Transport against London

London isn’t like other cities. It’s better than all the others put together, for a start. More importantly, like the one or two places that could mistakenly be considered its peers, London depends on trains and buses to survive, while cars are an irrelevance. However, our creaking public transport network is held together by gaffer tape. This is partly because the government prefers to squander money on Celts, but also partly our own fault…

Sometimes, people do attempt to use cars in London, but this is due to eccentricity rather than need – like being a polar explorer, or perhaps climbing Everest. A small band of lawless brutes also attempts to cause pedestrian carnage using bizarre two-wheeled torture devices. But ignoring insane minority groups, all passenger transport in London takes place on foot, on buses and on trains, while all freight traffic takes place by truck.

The latter works tolerably, but passenger transport is far more of a problem: even though London has one of the most extensive and capacious public transport networks in the world, it isn’t anywhere near good enough. This is because for the last 60 years, the philosophy driving its development has been one of neglect. Perhaps fair enough in the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of bombed Eastenders were fleeing London for a new life in the New Towns; less impressive ever since.

Money reserved for Scots and egos…

There are three reasons why London is massively neglected. One is the UK’s utterly useless political and administrative system, which means that the country’s productive parts (London, bits of the Southeast whose prosperity is dependent on their proximity to London, and greater Birmingham) massively subsidise everywhere else – especially Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland).

The second is the attitude of postwar civil servants and (perhaps consequently) their political masters towards railway schemes. Broadly, a new road merely has to be made of tarmac and meet cost/benefit analysis requirements in order to be approved, whereas a new public transport scheme needs to generate an accounting profit. No, that isn’t a misprint: it is government policy to refuse to fund new public transport schemes if it will have to pay for them out of tax revenue, even where CBA results are strongly positive, unless the scheme meets narrow political goals.

There have only been four major public transport projects in London since World War II: the Victoria Line, the Jubilee Line, the Jubilee Line Extension, and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The first two are partial exceptions to the rule above, having been approved in the late 1950s and late 1960s respectively to relieve the colossal congestion seen on existing London commuter services. Even so, an official justification for the Victoria Line was to provide jobs on Tyneside by sourcing all equipment and rolling stock from Northeastern manufacturers.

The other two projects are in absolute compliance with the rule. The JLE was approved at the end of the 1980s and built entirely to save the Tories’ pet Docklands yuppification project from financial collapse, while the CTRL satisfies an even more basic need among politicians: to annoy the French. It’s certain to achieve this objective admirably, while making no difference whatsoever to the lives of Londoners (or anyone else).

Unsurprisingly, the number of public transport projects in London with a positive CBA return is rather higher than four. The most important CBA-beneficial projects which aren’t happening are Thameslink 2000 (massive capacity increase on the existing horribly overcrowded north/south rail gauge line); Crossrail (rail gauge tunnel from Paddington to Liverpool Street allowing direct east/west rail travel and relieving congestion on the busiest Tube lines); and the Chelsea/Hackney line (tube tunnel alleviating the King’s Road rail blackspot and helping regenerate the still-a-bit-dodgy areas around Northeast London).

TL2000 and Crossrail ought to be well underway, or even completed, by now – yet both have yet to receive final funding. In all cases, the primary reason for the project’s non-appearance is the Treasury’s preference to doling out cash to Scots and Orangemen.

Trains or fruit?

The third problem, however, is that we don’t do ourselves any favours. The main obstacle to Thameslink 2000 is currently that a bunch of nimbies and luvvies in Borough don’t like the fact that the scheme (which will massively improve cross-London connections, benefiting millions of people throughout the Southeast) involves knocking down their local fruit market. Seriously, everything is on hold until a public enquiry decides whether it’s more important that loft-apartment dwellers can buy organic vegetables without having to go to Sainsbury’s, or that London’s transport problems get fixed.

Crossrail, which is rather more expensive than TL2000 since it involves digging a very big tunnel, is foundering because the Treasury is desperate to avoid paying for it for the reasons outlined above. The project has now effectively been approved by Parliament, so the Treasury’s current strategy is to ensure that nobody comes up with an economically viable way of funding it (for example, taxing the land price appreciation caused by the presence of new Crossrail stations).

Notwithstanding the fact that Crossrail desperately needs all the support it can possibly get, a great many nimbies and morons have decided to undermine the project further. Yet again, vegetables play a major role in galvanising opposition: over a hundred people believe Crossrail should be cancelled because it will get in the way of their allotments. Lawless two-wheeled thugs are whining that the scheme doesn’t accommodate their perversion. And in a move that sounds more like shameless opportunism than actual nimbyism, the businesses of Paddington are demanding huge compensation for the distruption caused by building work (never mind the enormous increase in business that the completed project will bring). Less forgivably, MPs for assorted places on or near the route are planning to oppose the scheme unless it’s replaced with an already-rejected one at double the cost.

As a Londoner, you have only one person on your side – and you should vote for him every mayoral election until he dies. The Lib Dem candidate from last time round, Simon Hughes, is siding with the luvvies over TL2000. The Tory candidate, Steve Norris, was a car dealer. Ken Livingstone is the only British politician ever to have made a serious stand in favour of public transport in London, and the results, both in the 1980s and this time round, have been impressive. And without his individual impact, Labour would almost certainly be as bad as the other two parties.

But solving London’s problems properly requires a far larger budget than the mayor can command – so even with Ken’s help, our transport system might well remain Utterly Rubbish.