down the middle of Half Moon Lane

199. The two hour residents’ parking zones are actually an irrational combination of two other ideas. Before civil parking enforcement, the Met encouraged councils to introduce one hour parking restrictions so that they could move a traffic warden from one zone to another during the day, thus making best use of limited resources. The level of enforcement, even then, was poor and no residents’ permits were used. In those days payment of parking tickets was largely voluntary in any case.

     Whole day residents’ zones with residents’ permits were used where councils were able to enforce it themselves and became ubiquitous in the 90s and 00s. In some cases resdients complained about having to pay to park outside their own houses (in fact they were paying to stop others parking outside their houses) and hence the two hour zone was reintroduced. Shared pays which didn’t accept post payment and which limited visitors’ stays during the working day to 4 or 6 hours ensured that commuters could no longer park there. Such zones were generally welcomed by the residents (so ong as they were not too big) as they could now find a parking space. Indeed, clever designers ensured that the boundary of the zone was at the point where more residents supported the idea than opposed it. They do seem to have worked.

     Like many amalgams the two hour zones such as in Southwark, combine the worst of both worlds. Residents still have to pay for permits but they don’t restrict all commuter traffic.

     The zone system ought to be used, too, with extensions to congestion charging. The original idea for the western extension was to do just that. However the politics of introducing it (I’m not sure it was actually a good idea in any case) meant that a single zone was the political price to get the scheme in at all. It’s just a demonstration that while the original congestion charging scheme was supported professionally but had serious political doubters, the western extension was championed politically (on the basis that the original idea worked) against more professional doubts.

200. @Old Buccaneer – there are some large employers like Sky and GSK near stations on the Hounslow loop so there are a lot of “reverse commute” passengers on that line.

     It is disappointing that the two main mayoral candidates seem scared of expansion of congestion charging as surely TfL would need to spend considerable time and effort researching the options before possible schemes could even be tabled for discussion?

     I’m wondering if expansion would use a boundary based scheme like the current congestion charge or if it should move to fully fledged road pricing where every journey has the potential to be charged based upon origin, destination, time and type of vehicle. In effect, Oystercard for motor vehicles.

     About two thirds of car journeys in London are under 3 miles so I don’t think a road pricing scheme can be purely zonal and it needs a per journey element as well, as a lot of congestion comes from these short journeys.

201. R-953
     About two thirds of car journeys in London are under 3 miles
     That is seriously insane.

     Almost as mad as one Local Authority’s recent attempt, not yet enforced, given the guvmin’ts dictum on limited (15-minute) parking times to give people 10 minutes grace …
     Yes, they are going to 5-minute parking times & going to change all the labelling etc.
     Good old LBWF, you couldn’t make it up, could you?

202. Reynolds 953 says “About two thirds of car journeys in London are under 3 miles ”

     I don’t find this quite as surprising as Greg does. Remember, this is counting journeys, rather than measuring them. Of the total mileage covered by cars in London (and therefore, arguably, the total congestion caused), the fraction covered in these short journeys is probably quite small. That’s because they are short journeys!

     Some very common routine tasks often undertaken by car, such as food shopping and school runs, will be mostly under 3 miles per trip.

203. It’s a long while since I drove to a work site in London. On a good day it was definitely quicker to drive than it was to take public transport. However, I gave up because it was so unpredictable compared with rail. I sacrificed the opportunity of about 50% of journeys being quicker for the certainty that about 95% of journeys would be very predictable in terms of time. That public transport journey did not involve London buses, which suffer from many of the same problems as cars.

204. @Malcolm – the figures are from here:

     From: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-14-who-travels-by-car-in-london.pdf

     35% of all car trips are less than 2km and and an additional 32% are between 2km and 5km.

205. East London river crossings were mentioned by Caroline Pidgeon so let me ask why, when so many schemes are being put forward, does no-one seem the suggest the obvious, which is to replace the anachronism that is the Woolwich Ferry with a bridge to link the North and South Circulars? The traffic on these roads, particularly lorries, is there anyway – at present it has to divert through Blackwall simply to cross the river.

     The argument is easier to make because there is an inefficient crossing there already – it just needs improving to make it a match for the western crossing at Kew.

206. Thanks Reynolds 953. A little massaging of the data there enables me to amplify (and maybe slightly de-sensationalise) your summary. Approximately:

     35% of all car trips (but 10% of all car km) are in trips of less than 2km and an additional 32% of trips (an additional 27% of car km) are in trips between 2km and 5km.

     If 10 cars pass you in the street, 6 of them on average are making trips of over 5 km.

207. @Malcolm
     “If 10 cars pass you in the street, 6 of them on average are making trips of over 5 km.”

     I doubt it actually – since that would imply that only 60% of cars passing you on the motorway are travelling over 5km.

     Bridge replacing the Woolwich ferry – the extra traffic would need new approach roads ploughing through Woolwich town centre, and with a big ramp obstructing planes taking off from City Airport.

     The ideal places for bridges, fords and ferries are often different – which is why the Roman Watling Street crossed the Thames much further upstream than the site later chosen for London Bridge.

     Although why the Woolwich Barrier was not built with at least a pedestrian crossing is a mystery.

208. timbeau draws a strange conclusion (presumably through misunderstanding) from my 6 out of 10 : which was based on a survey of car journeys in London. My “in the street” was assuming standing in a London street watching cars go past. Results if you are standing on a motorway hard shoulder (do not try this at home) would probably be different.

209. @Malcolm

     I did miss the “in London” qualification, and apologies for that, but nevertheless I suspect that the average distance covered by the cars you see in the street does depend to some extent on the street in question.

210. timbeau: yes of course it would. The main point of my posts was really to offset the original impression (from the way the surveys were summarised) that London car traffic consists almost entirely of people making absurdly short journeys. But those interested should read the TfL report cited by Reynolds 953, which makes much more interesting reading than any snippets here can give (and goes into many fascinating other issues not relevant here). Meanwhile, perhaps we should concentrate on what the candidates said…

211. @ Ray L – I think the issue is that the traffic *isn’t* there already. The lack of crossings and the restricted capacity at the Blackwall Tunnel constrains what would otherwise be a truly massive flow of traffic. There are already severe air quality and congestion problems in and around Greenwich and Woolwich – you will find a lot of opposition to more road based river crossings in this area. You will also find a lot of opposition in Bexley because they fear that if a bridge is built then the nature of the borough that borders the Thames, whether Erith or Oxleas Wood, will be destroyed by massive road building to connect to the bridge. You then end up back where we were in the 70s with pressure to “just ease that bottleneck” and “oh that one 5 miles away” and then you have a new bottleneck between the two bits that have been eased and then before you know it you have 6-10 lane wide roads smashing through residential areas. I’ll just say “North Circular Road” and “A12 through Leytonstone” as evidence of what happens.

     I suspect a fair amount of traffic diverts via the M25 and avoids London because there are not effective cross river links. As soon as you open up the Silvertown Tunnel and build a bridge between Gallions Reach and Erith / Thamesmead you can guarantee the A406 will get vastly busier through East London and the pressure on S London’s roads will grow hugely. I am pretty sure the end result would be vastly more traffic overall, more noise, more pollution and a trigger for more “road based” development on or new new or existing trunk roads. When London already has a massive air quality problem it seems rather stupid to be implementing a policy that runs counter to our legal obligations for which London may be heavily fined for breaching.

     I’ve only ever skim read TfL’s “river crossings” analysis. I do recall the traffic impact maps from building new links and the scale and geographic spread of the impact is quite staggering – 250% increase in Havering, 280% in Bexley (see report below).

     https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/rivercrossings/b5c585b1/user_uploads/traffic-impact-report.pdf

     I recognise there are lots of other aspects to the issue of river crossing but the environment / pollution is a key issue that frames the policy of opposition of several of the Mayoral candidates. It is worth noting, in passing, that TfL apparently has big concerns about how to fund the Silvertown Tunnel. If it’s struggling with that then a bridge further east will also be problematic. Finally TfL is now funding the replacement of the Woolwich Ferries – 2 new ones due by March 2018.

212. @Malcolm: to offset the original impression (from the way the surveys were summarised) that London car traffic consists almost entirely of people making absurdly short journeys

     On the other hand, it would be interesting to know what proportion of traffic congestion is made up of people making short journeys – for example, what proportion of cars on a congested high street are shoppers who have driven a short way to get there (and indeed what proportion are driving round in circles looking for a parking space).

     If you encourage people to do their shopping on the bus instead of by car, does that make a difference to localised congestion that then makes buses themselves faster and more reliable, creating a virtuous circle (and also a more pleasant environment on the high street?) Might this involve politically difficult measures like adding bus lanes at the expense of on-street parking? Might such measures be tricky for a member of a political party that prides itself on its localism and attention to local interest groups and campaigns?

213. @Ray L, WW et al

     We do have an article in the works on east London road crossings, so could everyone hold their comments to only what the candidate in question has (or hasn’t) said about such crossings we can avoid thread pollution.

     It will be better to have all the facts and options from the East Crossings article from which to base that discussion.

     LBM

214. @timbeau et. al.: “commuters who drive in from further out to take advantage of Zone 2 fares, will in future have to pay for those two hours.”
     They will only be able to do so if the machines will sell post-timed tickets. Most of the places I know with commuter-blocking parking schemes have residents only bays, with no or very few pay and display bays.”

     In the case of Southwark insofar as the local schemes are concerned, there are no machines – everything is ‘virtual’, with payments made online or by telephone, so one will be able to pay for one’s car just before the time zone parking kicks in and thus no ticket will be issued for display in the car window.*

     There are no parking bays as such but just dashed white lines down each side of the roads where anyone can park, just so long as they pay for the privilege between 12 noon and 2pm Mons-Fridays.

     * There is a paper version of this, where books of tickets can be ordered in advance by a household but that doesn’t seem to apply to the latest scheme to be introduced.

215. WW ( & LBM )
     All of which suggests that TfL or somebody has made a huge mistake in deliberately (?) arranging the Barking Riverside extension to be impossible to be converted/extended into a river crossing.
     IMHO we really need a n other lower Thames crossing, but not a road one, but for trains/tube/trams/buses/cyclists – select some combination of the above, but must include at least one form of steel wheel/rail interface based transport.
     None of which appears on or even near any particular Mayoral manifesto?

     [Please note Mike’s recent comment requesting hold-back on river crossing observations. Malcolm]

216. We have ticket books to allow residents’ visitors to park. I doubt if many commuters collaborate with locals to get parking – it could be a nice little earner though, as the tickets cost less than the P&D bays and, unlike the P&Ds there is no 4 hour time limit – one ticket only last half a day but you can display as many as you need to stay all day, or all week!
     I hadn’t realised, but you’re quite right: with virtual parking, of course you don’t have to be anywhere near your car when the parking times kick in. Just remember to text the right number at 12:30 (or whatever)

217. @IanJ
     The usually quoted statistic is that 30% of traffic in town centres is searching for a place to park. This is based on a quite wide ranging group of surveys pulled together by Donald Shoup at UCLA. They are, however, mainly US cities and in central London, where parking charges are more closely designed to regulate demand to the number of parking spaces available, the figure is probably less.

     @Graham Feakins
     It will be interesting to see how the adjudicators react to a claim that the driver didn’t have a mobile phone available at the time. Westminster, who had previously adopted this approach, ducked out of all the legal challenges until they had arranged for alternative payment methods (scratch cards) to be available as well.

218. In terms of lobbying, TfL have just quietly published the attached somewhat extraordinary document
     https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/human_streets_0.pdf

     Extraordinary in that it is a clear form of lobbying for the next mayor from a body which will report to him (or her, but probably him).

219. @quinlet. Dangerous document that, there are bits in it that might cause one LR commentor to self-destruct.

220. @ quinlet – I’m not sure the “Human Streets” document was that quiet… it came out a few weeks ago and a number of the points mentioned have been covered in the Evening Standard.

     Also it isn’t a TfL document – it comes from the mayor’s office so it is a GLA document.

     I thought a number of points in the document were very valid. Several of the mayoral candidates have been emphasising “Quietway” routes rather than Superhighways. The document points out that the Quietway program has had very limited progress because of the difficultly working with the boroughs, and this is something that needs to be addressed.

221. [Warning: this message is mainly anecdotal and its relevance to the mayoral candidates is limited. I have not removed it nor bothered to trim it, but other moderators may differ. Please ensure that any response is linked, somehow, to the main topic. Malcolm]

     When I visited London a couple of months ago, I had to drive back and forth between Purley and Lewisham on a number of occasions. It struck me – and not for the first time – that the journey times were pretty consistent regardless of the time of day. Some journeys were made during peak hours, while others were made well after 10 pm. The journey time was usually around 40 minutes regardless.

     There are so many pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, junctions and whatnot on the “main” orbital roads that the level of traffic itself made little difference: you’re not going to be doing much more than 20 mph even at night thanks to all that stopping and starting.

     In other words: while south London’s road network is poor, it does work. It’s just not quick. What’s more, it works better for orbital journeys than for radial ones as it’s the radial routes that get utterly hammered during the peaks. For all the grumblings over the lack of a ‘proper’ South Circular, it does make more sense to prioritise investment in the radial routes.

     Which leads me to my point: road capacity is essentially self-limiting.

     This isn’t exactly an earthshattering discovery, but it does imply that some of the reasons cited for not improving London’s road connectivity are based on poor logic or incorrect assumptions. It should also be noted that London’s buses are by far the most popular of all its public transport modes, and buses need roads. Therefore, if that bus service is to improve, so must the road network it relies on.

222. I wasn’t saying that the points made in Human Streets were not valid – I agree that in general most of the points made were sensible and, in some cases, inevitable. What was surprising was that the document was published at all, whether by the GLA or TfL. Normally retiring Mayors are quite careful about what they say in public about what should be done by the successors because it becomes a hostage to fortune to both (especially if the retiring Mayor has wider political ambitions). And for TfL to be associated with public lobbying about what their future leader should do is quite unheard of.

223. Isn’t the Human Streets doc simply a job application from Gilligan to Zac?

224. To go back to the disussion of extending the Congestion Charge zone, any move is fraught with difficulty. To start with, we have the proposition. The purpose of any congestion charge is to incentivise car users to do one of three things:
     1. Change transport mode
     2. Change time of travel
     3. Change destination
     The original CC zone created all three effects, the third largely by encouraging some car intensive businesses to move out of the Zone.

     Once you have a wider zone (of whatever nature, see below), the proposition is different:
     1. The alternative transport modes are less available / useful (see everyone’s travel attern discussion); spare capacity is now less/un-available on radial rail
     2. There is less scope for businesses to move
     3. Shifting time of travel is not really the point
     Perhaps an increase in capacity, such as Xrail 1 might give the opportunity to experiment.

     The second issue is the differential impact from the central CC zone. Inevitably, we are talking about a many-fold increase in:
     a) The number of residents within a charging zone (see Western Extension)
     b) The number of people who will actually pay the charge on a regular or irregular basis, rather than be deterred by it.
     Unavoidably, we are talking about a system of sub-zones with a more complex charging structure than a flat-rate, hence road pricing. Hence national government involvement.

     No wonder it’s a political hot potato.

225. The congestion charge, like speed cameras, “green” taxes, or taxes on beer and fags, are so often sold to the gullible electorate as a way of influencing people’s behaviour and raising money. Do they really think we don’t realise that you really can’t have your cake and eat it. the more effective it is at one of those things the less able it will be to achieve the other. The money raised from the CC was supposed to be ploughed into meeting the demand by the ex-car drivers for extra bus services.
     But the more demand there would be, the less money there would be to meet it. And if it raised a lot of money, the congestion would be as bad as ever.
     I once saw an article about the “least successful speed camera” because it had caught no-one speeding. Surely that means it had a 100% success rate – in deterring speeding?

226. Are you going to publish any more of these soon? My postal ballot has arrived and I’d quite like to hear the opinions of other candidates too 🙂

227. @ Anomnibus – I think you’re missing the point. Most of the candidates will say one thing in public and if they were to become Mayor they would then be faced with some painful realities about London traffic. It is next to impossible to undertake major road building in London because schemes won’t get through the planning process. There is simply too much opposition and the ability to campaign, communicate and make life extremely hard for politicians is far greater now than in the 70s and 80s. The other realities are that car based travel has been in decline for many years in London – the market has changed. The many factors behind this have been discussed here before. What road investment there is these days is about reducing speeds, transferring capacity and improving “urban realm”. In a few cases it is about major asset renewal or replacement (bridges, flyovers etc). TfL has been quietly pursuing a policy of reducing road network capacity or effecting modal transfer for many years even when the Mayor has been bouncing up and down saying “build enormous road tunnels under inner London”. It’s one of the best “smoke and mirror” campaigns I’ve seen in a long time. It was made starkly clear on the BBC series “Route Masters – Running London” when they interviewed Michelle Dix (then head of planning at TfL).

     I don’t believe a Mayoral candidate would be elected in London if they said “six lane motorways to be built across London, create lots more car parks, scrap cycle lanes, cut bus and tube services, hug an electric car”. Some people would vote for that but you’d hear the much larger and louder outraged response in the International Space Station. Tim Peak would be sending tweets about it. 😉

     Frankly who cares if road space is self limiting – the policy agenda is not about expanding road capacity and it hasn’t been for 16 years under any Mayoralty. I don’t see that changing any time soon – even if Mr Goldsmith was elected he’d be “got at” by the experts who’d soon make things very clear to him and I don’t see him as being especially well informed on transport matters to be able to argue cogently to the contrary. He could, of course, throw a Mayoral strop and say “do it anyway, I’m the boss” but then the responsibility would be very carefully hung round his neck. The “Living Streets” document is Bojo’s way of saying “don’t undo my legacy or else” in the nice understated way he does things. 😛

228. timbeau: I was going by the last of the zonal bus maps where it was shown along the midline of the road outside.

     Another aspect of ‘best transport option’ is related to time of day. I used to fly around Europe a lot, meaning I’d need to get the first plane out of LHR. Being too early for rail I could drive there at 4am in only 30 minutes *at legal speeds* yet a few hours later it could take two hours — or worse. If there’d been a 24-hr underground and CR1 option I _might_ have considered it, but otherwise I had no option but to drive. Also an issue of how much you need to carry with you.

     quinlet et al: The two-hour CPZs only permit non-resident (paid for) parking for 1.5 hours at most, thus making it impossible for the majority of railheaders to use those spaces.

     Greg: Three mile car journeys are only insane when there aren’t buses / other options available. Once outside the central area there usually aren’t.

229. @Walthamstow Writer – exactly. In 2008, Boris Johnson’s manifesto said that he would prioritise “smoothing traffic flow” and this label was attached to a whole set of various TfL road programs that may have achieved some localised improvements but ultimately didn’t really make much difference to the inexorably slow speed of traffic in central London.

     Boris didn’t make many claims about “smoothing traffic flow” in his second term.

     I’m sure he was perfectly happy touting road tunnel schemes as a sop to the roads lobby. He knew that he’d never be responsible for delivering any of them!

230. @ Alison W – I’m going to be a tad pedantic (eek!) about your 3 mile journey point. To be fair there usually are buses in London which can be combined with a walk. For many people cycling could be viable too. Others will use a minicab – witness the regular flow of them at any large supermarket. Where things fall down is that the bus based journey may not be predictable or fast and some will consider cycling to be unsafe or there may not be convenient cycle parking at the destination. It’s a question of relative priorities and car owners will often place a high value on the “door to door” aspect or the ability to (usually) have a faster journey. For those of us with no choice we have to walk and use the buses / tubes or, perhaps, tailor our plans if public transport isn’t a viable option. Note that’s not a complaint on my part – I’ve made my choices and have to live with the results!

     I do, however, feel that some motorists misjudge, or are simply outrageously biased in believing, that they have a “right” to drive wherever they wish, whenever they wish. They don’t research the alternatives or simply won’t countenance them – “oh buses are smelly and cold”, “trains are always late” and various other forms of nonsense. Every form of transport has its benefits and disbenefits. I think London is a bit different from the rest of the country given our vastly higher level of public transport usage but “negative perception” of public transport is still an issue for a lot of people.

231. @Walthamstow Writer – I think there is also simply habit. People drive because they have a car.

     People often don’t make rational or optimal decisions about their choice of route or mode. They do what they’ve always done.

     This applies to other modes of transport as well. Some academics did research into changed travel patterns after a tube strike found as a result of the forced change of habit, some people actually found a more efficient way of getting to work than they had prior to the strike.

     https://plus.maths.org/content/london-tube-strike-not-all-bad

232. In terms of all these 2-3 km road journeys, a lot of them will be in outer London boroughs presumably, where congestion is less of an issue AND infrastructure is designed much more around the car.
     A congestion charge is unlikely to be extended out to affect someone driving to Tesco’s in Barnet or to drop their children off in Romford. Indeed if you banned supermarket car parks then that would lead to a massive increase in home delivery vans instead

233. Mikey C: on individual trips vs. multi-drop delivery vans: my intuition is that total vehicle miles could fall, as a 4-6 km round trip per delivery is replaced by a van doing, say, 15 deliveries over 45km.

     The other thing shoppers might do is take a minicab; anecdotally, many do round my way. I can imagine that the savings are sufficient to pay the (one way) cab fare, at least if you have a large number to cater for or split the cab fare with a neighbour. But I am not an expert.

234. @ Reynolds 953 – fair comment about “habit”. Obviously a lot of people go on to autopilot whether driving or doing their regular commute on public transport.

     I hadn’t seen the tube strike research before but am not overly surprised by it. As I have related before I’ve done the “passenger info” role standing outside closed tube stations trying to help people get to work. I’ve seen the very varied responses from people when you

     a) tell them their normal route is not available
     b) provide them with an alternative that their brains can’t “compute”.
     c) confirm their usual route is not available for a second time and then try again to offer them a viable alternative.

     Even doing seemingly stupid things like sending people “backwards to go forwards” is greeted with incredulity. If the tube’s not running what’s the point of going to the bus stop where everyone else will go? Go to the stop one or two stops before hand where you stand a chance of getting on a bus when it comes. One small success that I remember is sending a chap from Turnpike Lane (stn closed, no trains) via Archway so he could pick up the Northern Line which was running. He turned up the next day (two day strike) and said “same as yesterday?” to which I said “yes” and he said “worked very well, thanks” and off he went for the 41 bus.

     As the research says people don’t have alternatives “up their sleeve” when things go wrong. They don’t try a different route when time allows them to do so so their knowledge level is nil when all of a sudden an impediment to their usual journey arises. I always tried to have pre-rehearsed alternative routes but my “nerd” levels of network knowledge make me the exception. 😉 I see TfL used to do “smarter travel” advice in Sutton and Richmond but it seemed to disappear after about 2009 – presumably quietly axed to save money in the TfL budget.

235. Banning supermarket car parks would infuriate the supermarkets because (a) they were explicitly given (planning) permission to build them and (b) because the person who owns a car and drives a short distance to a supermarket will likely spend more money and visit more often than the person who gets the bus or a minicab.

     It would probably also infuriate the former class of person, with political consequences.

     (exit, muttering into his beard about the number of four wheel drives in the car park at Sainsburys, Garratt Lane)

236. WW, Reynolds 953

     The massively increased public availability of live running public transport data and the ridiculously powerful small connected computers so many of us carry around mean that journey planning in London us now remarkably easy. For example, the navigation tools in Google maps includes a public transport option, called “transit” in a US way; and Citymapper puts public transport first but also offers Hailo black cab (and Uber, ugh) taxi options. Other apps are available.

     On Citymapper you can actually see the individual buses edging towards you (before you can see them with the naked eye).

     Both also offer a cycling option; Citymapper lets you switch between your own bicycle and a banking sponsored behemoth or BSB.

237. Old Buccaneer: “(b) because the person who owns a car and drives a short distance to a supermarket will likely spend more money and visit more often than the person who gets the bus or a minicab” – do you have any evidence for either the “more money” or “more often” assertions?

238. Mike, no.

     It’s a guess (hypothesis or conjecture) based on a belief that people who can afford to run a car in London, and choose to, probably have (tend to have) more disposable income than people who can’t afford to run a car; and they probably dispose of some of that income in a supermarket with a car park. Such a person, I would expect, would be inclined to buy the more expensive branded goods rather than the ‘value’ range. And they might go more often, because they have the convenience of going to and fro in their own car.

     I’d be interested in your counter argument but we’re almost out of sight of ‘transport topics in London’.

239. @Walthamstow Writer:

     I may have posted prematurely. There were multiple points I wanted to make, but the warning about a future river crossings article means I’ll reserve discussion on that aspect until later.

     However, my main point was really about how travel patterns seem to vary quite substantially between North* and South London…

     The south London road network is clearly optimised for orbital journeys. Now that I come to think of it, the reason for this is [snipped by Malcolm]

     [A ban on comparing South with North London is under active consideration in moderatorial circles. It has probably been done to death. Malcolm]

     The few truly radial trunk roads leading into central London from south of the river mean that there’s a clear limit to how much buses can help with radial commuting patterns. This doesn’t leave TfL with many options: at the moment, rail-based solutions really are the only options available.

     Any Mayoral candidate who wants to appeal to south London voters will need to address this issue. There’s only so much money in the pot and Crossrail 2 won’t be at the shovels-in-ground stage for years yet. Maybe trams will make a return soon.

     I look forward to the future interviews** with eager, if somewhat cynical, anticipation.

     —

     * (Not “North London and Central London”. I really do mean the boroughs outside the latter.)

     ** (For those who are unaware, this article first appeared in the highly esteemed “London Reconnections Magazine” – you may have heard of it – along with another which will, presumably, be appearing shortly on this very website. The editorial implied these were the first in a series.)

240. @Mikey C and Old Buccaneer:

     I suspect one of the reasons car owners tend to prefer using their cars, even for journeys that might well be quicker via other modes, is simply that they can see the dratted thing parked outside, depreciating rapidly at them with malice aforethought.

     I.e. “I’ve already poured a ton of money into this thing; I’m damned well going to get my money’s worth!”

     It’s also easy to rationalise spending that little bit more over public transport options by muttering variations on: “At least I can listen to my choice of audiobooks / radio station / music on a decent sound system while I travel. And it’s door-to-door. (Mostly.) And it’s raining! (RAINING! I might get wet!) And no strangers yakking away on their mobile phones / I can talk to my friends on my hands-free kit without getting hard stares…”

241. Anomnibus: I think that’s called the sunk costs fallacy. Another bit of psychological pseudo economics by car users (including me!) is to consider only some of the marginal costs of ‘own car’ use (ie fuel, ignoring wear and tear) and comparing that to the full price of the public transport ticket, so ‘own car’ almost always wins.

242. @Old Buccaneer – I’ll see if I can dig up the link, but a GLA survey of some urban shopping areas in London found that people coming by car actually spent less per month than people using other modes of transport.

     People coming by car spent more * per trip * but people using other modes of transport made more trips per month so spent more overall.

243. 
     The Human streets report is mostly very good & I think the Quiet routes” idea is a good one, that needs expansion – there’s a local one right “here”, in fact.
     I agree that it looks like a job-application by Mr Gilligan, but so what? Good luck to him, as a talks (IMHO) a lot of sense about cycling & road-use generally.
     The problem(s) are when it come down to specifics & localities.

     I have already castigated LBWF, re. the location shown in the photograph on Page 21 of the report & similar matters. [Allegations of dishonesty snipped. Malcolm]

     This is also a matter of both transport in London as well as local public interest.

     Especially if LBWF’s schemes are then used as a supposedly-successful model for other places, because people are unaware of the huge opposition to these ideas in some quarters.

     [Greg will be aware, as will others, that we will not permit frequent mentions of his opposition to the LBWF (London Borough of Waltham Forest) cycle scheme, almost whenever the word “cycle” appears. Nor will we allow this site to be the method of making certain allegations public. However, this mention (and a limited amount of further discussion should anyone wish to respond) is allowed, as the report which has been raised and discussed does indeed make much of the scheme in question. Malcolm]

244. WW
     and the ability to campaign, communicate and make life extremely hard for politicians is far greater now than in the 70s and 80s.
     At a cross-London & national level, yes. At local level, no, especially if a small group or individual has a lot of local “grip”. More’s the pity.

     R-953
     I think there is also simply habit. People drive because they have a car.
     Err, no.
     I have a car, but I use it for when I’m going to:
     1 -places where there are no buses or trains
     2 – times when the public-transport is not as good as during “Normal” hours, especially the return journey.
     3 – I’m carrying LOTS of “stuff”
     This amounts to an annual mileage of between 1800 & 2500 maximum.

     … your later post, re. amounts spent.
     Probably true.
     Once a month I do a supermarket-run ( I walk to the “other” on alternating fortnights) – my expenses on shopping have gone down, because of careful timing, etc – oh & I always make the journey a “dual-purpose” one & go on elsewhere to do other things that need the car.
     But, then I suspect that like most of the commentariat here, I’m much more aware of the costs/benefits & involved nature of the transport options available.

     Anomnibus
     Oh dear, can’t resist it: that they can see the dratted thing parked outside, depreciating rapidly
     Not mine mate – worth at least what I paid for it, back in 2003.
     [ Hint – they made the last one this January & I think prices are rising ]

245. @OB
     London Councils published this report a few years ago.
     http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/services/parking-services/parking-and-traffic/parking-information-professionals/review-relevance
     Based on real evidence (as opposed to opinions) it shows that, for town centres in London, car based shoppers visit less and spend less overall than those coming by bus, foot or bike. This applies to all social groups and applies to shopping centres like Arndale centres.

     Supermarkets won’t be the same, but the overriding belief by retailers that their customers mainly or entirely rely on cars for their shopping is certainly wrong and quite misleading.

     It’s also a bit of a strange thing that decision makers are apt to rely on retailers for their transport planning decisions in a way which transport planners’ views on retailing methods would never be given house room.

246. A message to all: further anecdotal evidence, describing how you or your gardener’s aunt do your/her shopping, or what exactly you use a car for and what you do not, will be removed (unless it is extremely unusual and makes a specific point). Other kinds of evidence, such as surveys, are fine.

247. @quinlet – it’s strange, isn’t it how whenever the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is mentioned, the large department stores complain about the loss of trade from passing motorists.? The stack of cars parked outside Selfridges or John Lewis is presumably clear enough to them. Suggests they don’t know their customers as well as they might….

248. @GrahamH
     I guess both you and I have come across enough examples of businesses that don’t know enough about particularly the peripheral parts of their businesses. Supermarkets (and manufacturers) that don’t know enough about their transport costs is another.

249. @Quinlet
     ” car based shoppers visit less and spend less overall than those coming by bus, foot or bike. ”

     Could the “spending less overall” be because they can bulk-buy, which is cheaper, whereas if you come by other means you can only buy what you can carry away? So they may be buying just as much “stuff” in the weekly shop as the pedestrian does in seven daily visits, but are spending less money on it.

     The weekly/monthly shopper may also have to buy more frozen food, as any fresh food will have passed its use-by date before the next visit. Frozen food tends to be cheaper.

250. @ quinlet

     Thanks for the reference. The report contains some interesting data, particularly in the appendices.

     Much of this data does not support what I wrote above. Malcolm’s warning is apposite & timely.

     Reynolds 953: the report quinlet links to says moreorless what you recalled – and more.

251. @quinlet – thanks for providing the link to the report I referred to. I’d misremembered it as a GLA report rather than London councils.

     While this report contains good data, there is a distinct lack of data supporting the “30 minutes free parking ” policy that Zac Goldsmith’s is promoting.

     Firstly, whether this policy provides any economic benefit to retailers. Does longer time mean spending more money or spending more time chatting over a cup of coffee while a parking space is blocked for someone who actually does want to buy something…

     Secondly, Mr Goldsmith says he is a “localist” but this doesn’t seem to apply when imposing car parking policies…

252. Re Graham H,

     The big 4 supermarkets are partially blaming their current woes on fewer people travelling to do big shops at their retail palaces. See quarterly reporting and investor research reports for this in plenty of detail.
     The supermarkets big format business model for groceries was offering a mix of good (e.g. milk) and not so good prices (e.g. toothpaste) unfortunately for the supermarkets if people do smaller shops more often they frequently use the opportunity to shop around so the not so good price category items have become more competitive as that is where new retails have chosen to attack (German discounters as well as pound shops and the other supermarkets trying to grab back market share).
     The big food manufacturing groups have also become very attuned to preventing themselves funding special offers that are good for supermarkets but less good or were quite often bad for the manufacturers so a huge extra subsidy channel for the supermarkets has been removed so there are fewer generous volume based special offers compared to decade ago. [A while ago I built the special offer commercial assessment models for 2 very large “food” manufacturers so I have pretty good idea of the economic of this]

     Re Quinlet /Timbeau,
     That report is about town centres which are very different to big supermarkets or retail parks… (which are driven by cars if you’ll excuse the pun!)
     Timbeau’s understanding is spot on.

     With car fuel consumption improving and petrol /diesel prices having fallen car travel for outer orbital journeys is often cheaper (as well as quicker) than bus or train especially if changes are involved. The fuel cost for a 15 mile off peak round trip I did last night was less than a single bus fare and I would have had to use 4 buses or 4 trains for the return trip (and far quicker as no waiting at interchanges especially when the SWT frequency drops in the evening). [My normal daily use is point to point Oyster and walk being cheaper than travelcard and sub daily cap.]
     So what would encourage public transport use in such cases (apart for pricing cars of the road):
     1. Trains – improved frequencies so less waiting time
     2. Trains – improved train performance with better acceleration, reduced dwell time to cut journey times
     3. Trains – cut fare (it ain’t going to happen the only possible advantage is more use above daily oyster cap or travelcard and where it the TfL / TOC revenue benefit in that)

     4 Buses – improved frequencies so less waiting time
     5 Buses – cut fare, which ain’t going to happen but the 1 hour fare concept would stand to make the biggest difference of any measure.
     6 Buses – Tfl take control of all roads with bus /cycle routes (and adjacent roads as sensibly required) and start applying lots of double red lines to improve journey times / reliabilities

     Can any one see any of those happening any time soon? If not the car is here to stay in outer London.

     I suspect a mayoral candidate promising lots of minor improvement to roads to in Outer London would get themselves lots of votes as lots of road users (drivers, ridiers, cyclists and pedestrians) can see lots of potential improvements for all road users.

253. A couple of observations about “short” car journeys:

     Cars are often used for a series of journeys during the course of a day,

     e.g. home-school 1 -school 2 – work – school 2 – school 1 – after school activity – home

     or home – office – client – office – shops – elderly relative – home.

     A lot of such journeys cannot be planned to fit in with timetables.

     Many people have to work wherever they can find a job. Sometimes the public transport options can make this really difficult and a car is the quickest and least costly choice. Someone I know had a period in his life where he lived in Cockfosters. His wife’s job and children’s education were based nearby. His employment was near Woking.

     There are also people who work antisocial shifts and whose work assignments change every year. They can’t always choose to live near work because they don’t know where this will be in a few months time.

254. Reynolds 953: I’m not sure what “30 mins free” amounts to. Where I’ve seen it implemented, in LB Kingston, currently, it’s “30 minutes free but if you want longer then pay from the moment you park”. I think that supports what Mary Portas was asking for when she talked about “free controlled parking”.

     I think a cafe operator is a retailer, but I agree that the ‘spend per minute’ at, say, £6 for 20 minutes*, compares badly with any form of goods shopping.

     As I’ve seen it implemented, I think the policy discourages ppl (the London Councils report reveals that the majority of shoppers are women) from driving to a town centre for the sort of ‘idle chat’ which Reynolds 953 seems to deprecate. Of course, if you get the bus, you can spend as long as you like in the cafe.

     The Local Councils report doesn’t present the data in a way that allows testing of this important proposition AFAICT.

     I wonder whether happy shoppers spend more & whether provision of hot drinks and somewhere to sit is conducive to happiness? Some people spent an amazingly long time (to my eyes) in some of the centres analysed in the London Councils report.

     Re: localism: doesn’t the Mayor set parking policy on his ‘strategic roads network’?

     *Based on two hot drinks at £3 each and personal observation of time spent.

255. Re Old Bucaneer,

     “@ quinlet

     Thanks for the reference. The report contains some interesting data, particularly in the appendices.

     Much of this data does not support what I wrote above. Malcolm’s warning is apposite & timely.”
     Note the title of appendix 2:

     Appendix 2 How and Why People Travel to Town Centres

     Is not how and why people travel to non town centre retail establishment e.g supermarkets or retail parks e.g. most big format stores in the ‘burbs

     Note the single data source and its attributes:

     The Mall Corporation has 8 ‘community shopping centres’ across the UK with 3 in London. Most of these shopping centres are to be found in in-town (as opposed to out-of-town) locations, making the data particularly valuable for the purposes of this study.

     The 3 shopping centre used for data collection were Walthamstow Wood Green and Uxbridge (the later they sold because it was not doing so well 😉 ) The other 2 remaining centres have small-medium format supermarkets not big or hypermarkets which are car driven

256. @Old Buccaneer – there is absolutely nothing wrong with a leisurely chat over a cup of coffee. It is one of my simple pleasures in life to settle down in my local cafe reading London Reconnections magazine.
     (Mods: any chance of a free subscription for the plug? 😉 )

     I think successful town centres are places that people want to visit and linger offering more activities than simple retail transactions. So experiences people can’t do on the internet such as cafes, hair/beauty salons and the like. All of these take more time than buying a pint of milk. Hence the inherent problems with cars given the number of parking spaces limits the number of visitors and more time does not mean more expenditure.

     Also, car parking spaces themselves can represent an opportunity cost for space that could be used for other purposes. Would a town centre benefit more from a space being used for half a dozen car parking spaces or some market stalls instead?

257. ngh: quite so. I have a “little list” of other criticisms of the report which I have forborne to post here. I might volunteer a piece for LR on the theme of road use and parking.

258. Reynolds 853: I was being a little flippant. And you didn’t use the term ‘idle chat’.

     Seriously: car ownership and use in London seem to be continuing to decline. There is some patchy data on this up to 2012 in the London Councils report.

     The issue is then how to get the ‘best’ use out of limited parking, taking account not only of the different business interests in the town centre but also the ‘quality of life’ issue you articulate so well. And the personal services – nail bars & tattooists as well as hairdressers fall into this category – point is a good one. Non-car transport modes work well for these trips. But of course a lot of trips are multi purpose.

     Choosing between market stalls & car parking is best done at local level, I agree – perhaps even more local than the borough ‘civic centre’.

259. @Reynolds 953:

     ” Hence the inherent problems with cars given the number of parking spaces limits the number of visitors and more time does not mean more expenditure. “

     Except that’s not a problem with cars themselves, but with privately owned, self-driven cars. You can be driven to a town centre in a mini-cab. No need to pay for parking as the cab driver heads off to their next fare immediately after dropping you off. You can stay as long as you like, then you call another mini-cab to go home. With as much shopping as you please. No need for expensive car parks.

     Obviously, if you could eliminate the need for a driver entirely, so the car takes itself to its next fare, you could run entire fleets of these on behalf of the public. The car, the van, even heavy goods vehicles, thus become key components in the overall “public transport” mix, rather than its enemy. But why wait for the technology to ripen?

     Consider the rise of ZipCar, Über, and their ilk: the younger generation is already living in the “post-ownership” era of the automobile. There may well be a case to be made for subsidising such services. Given how expensive it is to build anything at all in the UK, such a subsidy ought to be orders of magnitude cheaper than building and maintaining new metros, or installing a new tram system pretty much from scratch. Not that those don’t have their own roles to play, but in the lower-density parts of London, it’s much harder to justify their up-front and ongoing costs.

     Short Version: Roads are not a problem: it’s private vehicle ownership that causes the headaches. We could make much more effective use of our limited road space right now if we wanted to. Although self-driving car technology certainly wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think it’s necessary to wait for it; we could start formally transitioning away from private car ownership today and upgrade to full-fat self-driving vehicles when the technology is ready.

     Short, Short Version With Utterly Gratuitous Pun: “Gadgetbahnen Über Alles!”.

     (It’s possible I may need to get out more.)

260. @Reynolds953
     30 minutes free parking in town centres will generally make things worse rather than better if the current paid for parking is well occupied.

     The general rule for setting short stay parking charges is that they should aim for about 85% occupancy. If charges are higher than that it will leave increasing numbers of empty spaces by driving down demand. This certainly would be bad for high streets (or any retail area). If the charges are lower than that which would achieve 85% occupancy you don’t actually get many more cars parking – so no extra visitor numbers – but you do get increasing amounts of ‘searching’ traffic. This causes congestion and pollution and makes the high street less and less attractive as a place to visit.

     In reality, parking charges tend to be too low to hit the 85% target rather than too high and so the Goldsmith proposal is likely to lead to precisely the opposite effect than that claimed. It will make high streets less pleasant and harder to find a parking space and so put people off from visiting.

     @ngh
     I did say that the report did not cover out of town centre supermarkets and retail parks and that issues would be different there, but, given that household car ownership in inner London (which still has supermarkets and retail parks) is only about a third of households, any retailer consciously siting themselves away from decent public transport links is depriving himself of two thirds of his potential market.

261. Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking” is a very readable analysis of many of the parking issues being discussed here – see http://www.shoupdogg.com. Recommended.

262. @ Quinlet – thanks for digging out the info about non car drivers typically making a bigger financial contribution to the health of local shopping centres. This really needs to be screamed from the rooftops so that everyone understands it. I think I once screamed at the telly during a Mary Portas “save a shop” programme where she clearly no idea whatsoever that anyone ever went shopping other than in a car. On that one basis I struggle to take her “expertise” seriously. There is so much nonsense spoken about parking and giving motorists “flex” around parking where and when they like without any consequence. Didn’t the famed Eric Pickles centrally imposed “parking rule relaxation” make matters worse in many town centres resulting in a drop in trade overall? I understand many councils, even Tory controlled, were dismayed at the measure as it blew a hole in the local area plans and revenue from parking charges. It also does nothing for the performance of buses trying to get through town centres choked with cars.

     I am quite intrigued by your comments about the setting of parking charges / occupancy rates being so finely balanced. It’s not something I’d ever thought about but then I never have to consider parking charges (except if someone comes to my flat to repair something!). I also note your telling remarks about retailers having to ensure they don’t deter 2/3s of potential customers in some parts of London. That rather gives a contrary position to Anomnibus’s rather “rose tinted” view about the prospects of self guided vehicles. I’d also strongly argue that the Uber model is a disaster when it comes to road capacity being squandered and residential and other areas being turned into informal, uncontrolled car parks while Uber drivers wait for their next “instant” fare. At some point someone is going to have to impose regulations and ensure enforcement so that these downsides are removed. I simply don’t see how efficient bus services are “worse” in road space terms than fleets of self driving vehicles scuttling around or Uber cars lurking on every street corner. Buses make far more sense as would walking and cycling routes for those who wish to use those modes.

     Who wants to visit a town centre swamped with Uber cars clogging up every road in the place? This fate will, no doubt, be visited on much of the UK because of the erosion of viable bus services that support travel across a day (including early, evening and Sunday supported services). If the majority are forced into car ownership, dependency on friends and relatives for lifts or some form of taxi / minicab / PH vehicle then we’ve got a real mess on our hands. London could not function on this basis.

263. @Quinlet: for TfL to be associated with public lobbying about what their future leader should do is quite unheard of

     TfL have been pretty open about their opposition to one candidate’s proposed fare freeze… The “1.9 billion black hole” statistic adorning another candidate’s election posters comes directly from them.

     The Human Streets document might be a job application from Andrew Gilligan but I think not just to Zac Goldsmith – Sadiq Khan might also be tempted to reappoint Gilligan on the basis of the principle originally expounded by Lyndon B Johnson about J Edgar Hoover, that it is better to have some people inside the tent than outside it.

     @Anomnibus: Open up the Uber app in a popular trip-starting area and it can be very striking how many empty cars are driving round in circles waiting for someone to hail them. That doesn’t strike me as a great use of road capacity. In fact it would be better environmentally if they parked. Uber’s business model depends on there being a plentiful supply of cars at all time so they will actively encourage more cars onto the road at busier times (surge pricing). Doing this imposes externalities on others – as well as pollution and degradation of the urban environment, more cars on the road means greater delays (and so costs) to other road users. These externalities are of course of no interest to Uber, who like to claim that they are a technology company, not a transport provider.

     At the moment the situation is just about bearable because Uber is very much a niche mode, but it just can’t scale into a genuine means of mass transit: there isn’t the road space.

264. @WW
     I find I am in very much two minds about Uber, and, indeed, about autonomous shared use cars generally. On the one hand they do appear to result in a reduction in car ownership which both eases pressure on residential streets overnight and leads to a more considered choice of mode trip by trip because there are no ‘sunk costs’ . On the other I agree with you that if the numbers get out of hand it will produce both added pollution and congestion to no-one’s benefit. What I can’t discover if anyone has done any research about is if the tipping point where the delayed introduced by the added congestion and the wasted costs imposed by the vehicles wasting time just waiting for a hire making the service uneconomic comes before or after the point at which it makes the roads intolerable.

265. @Ian J
     “it can be very striking how many empty cars are driving round in circles waiting for someone to hail them. ”
     This is of course nothing new. Empty black cabs take up road space as well, and many ranks are full to overflowing.
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.500601,-0.1150035,3a,75y,124.51h,81.28t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sRu_iPI-y1-i7OWbe3BIMnQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-GB
     200 metres beyond this point is a sign saying where the end of the taxi queue is
     https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5014861,-0.1125694,3a,15y,10.42h,87.24t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sI7uEI06MA6Jsi340wAcGQQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en-GB

266. ….and most of them belching out diesel fumes for the whole time they are in the queue.
     No wonder we have an air-quality problem

267. @WW, quinlet et al:

     This article collects a whole bunch of different studies that look at spending of bike compared to private vehicle: http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/03/the-complete-business-case-for-converting-street-parking-into-bike-lanes/387595/

     I’ll try to dig them out later, but there are also studies looking at the kind of establishments that cyclists and pedestrians tend to frequent too. To boil it down, in summary, car drivers tend to do a weekly shop in a major supermarket, whereas cyclists and pedestrians tend to shop more frequently and at independent shops more. Now, it could be argued that those choosing to cycle and walk instead of drive are also those more likely to be aware of the wider advantages of choosing local independents and so this effect may diminish as the wider population are ‘nudged’ into using their cars less, but I think it’s important to grasp that encouraging people onto bikes and on foot isn’t just about moving people around in the most efficient and environmentally sustainable way, or even just looking at net spend, but it’s also about realigning local neighbourhood centres so that they are economically and socially viable and vibrant by making them places that feel safe and secure for people to use.

     (but I suspect that I’m getting a little off topic and in danger of being dragged into a discussion about the merits of Waltham Forest’s Mini-Holland, so I’ll leave it there…)

268. Some time since the publication of the Caroline Pidgeon interview.

     Will Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith be appearing here before the election?

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