• New Streetspace plan will fast track overhaul London’s streets (Guardian)
• HS2 will build underground connection to Euston Square station (IanVisits)
• Rethinking funding London transport (CentreForLondon)
• Trainspotters: do your thing – at home, via RailCam (RailFreight)
• L’état n’est plus la voiture: The car no longer reigns in Paris (FabricOfParis)
• Cars spread COVID too (Planetizen)
• Ships increasingly taking longer Cape route as fuel prices drop (Ship&Bunker)
Read our most popular articles:
- Schrodinger’s Cab Firm: Uber’s Existential Crisis
- You Hacked – Cyber-security and the railways
- On Our Line Podcast #8: Talking Uber, Lyft and Mobility disruption
And some of our other sections:
Feel we should read something or include in a future list? Email us at [email protected].
Reconnections is funded largely by its community. Like what we do? Buy us a cup of coffee or visit our shop.
London cycling COULD increse by a factor of 10.
Except, of course fior the ederly & disabled & mothers with children, forced onto buses, where the bus lanes have been removed for the cyclists ……
Which is what has happened in Waltham Forest – the congestion & pollution on the main raods has got significantly worse ….
I’m actually cycling less, & I lve in LBWF.
I think something, or more than one something, is missing from the calculations/models, but I’m not sure what…..
The article on finance & support for TfL is timely ….
I don’t think it emphasises quite how badly TfL has been treated by National (mis)government recently.
It was also seriously not helped by the current Mayor’s attention-getting, but long-term suicidal “Fares Freeze” either
@Greg
A 10 fold increase in cycling would still mean that less than 1/3 of trips would be made by cycle. The remainder would allow for people such as disabled people to do no trips by bike. Incidentally, many elderly people and mothers with children cycle.
It’s not a choice between providing for bikes and providing for buses. Both are needed.
It is important to compare how other countries fund local transport systems comparable to London Transport. When we do something different here from most other countries, we should ask very carefully if we are the advanced ones doing it better, or the foolish ones failing to spot our folly. Sometimes we have been the advanced ones others eventually copy. But we are very bad at spotting when we are the foolish ones, in spite of the evidence being in our face that few people are copying us.
I should like London transport to be more like continental major city transport. Unfortunately the fares and funding are not the only thing that is different about London local transport. If we just change that one thing to be more like them, it will go horribly wrong.
The problem is that, at least in pre-Covid conditions, London local transport is already very heavily loaded and can’t cope with the expansion in demand that much cheaper fares would bring.
We have to fix capacity first. But unfortunately we have another do-it-our-own-curious-way situation that is impeding that. For example, the most overloaded underground station, at least the one that TfL considers the highest priority to relieve, is Holborn. It is a 4 platform station where the Central and Piccadilly lines cross, so not the complexity of the really big stations where many lines meet. And it communicates only with the street. TfL recently put forward a Holborn pedestrian access capacity expansion scheme. It was costed at £700m taking 6 years to deliver. Since such numbers are always in error, you will have to change those to whatever real numbers you think they would eventually be.
The trouble is that when merely expanding pedestrian access capacity at just a 4-platform station costs £700m, there just isn’t the money to deal with all the other numerous pinch points either. Because we need lots of schemes like that. But at such costs we can’t afford anywhere near the number we need. TfL has already discovered it can’t even afford that one scheme and it has been indefinitely delayed.
Stuff like this doesn’t cost sums of money like this in our near neighbour countries. If we want to have transport systems like them, we have to deliver them at the same costs as them, or we won’t be able to afford them. After all, we are no more wealthy than them to afford major infrastructure at a large multiple of the cost.
We need to learn modesty in our schemes. We also need to rewrite our health and safety laws so that the law doesn’t force us to spend large amounts of money removing small risks. Other countries value life very highly too, but they recognise more easily when they are not achieving value for money in these matters. Public transport is already very, very safe in comparison to most other things we do.
So we can’t just do this one thing like the continentals. It won’t work unless we do the other things like the continentals too.
@Greg, @Quinlet
For many elderly and disabled people (depending on the disability) cycling is easier than walking, especially if you include e-bikes in that. Go to the continent and the number of elderly people out on e-bikes is large – depending on time and location they can considerably exceed the number of other people out on bikes.
I was once overtaken by a one-legged cyclist, on an unmodified bicycle, aside from a special cleat to attach his artificial limb to the pedal. He had a crutch taped to the bicycle, so he may have had greater difficulty walking. I only caught him up because he stopped in a cafe, this on a hilly route. And that was 20 years ago when I would sometimes ride 200km in a day. I can cite numerous similar cases. Maybe such parathletes are relatively rare exceptions, but they remind us not to make generalisations about the disabled.