Boris Johnson as Mayor - what are the implications for London's development?

[DarJoLe]

Originally Posted by Octoman

That means the comparison should be done on the basis of safety and aesthetics and on both those I think the new bus wins.

Not cost?

[Octoman]

Originally Posted by Langur

The point I'm making is that we can upgrade and add new terminal and runway capacity to our existing airports and keep pace with any competition in the world. It's a much cheaper option than starting afresh on a new site, and in these days of deficit reductions, we'd be foolish to spurn plans that the private sector can afford to build without taxpayer assistance (ie basically every option except the Thames Estuary). It's faster and cheaper and therefore makes a lot of economic sense.

I suppose it is possible that Boris is banging the drum for an estuary airport to keep the government under pressure and the issue high on the agenda.

I just grave reservations about trying to expand Gatwick. I agree your case is sound and ideally should be a no brainer. On the other hand I look at the problems a simple infrastructure project like building a new railway line encounters and envisage something many orders of magnitude greater.

Regardless, we need anything but the 'do nothing' option.

Originally Posted by DarJoLe

Not cost?

The cost is in line with other hybrid buses. I don't think a case can be made for bendies just on that.

[Langur]

Originally Posted by DarJoLe

Not cost?

In other contexts you're all about design and to hell with cost. How would you feel if 122 Leadenhall was a butt ugly concrete box instead? You wouldn't care if it was efficient or cheap.

London's one of the only cities in the world where forms of transport are icons every bit as much as Big Ben, St Paul's or Tower Bridge. Just look at a postcard rack, and you'll see images of red double deckers, black cabs, and the Tube roundel. The most iconic of them all is the Routemaster. The newer double deckers are decent enough, but they're just not the same, and the Routemaster cannot go on forever. Indeed it's already confined to just two short heritage routes. We need a replacement icon, and the Boris bus is simply superb. I was sceptical at first because I thought the design wouldn't be good enough. I was wrong. The design is amazing. With the Shard almost complete, the new things in London that excite me most for the next two years are the rise of 122 Leadenhall and the new Boris bus.

[Langur]

Originally Posted by Octoman

I just grave reservations about trying to expand Gatwick. I agree your case is sound and ideally should be a no brainer. On the other hand I look at the problems a simple infrastructure project like building a new railway line encounters and envisage something many orders of magnitude greater.

But I'm talking of a new runway at Gatwick and an upgraded rail link to Victoria. The upgraded Thameslink also gives Gatwick a rival to Heathrow's Crossrail connection. These Gatwick proposals vastly smaller and cheaper than having to build a 4-runway airport from scratch. You'd have to build a ton of new motorways, everything! I think some people assume we can build a spur from the new airport to High Speed 1, but isn't High Speed 1 already close to capacity even before the new Deutsch Bahn services to Frankfurt et al? I don't think there's room for a frequent airport express as well. If so, a Thames Estuary airport means building an entirely new rail corridor to central London. I just don't see how it could be easier or faster in terms of planning, let alone cost.

Agreed that the worst option is "do-nothing". Unfortunately that's what both governing parties have chosen to do for the last two decades.

[NCT]

Originally Posted by SE9

It's not a 'perceived feeling' that artics were faster due to sitting downstairs, they actually were. On countless occasions the 453, 436 and 12 would overtake the other buses that travel the same route. This was obviously not reflected in TfL's scheduling.

When artics were replaced with double deckers, of course they had to increase the frequency, or there wouldn't be enough capacity on that route. You can't replace 10 artics with 10 double deckers and expect passengers to make-do.

If an airline replaced all 747s on a popular route with 767s, you'd expect an increase in frequency to accommodate the same number of passengers.

On countless occasions artics were overtaken by DDs too. Buses in London aren't supposed to run early either as controllers will hold you back at the first instance. As the old adage amongst drivers go no good ever comes of overtaking, as you are just going to pick up the lot of passengers at the next stop. Either you are overtaken again or you get 'punched' and end up doing all the work. Buses just weave between one another and unless two drivers have vastly different driving styles once you are together you stay together. The Citaros Gs with their 205kW engines for a whopping 29-tonne thing weren't exactly the most powerful buses either.

Routes like the 25 and 38 are quite overspecified, and I suspect that's partly because Boris wanted to cover his back in case route reliability suffered upon debendification. Their current PVRs (peak vehicle requirements) are about 20 more than pre-bendy days. A lot of buses operate well below capacity even in the peaks - you usually have the first one quite full, which is followed by a trail of progressively more empty ones close behind because there are just too many buses. Their schedules have been made ridiculously slack too with buses crawling at 10 mph in empty traffic and drivers announcing 'I have to lose 4 minutes between here and the next stop'. What used to be a 89 minute journey on the 25 now takes 102 minutes.

[larven]

I think the Boris bus is superb, I can't think of anything else like it in the world.

We talk a lot on these forums about how good architecture and urban design can help instill a 'sense of place'. Well these buses do exactly that and I agree with Langur that they are as 'uniquely' London as any well known landmark I can think of.

[Langur]

One more point on the airports: the Labour government pushed through a bill that limits planning enquries to one year. There will be no repeat of the T5 inquiry that lasted a decade. All it needs is some political will and we can get a new runway at Gatwick under construction and ready to open by 2019. I don't think there'll ever be sufficient political will to push ahead with a 3rd runway at Heathrow, but a 2nd runway at Gatwick is possible.

[kerouac1848]

One of the problems with Gatwick is that roads inside London are poor south-of-the-river. There are no real fast roads from the M25 northwards towards central London which pushes people east or west to pick up the orbital motorway. Rail links are great but many people still drive and you can't wish them away and getting the upgrades needed is going to be extremely difficult. Gatwick Express also is not a separate pair of tracks like Heathow (the track it uses, the BML, is packed), and Thameslink spreads itself over so many branches increases to Gatwick are limited, so fundamentally a new rail tunnel is needed to provided any required services. Even then there are problems with Victoria which is packed and where can you put the extra services? Once you start talking of rail and road tunnels and extra platforms at termini the upgrades become very, very expensive.

[Bob]

The case for increasing capacity on the Brighton Main Line from south of Croydon to central London is ever stronger. e.g. increasing capacity on the line to Uckfield (or reopening it to Brighton). Add in an a second runway at Gatwick then options such as a tunnel from Purley stack up as the simplest, least disruptive and possibly cheapest as construction could be 24/7. It would help if the M23 could get as far as Croydon, which it could with quite a bit of cut and cover tunnelling. Other bits and bobs such as re-opening the line to East Grinstead or upgrading the A23 to the South would probably be enough.

I also think it unlikely there will ever be enough infrastructure built to support an estuary airport. I'd like a super efficient Thames one, but most likely it would be a forth half baked one. So in this case Langur is probably right. I think the Government might come round to this too.

[Octoman]

This picture sums up what I hated about the bendy bus. Apart from the fact it is blocking off the whole road to make a routine turn, it is bloody lethal. No wonder cyclists hated them.




And another taking up an entire junction.

[spindrift]

Originally Posted by Octoman

This picture sums up what I hated about the bendy bus. Apart from the fact it is blocking off the whole road to make a routine turn, it is bloody lethal. No wonder cyclists hated them.

Despite Boris's lies, they weren't lethal at all, they killed no cyclists and certainly didn't bother me.

Boris:

"They wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them."

As was pointed out at the time the real figure was none by 2008 and a further none by the time the last bendy left in December 2011.

It also rather begs the question why he had to spend millions getting rid of bendy buses and millions more introducing a cramped bespoke open boarding bus with a bored person standing around at the public’s expense when he could have just advised his legions of imaginary dead cyclists to man up and stop being pussies.

http://www.boriswatch.co.uk/2012/03/...kill-cyclists/

[Octoman]

I have no idea if cyclists were killed by them or not. I said they were hated by cyclists and that picture shows why. I asked one of my cycling colleagues and he said the issue wasnt collisions with the bus anyway but when it bent round him you were completely obscured from the vision of other motorists. Anyone looking to get a flying start accross the junction would be oblivious to the cyclists.

Either way, a bit of googling shows that they have higher collision rates than double deckers. Roughly 2.7 per million miles versus 1 per million for doubles. Neither are particularly high numbers but it supports the thesis that they were more dangerous.

And try arguing that with the family of Lee Beckwith who was killed after being dragged for over a mile under the rear wheels of a bendy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7035041.stm

[kerouac1848]

Originally Posted by Bob

The case for increasing capacity on the Brighton Main Line from south of Croydon to central London is ever stronger. e.g. increasing capacity on the line to Uckfield (or reopening it to Brighton). Add in an a second runway at Gatwick then options such as a tunnel from Purley stack up as the simplest, least disruptive and possibly cheapest as construction could be 24/7. It would help if the M23 could get as far as Croydon, which it could with quite a bit of cut and cover tunnelling. Other bits and bobs such as re-opening the line to East Grinstead or upgrading the A23 to the South would probably be enough.

You'd also need to build at least a partial orbital motorway that the M23 can connect to. The M1, 4 and 11 all link up with the north circular. You can't really dump motorway traffic into local roads around Croydon, nor expect people to come via central London onto the A23 around Kennington/Oval. Any new rail tunnel would also surely have to come with either extra room at a terminal or a new N/S crossrail tunnel.

Don't get me wrong I'd love it if an expansion of Gatwick was the catalyst for improvements in South London's road and rail network - I would support it for that alone. I just somehow think we'll be lucky to get a new rail tunnel and nothing more and as usual will kick the problems down the line for another generation to fix.

[spindrift]

Figures released in January to the London Assembly paint a more moderate picture than the overall totals to which Boris refers. This breakdown compared collisions on all 12 bendy bus routes to collisions on 15 selected non-bendy routes.

These selected routes tended to cover busy inner-city areas rather than the quieter suburbs. The number 41, for example, which goes from London Bridge, through Holborn, to Wood Green, or the number 8, which goes from Bow in the East End, along Oxford Street to Victoria.

It's not necessarily a scientific study, but it would seem to be a more accurate representation of the kind of routes bendy buses serve.

According to this breakdown, bendy bus routes threw up 5.6 collisions with pedestrians in 2006/07; non-bendy bus routes 5.17.

Collisions with cyclists were 2.62 on bendy buses; but 2.78 on non-bendy routes.

Damning evidence that bendy buses are, well, not much different from other buses?

http://www.channel4.com/news/article...s/1829747.html

Which ever way you look at it, Boris said something that was untrue.

Worth adding that this Great Lie is still being peddled, or at the very least strongly implied, by Boris, despite having issued Mayoral answers acknowledging its inaccuracy.

From the comments beneath Boris's fibs:

I'd like to be the first of many to point out that Boris knows full well by now that his original 2007 claim that 'cyclist-killing bendy buses' 'wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them' is completely wrong - the real figure was zero in nine years of operation of a fleet which was never more than about 5% of the total London bus population. In 2007 he could have claimed it was a misunderstanding but to insinuate it in 2012 two years after he admitted to the London Assembly that he was wrong is, I'm afraid, a direct lie. It's also a somewhat insulting one considering that cyclist deaths and injuries are going up under his Mayoralty even as bendy buses were withdrawn, proving once and for all that they were never the monsters Boris pretended and apparently still wishes to pretend they were - if they really were a significant factor in cycling KSIs we'd see a fall, surely?

[Chrisp7]

Originally Posted by spindrift

http://www.channel4.com/news/article...s/1829747.html

Which ever way you look at it, Boris said something that was untrue.

From your own quoted article:

Boris isn't strictly wrong; on the figures available to date, bendy buses are involved in more accidents than other types of bus.

But the picture is more complicated: when you look at bendy buses compared to selected non-bendy routes rather than London as a whole, the difference looks much less compelling.

I might add that as a cyclist I hated bendy buses, so dangerous.

[Octoman]

It's worse than that. The argument goes something like this :

Claim : bendy buses are not suited to congested urban routes and are more likely to be involved in an accident.

Answer : bendy buses have the same accident of around 2.5 per million miles as double deckers

Claim : but the raw data shows they have three times the accident rate. 2.7 versus 0.9.

Answer : yes, but that is because they are on congested urban routes which they are not suited to so we have smoothed the data.

[spindrift]

No, the argument is:

Boris:

"They wipe out cyclists, there are many cyclists killed every year by them."

This is not true. No cyclists have been killed by bendy buses. Boris lied, then lied again after his lies were pointed out.

[NCT]

Whether Boris's remark was a lie makes no difference to be fact that bendies are certainly ill-suited to London's conditions (with the exception of Red-Arrow routes). One can certainly argue the manner in which bendies were withdrawn was clumsy, but that's politics.

[woodgnome]

What's Boris up to? The Mayor's plans for London are all too vague, but his plans for himself are crystal clear

-- Link to Daily Mail article --

It’s already two weeks since Boris Johnson staged a great victory over his Labour opponent Ken Livingstone. Yet we have heard surprisingly little since from the mayor of London, apart from, that is, his likening of the Jubilee river pageant to a more ‘successful and cheerful Dunkirk.’

Partly this has been because eyes have rightly been fixed – with some terror – on events in Greece and the eurozone. Partly because Johnson has been more visible on the pages of the Daily Telegraph, where he writes a weekly column, than he has been in City Hall, where he conducts his day job. Already Johnson the national politician – for whom the Telegraph represents a personal intranet with the Tory party at large - is taking precedence over his leadership of London.

His sole noteworthy pronouncement to date did not emanate from the eighth floor of the mayoral vastness next to Tower Bridge, addressing London’s problems and his great plans to solve them. No, it was a rather unmayoral rant in Monday’s Telegraph against the BBC.

This was apparently provoked by mild criticism by BBC arts editor Will Gompertz of Johnson’s vainglorious £24 million ‘fallopian’ metal structure officially known as the ‘Orbit’, and the audacity of BBC London News’s political editor Tim Donovan in doing his job during a hard-fought campaign by asking him a few difficult but entirely justified questions.

‘We need a Tory’ to run the ‘statist, corporatist, defeatist' etc Left-biased BBC, Boris opined in retaliation, ignoring the fact that we already have one in the shape of its chairman Lord Patten. (His father-in-law, the late Charles Wheeler, was also a BBC stalwart of course, his sister-in-law continues to work there, and many of the Johnson clan including Boris himself have barely been off the BBC airwaves for years. So much for bias.)

Indeed, although this outburst may well please many readers who perhaps share those sentiments about the Corporation, it is in stark contrast to the effusively positive comments Johnson made about the BBC when still bothering to court London’s liberals in his early ‘Red Boris’ days as mayor. Nor could either Gompertz nor Donovan, both thorough professionals, be said to have stepped outside the bounds of impartial journalism. What is more, the BBC's reporting standards hardly rank as a priority for Londoners confronted by knee-quaking news (biased or not) about our economic prospects just when most of us hoped they could not get any worse

It was yet another example of Johnson revealing the darker and angrier cast of his character beneath that veneer of a lovable buffoon. He cannot take sole blame, of course, for the nasty, personalised and destructive nature of London’s mayoral campaign. But all the shouting, barging, swearing, over-talking and general braggadocio of Project Boris did nothing to lend it much grace either. The televised mayoral debates with their jibes and jeers no doubt helped to persuade cities up and down the land that if this is how mayors behave they were better off without one. (It is also significant that with turnout only just over 30 per cent, Johnson was returned as mayor with support from just one in six of his constituents.)

Nor did the antagonism cease with Boris’s narrow victory over Livingstone on 4 May. The atmosphere in the chamber at City Hall as the candidates filed out onto the stage to hear the returning officer read out the results was more akin to a grudge match at the bottom of the league than a sort of coronation.

A senior Tory sitting in front of me spat out unpleasantness in turn about each and every one of Johnson’s opponents, but I was particularly shocked by the comments made by some UKIP supporters in the row behind. This was not politics’ finest hour – not least when Johnson omitted to thank the thousands of party supporters who had turned out in the rain to help him to victory. That lack of grace did not go unnoticed in the ranks either.

The role played by many of his unsung campaigners is all too evident given the closeness of the result. Indeed, one Tory elder assures me that the party really did think at one point that he had lost. There are reports too of a high-end legal team on standby in case it became necessary to mount a challenge to a Ken victory.

But whatever the margin, Johnson did win and so we must now leave the past behind to try to peer into the middle distance. The lack of substance in Johnson’s campaign – and his silence since - leaves us largely in the dark as to what he intends to do over the next four years. For London anyway. By contrast, Johnson’s plans for Johnson are becoming clearer by the day as he positions himself in the bosom of the right of the Tory party for a future leadership bid.

What is also clear, though, is that there is little incentive for David Cameron to put himself out any longer on the mayor’s behalf. The election is won; it was a beacon of light on an otherwise dark night. But that’s done. Johnson, who was bailed out twice with pre-electoral bungs from Downing Street for transport and the police, ungratefully informed his election victory party that he had beaten Livingstone ‘despite the rain, the BBC and the endorsement of David Cameron’.

And why would George Osborne continue to find helpful stashes of cash for Johnson, when the mayor made no secret about his disdain for the omnishambles budget and is, even more crucially, his main future rival for the leadership?

Labour in London has now lost twice against Johnson and there are signs that the shock has encouraged them to start planning even now as to how to beat him next time. If so, they are wasting their time. It is highly unlikely he will stand again in 2016, not least because he is unable entirely to conceal his boredom and frustration with the job even now. Taking a Parliamentary seat in the 2015 general election is still the most likely course, whatever Johnson’s comic semi-denials. The Conservatives would be better served by thinking who might succeed Johnson as their candidate. Zac Goldsmith, currently MP for Richmond Park, is a name that crops up, given his fame, possible cross-party appeal and green credentials – assuming, that is, that the electorate has the stomach for another Old Etonian blond.

Labour also needs to start planning for 2016, while learning the lessons from 2012. Livingstone’s campaign was curiously undisciplined at times – perhaps as the result of being run by people emotionally close to him who possibly lacked the firepower to control their man. There were also signs that the party did not throw its collective weight behind him – even some London MPs were said not to have voted Ken. And why, for instance, did former Labour minister Lord Adonis wait so long before putting his considerable political weight behind Livingstone’s claims that tube and bus fares could be cut without wrecking investment? Why was a letter from a former finance director of Transport for London that said the same thing not circulated more widely? It was all too little, too late.

Whoever runs for Labour next time needs the party to unite behind him or her in a way that after 40 years in public life Livingstone could not muster. The Tottenham MP David Lammy is said to want the job but other possibly more intriguing names are also already being bandied about such as John Cruddas (the popular Left-winger who has just been handed the job of co-ordinating Labour’s policy review) and Sadik Kahn, the prominent and likeable Muslim MP for Tooting.

And what of the other parties? Jenny Jones, the warm-natured Green candidate, took her party to third place ahead of the Liberal Democrats. She achieved, perhaps by accident, national attention and a possible place in the political text books of tomorrow when she called for candidates to publish their tax details. Unlikely to stand again in 2016, the party will possibly find it a hard slog to repeat Jones’s success. It is far from clear as to whether this was a one-off protest vote or the start of something more lasting and significant.

Despite personally performing better than last time and with an eye-catching poster campaign behind him, Brian Paddick came in a shameful fourth for the Liberal Democrats. He did not really want to run this time, and can be ruled out as a future contender. Yet his party, if it exists at all in 2016, is hardly brimming with obvious (willing) replacements.

Siobhan Benita ran as an Independent and is living proof that enough resourceful protesting by an attractive, articulate woman about not getting enough media coverage results in lots of…media coverage! Hers was a brave candidacy, coming in as she did from nowhere. Support from her former Whitehall boss GOD – Sir Gus (now Lord) O’Donnell – was undoubtedly a boost. But her downfall was that, apart from supporting a third runway at Heathrow, she did not offer a sufficiently distinctive manifesto to explain her presence other than as a diversion to the main show.

Lawrence Webb of UKIP failed to make much of an impact, while his supporters disgracefully burned pictures of Paddick, who is openly gay. And then there was Carlos Cortiglia, the Uruguayan candidate for the BNP, who extolled 'socialist' principles for transport and urged his party to change their immigration policies. Quickly dubbed Comedy Carlos, it was nevertheless clear that in tough times no-one found any of this funny. Nor was it frankly what London, with its economic back against the wall, deserved.

[Bob]

Why can't we all just admit it was nothing to do with the performance or danger of either type of bus? This is political, pure and simple.

Boris saw something which a group of voters naturally didn't like. Bendy busses were a change and people don't like change. They are also modern and they replaced a much loved icon - the original routemaster. He saw the opportunity to align himself to something which would be popular. He gave them an alternative and who cares about the detail. He successfully wrapped himself up as the much loved routemaster vs Ken as the modernist that doesn't care.

This has been so successful that the whole city has felt obliged to align themselves to one bus or the other making ever stronger claims from which ever side they are on. It's a giant political trick that worked. It's not quite as shallow as I'm making out as the new bus does represent Boris in a world where most voters aren't going to bore themselves with manifestos.

IMO What we've ended up with is an iconic new bus which is a bit less efficient and which regrettably is on a tortuously slow roll out. Plus points for image, minus points for function. Kind of evens all in all.