Transport For London , December 2021, Section 114 "Bankruptcy" - Service Cuts?

[cctransuk]

18 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

Not true. It's illegal to use them on pavements, not roads. Most major cities now have them.

 

Last I heard - and I may have missed something - they are only approved for rental use on the highway in certain experimental conurbations; not nationwide.

 

That's not to say they are not being illegally used elsewhere - they certainly are!

 

CJI.

 

PS. Do a Google search on 'e-scooter highway use' - see Met. Police advice.

Edited November 30, 2021 by cctransuk

[Nearholmer]

 

3 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

The problem is the goose has grown up to become a duck.

I wouldn’t argue against the fact that there will be a re-balance, which is why I talked about tide-over until things re-stabilise. they won’t stabilise in the place they were in before, things never do.
 

But, I think that reports of the complete death of city-centre working are exaggerated. It’ll probably contract significantly, but if you listen to business leaders they have been banging-on about getting people back to their desks. 
 

 

[Nearholmer]

27 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

Thats the most colourful sub station ive ever seen

Yes, I was programme manager in charge of building that, and the exterior finish wasn’t a TfL choice, we specced it in a plain skin (which weathers and lasts better than plain concrete, before you ask). The exterior decorative finish was required by Westminster City Council, as a condition of planning agreement, which we could have fought via endless legal battles, but decided it would be cheaper and quicker to buy the “wrapping” cladding.

 

Local planning bodies are in an interesting position with railway utility buildings, because they can’t refuse to allow them, but they do have powers to make conditions in respect of appearance etc. Bus garages I’m less sure about. The planning body bears none of the cost of any requirements it makes, which can cause some pretty tough debates behind the scenes.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Steamport Southport]

6 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

 

Last I heard - and I may have missed something - they are only approved for use on the highway in certain experimental conurbations; not nationwide.

 

That's not to say they are not being illegally used elsewhere - they certainly are!

 

CJI.

 

But he said they were illegal on roads, I'm pointing out it's pavements you can't use them on.

 

Thirty areas have them, mostly large cities with a student population.

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/e-scooter-trials-guidance-for-users#trial-areas

 

I would expect them to be fully legal next year. Besides PC Plod just turns a blind eye anyway. I doubt they have issued many fines for misuse.

 

 

Jason

[adb968008]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

21 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

But, I think that reports of the complete death of city-centre working are exaggerated. It’ll probably contract significantly, but if you listen to business leaders they have been banging-on about getting people back to their desks. 
 

 

They bang on about it but unless they come up with £20k pay rises, to cover inflation and additional transport costs to return market forces will prevail, which means pay less and let them work from home.

I see recruiter emails everyday, and they are all promoting work from home… obviously there is demand for that in London as few willingly ever wanted to commute.. who does ?

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by adb968008

[Hobby]

29 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

1 minute ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

But he said they were illegal on roads, I'm pointing out it's pavements you can't use them on.

 

Thirty areas have them, mostly large cities with a student population.

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/e-scooter-trials-guidance-for-users#trial-areas

 

I would expect them to be fully legal next year. Besides PC Plod just turns a blind eye anyway. I doubt they have issued many fines for misuse.

 

 

Jason

 

 

I really hope not  they are a pain in the backside here in Birmingham (part of one of the pilot test sites), especially being ridden illegally, such as running red lights, on pavements,  etc., everyone hates them! 

 

In my local town the police have confiscated several thank goodness. 

[Nearholmer]

Worth reading https://content.tfl.gov.uk/board-20210728-supplementary-agenda.pdf

 

Earlier years are on line too, and it’s worth looking at this one, to get a pre-pandemic feeling https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdfk

[adb968008]

31 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Worth reading https://content.tfl.gov.uk/board-20210728-supplementary-agenda.pdf

 

Earlier years are on line too, and it’s worth looking at this one, to get a pre-pandemic feeling https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdfk

Its an interesting read but I feel its over estimating itself to think it will be at 75% by next year.

Of note the meeting itself was delivered by Zoom, so TFL itself isnt bringing staff into the offices.

 

Personally I think next year probably wont differ from this year, and 54% is probably the norm for 2022 and probably wont reach 65% for the next 3-5 years.

 

Tourists are gone.. BA’s binned its 747’s and down gauged for 5 years, last year… other airlines are the same worldwide. That capacity will take years to replace, even if demand existed to bring it…there will be a delay.., so less tourists, less business travellers, medium term, in the region of 10ks passengers every day into London… 

 

If workers goto 2 days a week, thats 3x days revenue gone.

Business travellers might not be TFLs biggest spenders (Addison Lee probably wins there), but still theyve gone.

 

Who is replacing that lot to increase above the numbers next year ? British tourists wont pay the £300+ a night hotel prices foreigners pay and theres only so many London weekends they will do, and probably did them enough already in 2020/2021.

Edited November 30, 2021 by adb968008

[Nearholmer]

That must have been written in late-June at the latest in order to get to Board by 28 July, so it represents view of the future that is probably six months old.

 

It would be interesting to see what revenue projections are on the table this week, because I’m with you that they will be lower than shown here.

 

One heck of a cloudy crystal-ball at the moment!

[adb968008]

Of note Dft is cutting rail services everywhere.. XC HSTs went this week, SWR to Bristol next week, the cuts wont stop coming, the public wont be happy at seeing a reduction in services elsewhere, but a protected service in London, especially when London it seems to have had the biggest fall and slowest recovery in demand, and of course wants to retain its independence from the dft…
 

thats Cake and Eating it territory… even worse its exTory Mayor now PM vs current Labour Mayor… Boris isnt going to cut favours, indeed he’d probably want to kill tfl if he could and bury Khan in its remains, but the election is 3 years away, so it needs to be a slow ugly death.

 

Reports like that suggesting self sufficiency in a year are obvious traps to see tfl return with a begging bowl next year and the year after, with a constant rhetoric of feed us or London dies… Managed decline thats manna to Boris’s ears as voters tire of it, and the election draws closer.

 

If Khan wants to head this off he needs to do it now, close tubes, roads etc, in 3 years everyone will have forgotten the pain… if he turns tfl around it would be for his political gain.

Edited November 30, 2021 by adb968008

[Grovenor]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

But he said they were illegal on roads, I'm pointing out it's pavements you can't use them on.

Jason

But he is right and you are wrong, currently use on the public highway, including roads footpaths and cycle lanes is illegal except for the experimental rental schemes.

It may change in the future but hasn't yet.

[ejstubbs]

6 hours ago, thirty2a said:

bus routes have been cut back already which doesn't get a lot of coverage, I do wonder how we will get people to use less cars when public transport is on a downward trajectory

 

Part of the reason for the decline in public transport use is people worried about Covid choosing to use private transport i.e their car instead.  You won't get those folk back on board just by running more buses, trains or trams.

[cctransuk]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

But he said they were illegal on roads, I'm pointing out it's pavements you can't use them on.

 

Thirty areas have them, mostly large cities with a student population.

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/e-scooter-trials-guidance-for-users#trial-areas

 

I would expect them to be fully legal next year. Besides PC Plod just turns a blind eye anyway. I doubt they have issued many fines for misuse.

 

 

Jason

 

Jason,

 

They ARE illegal on 'roads' - correct designation, carriageway.

 

Exemptions have been authorised in a limited number of areas for RENTAL e-scooters only.

 

So, it is illegal to use a privately-owned e-scooter ANYWHERE on the public highway; carriageway or footway; or in a public place.

 

You said that it is not illegal to ride e-scooters on roads (carriageways); far from being correct and extremely misleading.

 

It is this kind of misinformation that has encouraged every Tom, Dick and Harry to buy an e-scooter and belt around our towns and cities without regard for other road-users, believing that they are 'green' and legal.

 

Add the fact that the Police can't be bothered with the paperwork associated with enforcement, and you have a perfect recipe for dangerous chaos.

 

CJI.

[ejstubbs]

10 minutes ago, Grovenor said:

currently use on the public highway, including roads footpaths and cycle lanes is illegal except for the experimental rental schemes.

 

While this is true, someone obviously hasn't passed the news* on to this ‘Absolutely livid' rail user: https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/lifestyle/travel/absolutely-livid-e-scooter-owner-kicked-off-scotrail-service-to-edinburgh-3475914  I suppose he could just have been taking it in to town and back for a year simply because he was so desperately fond of it and couldn't bear to leave it on all its own at home...

 

* Although, given that he seems to be confident that there was "no legal reason" for ScotRail to refuse carriage of his e-scooter, I would have expected that his knowledge of statute law should be verging on the encyclopedic.

[Nearholmer]

26 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

but a protected service in London, especially when London it seems to have had the biggest fall and slowest recovery in demand,

But, is the service in London “un-cut”?

 

 TBH, I’m not close enough now to know what the situation is, but  it’s routine on the underground to tweak service intervals to match demand. In the recent past the tweaks were upwards, to absolute maximum line capacity, because demand continually outstripped supply, but they were trimmed downwards during lockdowns, and I don’t know how far back they are. They may be fully back so as avoid the usual “ram packed” conditions at peaks, I honestly don’t know.

 

I do know that there is a grumpy debate going on about the re-start of the night-tube services, which aren’t fully back-up yet. https://londonist.com/london/transport/night-tube-return-date-central-victoria-lines

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by Nearholmer

[ejstubbs]

8 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

It is this kind of misinformation that has encouraged every Tom, Dick and Harry to buy an e-scooter and belt around our towns and cities without regard for other road-users, believing that they are 'green' and legal.

 

https://www.thenational.scot/news/national/19615599.57-pedestrians-injured-e-scooters-2020/ (note that it does not say whether/how many of the injury collisions took place on the carriageway vs the footway - and it has to be said that the e-scooter users seem to have come off worst overall, looking at the data lower down the article).

Edited November 30, 2021 by ejstubbs

[adb968008]

the problem was still there in 2019..

 

£4.9bn in passenger receipts.. £6.4bn in operating costs in 2019.

passengers arent paying for their rides.

tfl was reliant on other forms of funding to progress its aims.

 

Its going to have to reduce its cost base, any business in that situation has no choice if it is to survive… its costs are too high. The question is why are they so high ?

I honestly feel its plans and management are too lavish, it should be running itself as a utility company, its own advertising, marketing spend, (c£9mn), it also costs c£15mn to run its own advertising business…
I fail to see why it would need any budget for this at all, beyond a tube map and website ?

 

£9mn on office furniture for a new office is another..for 2460 employees…£3500 per employee for a desk and chair ? No wonder staff satisfaction went up.

http://www.prsarchitects.com/projects/workplace/tfl-palestra-building-fitout

 

To me theres a lot of waste in tfl.. right down to its own presentation report and its numbers…which must have cost several £10’s of K to produce… Hornbys annual report is a basic word document… just 7 photographs and no fancy icons in it..

https://wp-Hornby-2020.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/media/2021/08/10085319/37132_Hornby-ARA-2021-web.pdf

 

gsk.. multi-billion company.. not one image…

https://www.gsk.com/media/6662/annual-report-2020.pdf
 

Ive been thinking it for years, back to Ken Livingstones days… its too grand, at the end of the day its a transport company, but its got all kinds of unnecessary additional cost enterprises hanging off it… each one a drop in the ocean, but dump a 100 of them, youve got an ocean…

 

my old employer used to make cable, and shipped in multi-coloured boxes.. looked great, they realised a 7 figure saving by ditching the colour, and the white box, and going to a plain brown box with black ink…. They saved more by ditching the marketing company that was designing the attractive but disposable cardboard box… made no difference to sales, because its the product that was wanted, not the box… people just want a bus, tube or train… not a fancy sign that talks to them and plays videos etc… its boring, because it is.

 

cost management, imo its got to get ruthless, cut everything before the service… but thats not the message i’m hearing.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by adb968008

[TheSignalEngineer]

10 minutes ago, cctransuk said:

Add the fact that the Police can't be bothered with the paperwork associated with enforcement, and you have a perfect recipe for dangerous chaos.

Result of years of underfunding and spending on HQ empire building in our case.

 Arresting somebody in this town often results in losing 1/3 of the available manpower from the streets for the next four hours to deliver to the nearest remaining  custody suite and do the paperwork.

Nobody has been arrested for the past few days as the road across the hills had been blocked firstly by snow then the operation to recover the vehicles of the numpties who ignored the message signs then removed the barriers and carried on. I just hope they had a nice walk back to safety through the 50 mph gusts whipping up the drifts. 

(Rant over.)

[Nearholmer]

TfL, before that LT, and before 1933 the private companies, have always had income streams beyond fares - advertising, property etc, The Metropolitan Railway was famously called “a property developer that happened to run trains”, and very many other significant cities in the world uses various forms of subsidy from rates, development land value-gain, etc etc to keep fares well below operating costs.

 

If you look at this summary of fares ratios, you will see that the Underground is budgeted to make excess income over operating cost, which isn’t very common worldwide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio.

 

As I hinted before, the biggest issues in services that don’t cover their costs are in buses, and it’s a political decision to subsidise those to promote social inclusion, a decision that three mayors in a row have obtained an electoral mandate for. Put another way: people voted for it.

 

TBH, it wouldn’t be too difficult to turn TfL into a commercial profit-making enterprise, but doing that would involve so much “blood letting” in terms of service provision, and so much knock-on damage to the overall function of the city, and/or such fare rises that I don’t think anyone seriously seeking election has ever put it forward as a proposition, and I doubt they ever will.

 

You need to compare the way TfL fits into the function of London with the way other “world city” transport authorities and their services fit with their cities. In all cases, the public transport is integral to the function of the city, just as much as the electricity grid, the drains, the streets etc, and they all work in broadly the same way, irrespective of whether the country is full-on capitalist*, or full-on communist, or anything in-between.

 

What is going-on right now is a game of brinkmanship, between very hard-headed people on both sides, and, just as has happened many times before in London, and other cities too, a settlement will be arrived at, because without one, the city can’t function at “first world” level. Have a look at who is on the board - these are not lightweights https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/corporate-governance/board-members

 

*New York messed things up spectacularly in the 1970s, and had to sort it all out in the 1980s as part of re-launching what had become a dying city.

 

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by Nearholmer

[adb968008]

11 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

What is going-on right now is a game of brinkmanship, between very hard-headed people on both sides, and, just as has happened many times before in London, and other cities too, a settlement will be arrived at, because without one, the city can’t function at “first world” level.

I agree totally.

 

But its always the service thats threatened.. not the fancy extras.

My favourite one was Vancouver bus strikes in 2000…

 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/metro-vancouvers-last-transit-strike-2001-1.5318483
 

one local part of the economy complained (elderly etc).

The rest, were glad, as the buses cleared off the roads and made both commuting and parking easier… some even were complaining when the strike ended.

 

if a tube line closes i’ll eat my hat, but if it does i’ll choke on it when I see the budget expended on promotion of closing it, and all the rundown activities, even if it was only temporary…which to me would typify whats wrong with tfl.

 

 

 

Edited November 30, 2021 by adb968008

[Nearholmer]

Well, like it or loath it, assuming you are a London voter, you can vote to change the person in charge of TfL every four years, if you fancy, and in between you can lean on him by way of your local GLA Member.

 

The structure is far more democratically accountable than the national rail model, precisely because it doesn’t put the DfT and Minister for Transport at. Central place in the loop.

[31A]

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Of note Dft is cutting rail services everywhere.

 

I'm sorry, but what is your basis for saying that?  I have just been reading the article in the December 'Modern Railways' previewing the December timetable changes, and the whole theme of the article is of services increasing, and getting back towards pre-pandemic levels.

 

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

XC HSTs went this week,

 

Is this not as a result of an 'industrial relations' situation?

 

2 hours ago, adb968008 said:

SWR to Bristol next week

 

This amounts to three trains per day.  Whilst obviously an inconvenience to those who use them (and I know there has been another thread on this subject), three trains per day is merely a drop in the ocean in the big scheme of things, and far outweighed by the increases elsewhere.

 

[SamThomas]

5 hours ago, cctransuk said:

 

 it is illegal to use a privately-owned e-scooter ANYWHERE on the public highway; carriageway or footway; or in a public place.

Correct !

 

Anyone who thinks they are a good idea should spend the day in the cab of an HGV in any urban area that has a lot of these death traps - they will soon change their minds.

 

Still, they will be good business for the undertakers.

[rodent279]

10 minutes ago, SamThomas said:

Correct !

 

Anyone who thinks they are a good idea should spend the day in the cab of an HGV in any urban area that has a lot of these death traps - they will soon change their minds.

 

Still, they will be good business for the undertakers.

I have friend who is of the opinion that the legal profession will do a roaring trade in damages/injuries claims as a result of e-scooters.

As an aside, and totally unconnected with this in any way whatsoever, I believe a lot of MP's are either lawyers, or connected with the legal profession in some way.

 

(Personally, I think e-scooters are a good idea. I'm just not sure that people can be trusted to use them responsibly).

Edited November 30, 2021 by rodent279

[SamThomas]

3 minutes ago, rodent279 said:

I'm just not sure that people can be trusted to use them responsibly).

& there lies the root of the problem.