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

[Nearholmer]

17 minutes ago, KingEdwardII said:

It's no good imagining that "someone else" will pay for these things.

 

Ah, but I never did imagine that.

 

If we wish to continue to defecate, and wish to have clean rivers, we clearly need to meet the cost. What making the cost of doing that within existing techniques visible might do, of course, is prompt consideration of other ways of dealing with our bodily wastes than by disolving them in very large volumes of water as a way of transporting them to central processing. 

 

To me, the problem is when the costs are hidden, often not deliberately so but simply by default. Until recently, barely anyone knew about over-spill of raw sewage into rivers, let alone cared; we didn't know that there was a hidden environmental cost of using the loo when it was raining. There are many things around car use that are similar, costs that we sort-of don't perceive most of the time, things like land-take, which is absolutely huge (railways were good at thit in their heyday too), visual intrusion, noise, communities cut in two by busy roads, and opportunity costs created by road-building/upgrading. None of them are "costed in".

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by Nearholmer

[phil-b259]

5 hours ago, adb968008 said:

But what do you do about the “part” ?

 

 

I said part because if you happen to live in Spencer Wood south of Reading or Hermitage near Newbury its too far to walk to the nearest railhead and busses may not be suitable either. The most obvious option is therefore to drive into London via the M4 & A4. However in both cases there is a perfectly reasonable alternative - drive to Newbury / Reading and get one of the frequent London bound trains train. Yes its not as 'coinvent' as driving the whole way but its hardly a case of making 6 or 7 changes or the train takes ages from those locations is it!

 

Now before you go off on one about costs - take note that this is about how practical modal shift is! Quite obviously if you are traveling from say Petworth to Cranleigh making the car significantly more expensive would be unfair as there is unlikely to be a viable PT alternative. Driving from Petworth to London say does have an alternative by driving part of the way and getting a train for the rest.

 

Now, cost is of course important, but its the easiest of the barriers to modal shift to fix via it just depends on how much subsidy you believe the Government should provide.

 

5 hours ago, adb968008 said:

 

Now I live outside, I don't have a choice… yes I have 1 bus every 5 minutes, but it doesn't goto the shops, the schools, the train station, the doctors, indeed in 7 years Ive lived here i’ve probably used it a dozen times because it doesn't go where I need. It ends in West Croydon but I can walk for 20 minutes and take a 10 minute train faster… but thats not even useful for my shopping as Croydon is a dump and I try to avoid the place, if I have to I can drive in about 20 mins, and park for less than the train fare, and not be dependant on a flaky service that varies between 30 minutes and 6 hours dependant on the wind. The bus goes that way because thats the way it, the tram, then the trolleybus has always gone that way since Queen Victoria.

 

 

Quite obviously if the public transport journey time is longer or involves multiple changes then its ability to act as a realistic alternative is compromised. Sometimes that can be rectified by additional public transport provision - sometimes it cannot.  Your specific example however is just that - a specific example and it in now way invalidates the general principle that roadspace in urban areas should in principle be prioritised for those vehicles which NEED to be their - tradespeople, delivery vehicles, public transport, etc

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by phil-b259

[KingEdwardII]

7 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

None of them are "costed in".

This is where the argument really begins.

 

I doubt that people are unaware that land is required to build things - the question is, "is this a cost?" and if it is, how to calculate any such cost. Some roadbuilding might be regarded as a huge benefit by some communities - i.e. the classic provision of a by-pass that removes the bulk of traffic from a community. What's the cost of the land needed for the bypass in this case?

 

Equally, when building homes - do we build blocks of high rise flats rather than houses, to reduce the land take? 

 

Yours, Mike.

[Michael Hodgson]

12 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

It may even be that people’s perceptions of the need for change are themselves evolving faster than the processes can keep pace with.

What will change their minds fast is a widespread major disaster.  Something like the floods that hit East Anglla in 1953.  Germans will already be more receptive than Brits to the need for change after the devastating flooding of the Rhineland this year. The less we manage to so about environmental issues, the greater and more frequent such problems will be.

 

And in the nature of things, whatever we do to address one issue will exacerbate some other problem.

[KingEdwardII]

2 minutes ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Germans will already be more receptive than Brits to the need for change

The question is: what change is needed? It is all too easy to take the wrong course of action if the problem is not correctly identified. Even then, there may be alternative responses.

 

I think that the 1953 flooding led to construction of better sea defences - the classic example being the Thames Barrier. This was probably the correct course of action. However, we have come close to more flooding at times since 1953 - not all places on the east coast are so easy to defend (e.g. Great Yarmouth).

 

Yours, Mike.

[frobisher]

9 hours ago, adb968008 said:

Tbh I cannot imagine how two parents in the 1960’s managed to work a 10 hour day in London, add two hours for commuting, take kids to school, do shopping all by tram and bus. 

 

Erm in the 60's generally one parent worked, the other looked after the kids and did the shopping locally, you didn't take the kids to school they bloody well walked themselves or took the school bus.  

[Nearholmer]

33 minutes ago, KingEdwardII said:

What's the cost of the land needed for the bypass in this case?

 

Good question, because it might be "market value", or "lost agricultural production", or " lost carbon sink", or "lost biodiversity", or "lost visual amenity", or something else I havent thought of, and how the dickens do you price several of those? I don't know, but what I do know is that they are all costs imposed.

 

And, you've made it easy(!) by focusing on the obvious bit: a road. Car use also takes vast amounts of land for other purposes, the biggest probably being parking, 

 

They are pig-difficult questions, but what we do by either pretending they don't exist, or putting them in the "too difficult" tray, is to allow the whole thing to roll on unchecked, without structured thought, and usually emotion-driven arguments, rather than analysis when it is discussed at all.

 

When the same sort of questions began to emerge around another externalised cost of road transport, accidental deaths and injuries, a lot of very clever bods were put on the case and were able to arrive at figures to use, which have withstood the test of time in "fatalities avoided" benefits used in road improvement cost vs benefit analysis. Similarly, the time-cost of congestion has been studied, and a widely accepted set of figures are used (TfL does similarly for delays in public transport).

 

It wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to derive cost-proxies for a host of impacts of car use beyond deaths and time delays, but it would take better brains than mine.

 

Its just struck me that they way to think about it is that we need to value (in both senses of the word) the other externalities, in the same way that we value human life and human time.

 

 

Edited December 2, 2021 by Nearholmer

[letterspider]

On 30/11/2021 at 16:59, adb968008 said:

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Focusing solely upon operating costs and passenger revenues is short sighted. If you factor in the value of saving to the environment in preventing pollution related diseases inflicting expenses upon the NHS and CO2 damage to the environment and the boost to the economy from commuters and tourism, then the metro and bus system is in healthy profit. The government is at fault because it is not quantifying this value added, keeping that revenue to itself instead of giving back some to tfl in subsidies. Certainly not if it is going to the passengers (if it was then fares should be getting cheaper)

If we solely concentrate upon counting beans, then London would be congested and full of filthy polluting vehicles and fares would be sky high.

Edited December 2, 2021 by letterspider

[lmsforever]

2 hours ago, KingEdwardII said:

The question is: what change is needed? It is all too easy to take the wrong course of action if the problem is not correctly identified. Even then, there may be alternative responses.

 

I think that the 1953 flooding led to construction of better sea defences - the classic example being the Thames Barrier. This was probably the correct course of action. However, we have come close to more flooding at times since 1953 - not all places on the east coast are so easy to defend (e.g. Great Yarmouth).

 

Yours, Mike.

I witnessed the aftermath of the 1953 floods at Sth Benfleet and Canvey island and on the island literaly there was nothing left standing .In Benfleet  the area by the station was a river luckily my aunts house was up a steep hill by the station reached by a footpath from the Southend bus stop.I was very young but it affected me to see so much carnage as were the authortities .They built high sea walls round the island and forbade holiday makers to visit also the creeks near benfleet were dredged and extra defences were built around the oil refinerary nearby.The defence work was started very quickly as was reconstruction of houses etc  and thankfully they worked .We went to the island regularily in the late fifties and enjoyed the place, travel was by bus and very enjoyable ,The floods have receeded in the memories of locals but every now again the tides are high and the older people hold their breath .

[lmsforever]

I should have added to my last post that the defences  onward to Southend via Liegh on Sea were of a more modest nature due to the flooding being not so serious.You could walk from Liegh toSouthend alongside the sea and look at the boats and watch the railway as well, of course a trip down Sarfend pier was a necesity with fish and chips in the pier head caff !!! I enjoyed my summer holidays at Sth Benfleet in the fifties you could go out all day and enjoy yourself train spotting and bus spotting .An occasional outing was to familly over the river via the Tilbury ferry which seemed very small .The defences up the river were high earth embankments which worked surprisingly well but the water levels are increasing now so work will be required soon.It surprised me how people forgot what happenned and now Canvey is well built up, who knows what will happen in the future. Sorry for rambling on but I enjoyed my youth and was able to go to places you couldnt now.

[uax6]

14 hours ago, Bittern said:

in theory, local authorities, and thus their LEAs, are required to provide their statutory essential services uniformly across their service area. In practice that's never been enforced when it comes to schools, and there's no similar principle for GM schools or for Academies or all the other  assorted arrangements. Since you generally can't get your kids into a good school by coaching them through the 11+ anymore, you have to do it by either buying your way to winning the postcode lottery, or paying school fees, or by finding a good school somewhere nearby and travelling further.

 

There's also more flavours of religious school nowadays, plus schools with whatever educational philosophy or area of focus, and that means more reason to pick and choose.

 

And of course this is an effect of the back-door privatisation of the education system that we have fallen for.

 

In rural areas you get smaller schools (that are in quite useful places for short distance travel) being closed to introduce the economies of scale that larger ones produce, but without a thought for how this really effects things.

For instance our village primary was planned for closure by the academy trust*, as there was another school in the same trust in the next village. There would have been transport provided for those children effected.... upto the age of 8, giving two interesting issues. Firstly that there is two year groups that would have no provision for transport other than parents driving them there (the route from our village to the next has no pavements and includes crossing the very busy A10 road), but also asks parents to put their 4 year old on a bus to take them to school. Just how many parents in this day and age will do this? Also, as an aside, we, as parents, had to get permission from the school to allow our child to walk alone to school, a distance of approx 600 yds... madness!

 

Andy G 

*We actually took them on and managed to keep the school open (there were serious flaws in their economics, and some of their 'facts' weren't actually facts at all) Interestingly a similar sized school in the same trust, which we told the parents at the time would be the next on the list (but wouldn't believe us, nor help) has now indeed been closed, and they have two major roads to cross to send there children to the replacement school, and the distance involved is somewhere in the region of 5 miles. I wonder how many get bussed in, as opposed to the parents taxi method....

[KingEdwardII]

1 hour ago, uax6 said:

In rural areas you get smaller schools (that are in quite useful places for short distance travel) being closed

This has been going on for years and is nothing much to do with "privatisation of the education system" - local authorities have been just as keen to close village schools. There are several villages in our area now with no primary school of their own where the children face a journey where walking is totally impractical. (Some journeys within villages with schools are impractical for young children to walk, given the lack of pavements and the level of traffic)

 

Having a school can be a two-edged sword for a community - yes, much more convenient for the families who can send their children to a local school (and indeed ours were able to walk 300 yards to their primary school), but the school is then used as a justification for ever more new housing. 

 

Of course, secondary schools and sixth forms are usually located in the larger communities - so long journeys are a part of life if you live in the country. Our children had a 3 mile bus journey to secondary school and well over 10 miles to sixth form. Children of some colleagues at work used to travel 25 miles by train to and from their sixth form - although this was by choice as the sixth form involved is one of the best in southern England.

 

Yours,  Mike.

[Bittern]

38 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

One way treasury and DfT can hugely influence things is to define assumptions to be used within financial modelling. I can’t say too much about it, but assumptions about things like values to use for “optimism bias” can swing outcomes one way or the other.

Yeah, Roger Ford, Graham H, and Walthamstow Writer have all been rather informative on that topic as relates to transport in particular.

 

I suspect the minister/DfT/Treasury want them to look more favourably at the assorted F-ing Magic solutions proposed by vendors and ignore all the problems inherent in the world of Actual Machines. The best way to push back would be to ask for quotes based on a fixed-price contract, but Whitehall would probably stop that.

[adb968008]

8 hours ago, letterspider said:

Focusing solely upon operating costs and passenger revenues is short sighted.

No it really isnt.

Any business needs laser focus on this,sure there are other influences, but businesses only make any decision which ultimately, when you strip it away, comes down to one of those two reasons.

 

When it comes to going green, they are doing it for one of those two reasons… your suggestion is merely one of them: saving cost by using grants, subsidies etc.

Edited December 3, 2021 by adb968008

[Nearholmer]

It’s about cost vs income, rather than cost vs farebox revenue.

 

Income can be from multiple other sources than the fare box, and especially for metros it always has been. Property (which includes value-gain on development land); advertising; renting bits out to make films; business rates; grants of various kinds; etc etc.

 

The fact that pre-pandemic TfL was balancing its books while cross-subsidising bus services tells you that they are old hands at this stuff. Other metros across the world ditto.

 

Added to which, public and private enterprises do not have the same agendas. A public service/enterprise generally exists as such because “excess of income over expenditure” is way too crude a measure to apply to things that affect the lives of millions in various ways, and have the potential to do great good or harm; heavily economic regulation of private-sector service industries like energy is all about the same thing.

 

You only have to look at the massive controversy over the negative impacts of “tech” services that is going on worldwide right now to understand that life is more complicated than revenue vs expenditure, or RORI, or the dreaded “shareholder value”.

 

 

 

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Bittern]

14 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

It has been said that you might as well make it completely free as you'd save the cost of collecting fares etc and although people might just ride around for no good reason when it first comes in, they would soon get sick of that and find something else to do. 

The best sensible argument along those lines is that if bus stops are too close together and buses are too frequent people will catch the bus a few hundred metres just because it is there, thus increasing dwell times.  That's not so much of an issue if the stops are more like 10 minutes walk apart, but of course that also makes the buses less useful for people who need them. It only exacerbates a problem that already exists and it can be managed, it just has to be thought about in route planning etc.

[letterspider]

We should not be considering or running vital infrastructures as a business. Every national asset so far privatised is in crisis.

And too often there have been tragic mistakes. 

What the government has achieved by privatisation is to shift legal liability from itself to the businesses and that hasn't worked because the government hasn't the levers or the guts to put company directors in prison for long terms for corporate manslaughter.

And without a Constitution, laws are created by MPs that all too often

have vested interests.

Grenfell shows in detail how a business has little incentive or capability to look beyond itself and call out other contractors for taking short cuts, it's 'none of their business'

Perhaps the public are greatly to blame for taking too narrow minded a view about politics 

 

[Bittern]

14 hours ago, admiles said:

That brings us onto why he gets taken to school by car. Well, it's about 15 miles away and that's a long walk when you're 4 (and a half). He doesn't go to the school that's nearer because its full. 

Does the law still require schools to provide transport if you're more than however far away by the shortest safe route? It did when I was a kid, provided you went to the closest school with space that was the right religion,  or a selective magnet school, but that was a few years back and while I've never heard a fuss about it being repealed I don't have any kids of my own.

 

Still, I don't think the law required the transport to be very fast or direct, just safe and not involving excessive walking.

[Bittern]

14 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

Nevertheless- driverless and uncrewed trains don't seem to cause too much of a problem [in Paris]

AIUI British laws about evacuating trains safely are unusually strict (IIRC you have to have someone to assist if passengers can't self-evacuate onto a safe walkway out of danger, and on routes that became unstaffed after some specific date that self-evacuation rule applies to PRMs as well), plus it's much harder to avoid the need for someone to be around in person to fulfil the legal functions of the guard. The fourth rail also makes things tricky, since it greatly increases the risk of electrocution if it isn't shorted before a train is evacuated along the trackbed.

[Nearholmer]

25 minutes ago, Bittern said:

AIUI British laws about evacuating trains safely are unusually strict (IIRC you have to have someone to assist if passengers can't self-evacuate onto a safe walkway out of danger

I am not aware that there is a prescriptive requirement of that kind.

 

The big issue in legacy tube railways in London is that there simply is no room for a side-walkway, evacuation has to be through the cab and along the 4ft, and nobody that I’m aware of is contending that that can be managed safely by remote means or on a “get staff there as quickly as possible” basis.

 

For information, will the central section of the Elizabeth line be GoA2, or does it get to GoA4?

[DY444]

16 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Generally the problem with cars in London (certainly towards the centre) is not cars owned by Londoners!

 

Studies prove that car ownership within London is the lowest in the country. This trend neatly matches the accessibility to public transport - and as is to be expected those living in the outer suburbs more likely to own a car than those living close to the centre reflecting the less effective reach of PT in being able to cater for journeys - particular orbital ones.

 

This lower than average car ownership is also reflected in electoral behaviour with the majority of Londoners (as a whole) voting for anti-car policy candidates as traffic congestion (even if the emissions issue is solved by EVs) will still impact PT.

 

Of course, as with car ownership itself, the political views of residents of the outer boroughs will be different from those living closer to the centre - and yes, because urban development is denser towards the centre so has more voters living there this has lead to London Mayors (or candidates for the position) adopting an anti-car stance.

 

However London is not an island - huge quantities of private vehicles enter it every day along arteries like the A40, A13, M4, etc. These people live well outside London, most in places where rail would be a viable alternative for some or part of the journey. These extra private cars hugely distort the actual situation and can easily drive an increase in motoring within London even though car ownership remains low.

 

It's definitely not a one-size fits all in London.  As you hint there is a definite difference between inner and outer London.  Car ownership in many parts of outer London is high (except in Richmond obviously ). 

 

There's also another factor, often overlooked, which is that not every London Borough is equally well served by TfL.  Sutton for instance is generally regarded as being amongst the worst if not the worst.  It has no tube, no Tfl Rail/Overground, no tram for all practical intents and purposes (one tram stop right on the boundary with Croydon), slow train services to London relative to the major centres of adjacent boroughs and bus routes hampered by traffic congestion as a result of all of those.  Road traffic is way up compared with pre-Covid levels.  The plan to bring the tram to Sutton is dead in the water; Crossrail 2 would have served the periphery of the borough and been of secondary benefit through interchange at Wimbledon but that is dead in the water too so no prospect of any change.  However the lucky residents of the London Borough of Sutton "enjoy" the 6th highest council taxes of the 32 boroughs and the 15th highest in the country.   Bexley is another in a very similar situation. 

 

Residents of those boroughs are quite rightly asking what they get from TfL .  The answer compared with most boroughs is not much.  A patchy, by London standards, bus service and concessionary fares which are in the cross hairs of critics.  Car ownership is high by London standards, it seems to me that is unlikely to change and no wonder. 

Edited December 3, 2021 by DY444

[phil-b259]

3 hours ago, adb968008 said:

No it really isnt.

Any business needs laser focus on this,sure there are other influences, but businesses only make any decision which ultimately, when you strip it away, comes down to one of those two reasons.

 

 

 

Oh they are important alright - BUT the question is are ALL the relevant costs included in the analysis?

 

Take for example air quality, thats technically none of TfLs business as a transport provider, but poor air quality causes millions of hospital admissions per year and can now be put on death certificates following a ruling by a coroner a couple of years ago into the death of an asthmatic child.

 

Therefore its fair to say that the increased costs to TfL of, say extra bus provision can be offset by savings in the health service - but as the Health service is run independently from local Government and funded by Westminster its very difficult such savings will not appear in TfLs under usual accounting methods and it will seem as though TfL is wasting money on poorly performing bus services.

 

 

[phil-b259]

56 minutes ago, DY444 said:

 

Residents of those boroughs are quite rightly asking what they get from TfL .  The answer compared with most boroughs is not much.  A patchy, by London standards, bus service and concessionary fares which are in the cross hairs of critics.  Car ownership is high by London standards, it seems to me that is unlikely to change and no wonder. 

 

Agreed - but this is an inherent flaw on democracy itself.

 

To actually make the business Government possible on a national scale it is necessary to have a degree of centralisation / regionalisation / grouping of services and thus split people into manageable chunks.

 

Therefore one MP / councillor is expected to represent the view of xxxx voters, the London Mayor is expected to represent YYYYYY voters etc.

 

Quite obviously the more voters you add to the process the grater the chance of a split opinion and the elected representative finds themselves tied to representing the majority view even though it leaves plenty of folk marginalised. On the other hand make the number of people served too small and it becomes ridiculous - e.g. having a hospital in every street run by the residents of that road (which would in theory avoid accusations of healthcare provision not reflecting local views)

 

London and much South East England voted to remain in the EU, the majority of England voted to leave being a classic example of this in action.

 

The same is true in the GLA area where the sheer number of voters living in densely packed regions closer to the centre outnumber those closer to the edge and as such transport policy - which in a democracy has to be driven by the majority view, will tend to neglect the outer boroughs views.

[Nearholmer]

It’s a pretty dim politician who fosters a “tyranny of the majority” though, because that inevitably leads to some sort of backlash in the long run. A not-dim one looks to at least satisfy sufficient of the minority to prevent the backlash.

 

(This seems to be a lesson that quite a few current politicians have forgotten, the current populist fashion being to drive polarisation and look to declare a resounding victory at 51%, while actively stomping on the 49%. Works for a while, but by golly does it store-up a lot of trouble in the long term. Look at Northern Ireland to see where it gets you.)

 

 

Edited December 3, 2021 by Nearholmer

[DY444]

28 minutes ago, phil-b259 said:

 

Agreed - but this is an inherent flaw on democracy itself.

 

To actually make the business Government possible on a national scale it is necessary to have a degree of centralisation / regionalisation / grouping of services and thus split people into manageable chunks.

 

Therefore one MP / councillor is expected to represent the view of xxxx voters, the London Mayor is expected to represent YYYYYY voters etc.

 

Quite obviously the more voters you add to the process the grater the chance of a split opinion and the elected representative finds themselves tied to representing the majority view even though it leaves plenty of folk marginalised. On the other hand make the number of people served too small and it becomes ridiculous - e.g. having a hospital in every street run by the residents of that road (which would in theory avoid accusations of healthcare provision not reflecting local views)

 

London and much South East England voted to remain in the EU, the majority of England voted to leave being a classic example of this in action.

 

The same is true in the GLA area where the sheer number of voters living in densely packed regions closer to the centre outnumber those closer to the edge and as such transport policy - which in a democracy has to be driven by the majority view, will tend to neglect the outer boroughs views.

 

Don't disagree in general but transport improvements in Sutton have, in the past, also been undone by its own elected representatives. 

 

For instance the plan for Thameslink was originally for the Wimbledon loop service to be changed into an out and back from Blackfriars.  That was one of the reasons for providing the bays at the rebuilt Blackfriars and for locating them on the west side.  The quid pro quo for the loss of through trains to Farringdon and beyond was that the service frequency was to be doubled to 4tph in each direction round the loop.  That would have made a huge difference to both usability of the service, and very importantly given its terrible record, the reliability of the service.  In its first 20 years of operation, something like 75% of the cancellations on the Wimbledon loop not caused by driver issues were caused by incidents north of Blackfriars.  It was also the case that most passengers going beyond Blackfriars on the loop services alighted at City or Farringdon.  The proposed 20-ish tph through the Thameslink core would have provided a pretty slick ongoing connection.

 

Unfortunately for the longer term prospects of Sutton, those travelling beyond Blackfriars proved to be very vocal (as well as unwilling to walk a few hundred yards or change at Blackfriars) and the two local MPs and the councils beat the DfT into submission.  The through trains were retained, complete with their inherent unreliability, and the frequency remained at a distinctly non turn up and go 2 tph.  Perhaps the reduction in commuting ought to prompt a rethink but I doubt it will.

 

We seem to have a paradox in London in that borough level and regional politicians say they want to reduce car use but can only find sticks (mostly with unintended consequences) and no carrots.  You have to provide a viable alternative.  In the specific case of Sutton there have been plenty of opportunities to do this from the relatively modest to the grand.  None have been taken. 

 

In a wider context I am baffled why the Mayor spent the best part of a year doing everything he could think of to discourage travel on TfL services despite knowing full well that the whole viability of the operation was more dependent on farebox revenue than at any time in history.  And with a conservative Government.  What did he think would happen?  It was inevitable there would be a price to pay and that his opponents were going to shine a light on anything he had done to help to create the underlying situation.  Completely bizarre imo.