Friday Reads – 29 May 2020

1. Re: “Should TfL build blocks of flats to save itself?”

   Walking past Abbey Road DLR station yesterday, I was rather struck by the idea that TfL could make a fortune if it could make the Jubilee Line depot there into a place for people to live. There’s loads of demand for housing, and it would certainly help with the “Stratford to Canary Wharf city” project if the 200×500 meters site could be leveraged. The idea would be to keep the depot on the ground floor and build the housing above. With two DLR stations around the site (Stratford High Street is at the north end) it already has great connections.

   I guess the same idea might be possible with the Victoria line depot at Northumberland Park.

2. TfL has been obtaining funds through property development and sales for decades. Many of the early tube stations in Central London were built so as to permit development above, and that happened. Chiltern Court and Chalfont Court at Baker Street are examples of housing at an Underground station – though hardly “affordable”. As time passes the remaining opportunities become harder and more expensive to realise. Most remaining development opportunities are around stations and over tracks, but such schemes are difficult to realise. For a scheme to be economic at all the cost of creating a development site must be broadly comparable with the cost of land in the area – and that requires a scarcity of other sites and high land prices generally. Harrow-on-the-Hill station is a good example of a location where a rafted development over the platforms would be technically possible, but has never stacked up economically, though office development on adjacent land was completed about thirty years ago.

   There is also the issue that property development and income is particularly cyclical, so a boom or bust in the economy has a disproportionate effect on the market. That means it is difficult to rely on income. One can spend years (literally) dealing with the technical, commercial and legal aspects of a scheme and then find it is not going ahead because market conditions have changed.

   I’m afraid that politicians and others coming up with the bright idea that property development is the way out of a funding problem is nothing new either.

3. Tfl as property developer. A recent example of air rights development can be seen on the DLR. A new block of flats had been built over the tracks on the “ski jump” ramp where the DLR dives into Bank tunnel. They managed to built that with minimal (if any) interruption to services. That site is less than five minutes walk to Tower so presumably the land value (and the price they can sell those flats for) will be high.
   The jubilee depot at Stratford is huge. I don’t see how an over deck could be constructed without severely restricting the use of the depot, especially as it would need significant piling. But I’m not a building engineer and would be interested to hear if anyone thinks there is a practical way to do this without restricting use of the depot.

4. To make money from property as an infrastructure provider, you first have to have the land to develop. Then, to remain in that business, you have to keep it rather than sell it off. If you keep it, your property portfolio provides you with a long term income, rather than periodic capital injections, just when you can do a development. You can also enjoy capital gains if you still own it.

   In other times and other places, there has been more land available to develop. In other places, some railways are more inclined to hang on to their developments and use them to provide a long term income. But British governments have tended to encourage transport providers to sell down their land portfolios, to address immediate financial shortfalls and arguing that others would develop it and manage it more effectively.

   Property development to fund the London Underground is indeed nothing new. The Metropolitan line obtained considerable funding in that way. After the first world war, permission was given to the Met not just to make money from surplus railway land (such as land where they housed railway construction workers) but to buy land and develop estates, which became part of the so-called Metroland.

   So it has been going on for a long time. The real issue is the scale of it, the amount of land they have access to that they can add value to, and probably also, keeping it. Hong Kong is already mentioned. Japan is another big case – railway companies there make around half their income from property. They are cited as examples of subsidy free railways, but only because they have this large property portfolio they developed over time, kept, and now make large amounts of money out of. The Dutch railways also make proportionately more money from property, again by developing estate and more often keeping it.

5. “The station design has a sufficiently sized concourse and platform space to accommodate passenger growth to 2041 and beyond” And HS2 opens when?

6. The Bakerloo line depot next to the Imperial war museum must be a leading candidate for development.

   The site is huge and less than 10 minutes walk from Waterloo.

   I suspect the only reason they haven’t built a raft over the top of the depot is because they are hoping for a Bakerloo line extension to allow them to clear the site completely, making the build cost much lower.

7. Woolwich Arsenal DLR station is no closer to having anything built over it since it opened in 2009. There were plans for a hotel, and later on flats but nothing has ever materialised.

8. @ISLANDDWELLER

   As I recall, they built “Victoria Place” over the higher numbered platforms at London Victoria station whilst I was commuting up from Brighton in the 1980s. This is the same idea: drive some piles in for the foundations and then create a deck over the lines for the “building work” to happen. Perhaps it might just be easier to move the depot to Zone 5 and have a virgin site to work with in Stratford.

9. Regarding COVID transmission on transport, Masks typically worn on East Asian metros are not all N95s or local equivalents, as illustrated by the Taipai image in the Medium article showing standard surgical masks being worn. Surgical masks are worn in the operating theatre primarily to shield patients from pathogens exhaled in the breath of surgeons and their support staff working closely rather than to protect the surgeon. This is known as ‘source control’, which is also the primary benefit of public wearing during an epidemic in confined spaces with little airflow where social distancing can’t always be relied on.

   If all in such spaces wear even very basic masks or other face coverings, the air can be kept much clearer of droplets and aerosol contamination than without any masking, and everyone on board a train or bus is thus protected to a degree regardless of the effectiveness of the masks in protecting the wearer directly. On transport, people tend to keep themselves to themselves, and enthusisatic singing, dancing or even talking is rare, especially in the UK, and even more so during this period. This is a very different environment to other enclosed crowded areas where mass transmission is known to have taken place such as nightclubs.

   The comparative safety of public transport with mandated masking seems to be borne out by the East Asian experience, but clearly broad measures to limit crowding, particularly in the peaks, are still needed. Perhaps a capacity level on vehicles of greater than the rather unrealistic 15% target in UK might be possible safely, as long as masks are mandated rather than only advised as at present. Many European countries coming out of lockdown and easing business shutdowns are aiming at a capacity of around 50% on public transport initially with mandatory masking.

Comments are closed.