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Posts tagged Boris Johnson
Cycling and safety: some top comments
Mar 12th
My latest for Cif went live this morning. It’s about Boris’s Cycle Safety Plan and the majority of commenters have, all too predictably, been ignorant and boring Boris trolls. However, there were welcome exceptions. I thought some of their contributions deserved highlighting here. Here’s one from Constituent:
In Copenhagen, many roads have cycle lanes between the pavement and the road itself, higher than the road, lower than the pavement. These can be blocked by pedestrians when buses arrive at bus stops, and conversely I’ve seen pavements blocked by parked cycles, forcing pedestrians to use the cycle lanes.
Here, a bit of paint isn’t going to help much, unless we are talking about replacing the red and yellow lines telling you where you can’t park your car with green lines showing where you can park. The target should be for no one to go into London without having off-street parking arranged.
As things start, the biggest problem for cyclists is parked cars, and there’s a strong argument for more multi storey parking towers all over the place, perhaps with a café on the top where you can enjoy the view. Local residents currently using street parking in trafficked areas could rent spaces in the towers at greatly reduced rates.
And from Laurie1984:
Most of the traffic nowadays in central London is white vans, black cabs and lorrys. Very few ‘normal’ motorists drive into central London, as they have enough sense to not even try. Van drivers and cabbies depend on getting from A to B quickly for their livelihoods, and so make the more dangerous drivers. In my entirely anecdotal experience of a pedestrian in central London, it’s the cabbies and van drivers who seem to regularly try and kill me. Find a way to make them more careful drivers and I’ll start cycling. (In fact, use the carrot approach – convince them by driving safer, more people will cycle, thereby freeing up the roads for them to get around quicker).
This struck a chord with the reverent:
I have to agree with Laurie1984 above that there is a big problem with commercial vehicles in central London. Delivery van and private hire cars seem to be driven particually badly. With the delivery van they are often hardly full (when I’ve seem them open) so this could be done with far fewer vans, or even some delivery bikes. Private hire cars need much better regulation, as TfL give them a badge for the back of the car but won’t do anything about their driving afterwards.
I write having almost been wiped out by a Addison Lee car this morning on Threadneedle St as he was trying to get the red light first. He then tried to run the cyclist behind me into the pavement on Bishopsgate (who had some words at the next set of light).
Earlier, thereverent had observed of Boris’s approach:
[There] are some steps in the right direction, but still far too little. I still think that when transport planners re-design roads they only look at the car and bus point of view. This is why you get one-way systems with no cycle provision (when one could be easily put in) or a really poor one (Vauxhall). Or cycle lanes which either disappear, have bus shelters or other obstructions in them, and then throw you back on the road at a dangerous point. Certainly some of the roads in London that have tried to get two narrow lanes should be only one lane. Some driver re-education about Advanced Stop Lanes (ASLs) is needed.
Two small steps to make the superhighway much better would be:
- Ensure none of the cycle highway was part of a car lane (which some of it in the youtube clip). This might mean making some double lane roads single lane.
- Provide traffic light which have cycle-only phases allowing cyclist to get clear of the traffic (particularly left-turning traffic).
Thanks for all these comments and also to everyone who contributed so thoughtfully here and here and here earlier this week. This is the Mayor’s “year of cycling”. There’s lots to talk about. Keep the useful comments coming and have a collision-free weekend.
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TfL: staff cuts and future funding
Mar 12th
The start of my latest newsletter:
Cynicism is a dreadful thing. But when you receive a press release from a major public sector employer proclaiming a “vision for the future,” promising greater efficiency and containing a pledge on staffing that is hedged like the maze at Hampton Court, the jaded eye skips instinctively down the page to find where the job cuts have been hidden.
There will be 700-800, TfL thinks, 450 of them among ticket office staff (it’s all in here). Its defence is that more and more people are using Oysters and they have more points at which to purchase them, which means the need for ticket office staff is shrinking. It addresses concerns about safety – deserted stations and dead of night, that kind of thing – by pointing out that there are more police officers patrolling.
The Lib Dems aren’t impressed and neither are Labour, though their guns are semi-spiked by the fact that Ken Livingstone planned to close ticket offices too. I’d guess that Boris’s rationalisation for breaking a manifesto pledge, “ensuring there is always a manned ticket office at every station” (see page 2) may draw on this fact at next week’s MQT. Meanwhile, the RMT has pledged “an all-out fight”.
What happened to that no-strike deal (see page 6)? And what will happen to the flow of investment if and when George occupies the Treasury? Or indeed if Alistair remains there? Ponder this from Regeneration and Renewal:
Mayoral agency Transport for London is to publish a report next month to make the case for using a US infrastructure funding tool to fund a £600 million extension of the Northern Line to the Nine Elms area in Wandsworth.
Speaking yesterday in London at a conference organised by real estate advisers CB Richard Ellis, Matthew Hudson, head of corporate finance at TfL, said the report would set out a “concrete example” of how Tax Increment Financing could be used to unlock the regeneration of the Nine Elms opportunity area.
The Tif model, widely used in the US, finances infrastructure projects by borrowing against future tax revenues resulting from regeneration. “We have a report coming out in five weeks time, that will set out a concrete example of Tif, Hudson said. “It will have all the cashflows, all the structures, which I hope will stimulate the debate and move things forward.”
Remember Tif? Sounds like a nice girl. Boris thinks thinks so too.
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Jenny Jones calls for better London road safety
Mar 11th
The name of the young cyclist who died near Guy’s hospital on Tuesday has been released:
Friends of a medical student who was crushed to death in a collision with a tipper truck while cycling to lectures paid tribute to an “incredibly talented” young man today. Muhammad “Haris” Ahmed, 21, died instantly in the collision near London Bridge on Tuesday morning…Mr Ahmed was a fourth-year medical student at King’s College and was on his way to the Guy’s Hospital campus when he died at the junction of Weston Street and Snowsfields.
The piece in the Standard also quotes Jenny Jones AM. She refers also to the second cyclist to die this week:
Many of us feel a mix of sadness and anger at these latest deaths of cyclists in London. This summer the Mayor is encouraging thousands of inexperienced riders to use the cycling superhighways and share the roads with some of the main lorry routes through the capital. The most obvious action for him is to ban lorries from these cycling commuter routes at peak times. The least he can do is to re-engineer these routes to give cyclists priority.
The same comment appears here and Jones covers the waterfront of road safety issues in a piece for Progressive London:
Having spent nine years pushing for road safety to be taken seriously by the Met Police, I find that the previous slow incremental improvements are now being reversed with barely a guilty shrug from the Mayor’s office.
First, there is a decline of 20 police officers, 5 PCSOs and 5 staff working on road safety. Secondly, cuts to the London Safety Camera Partnership mean the redeployment of 45 police staff, which means it’s a way of letting off 280,000 speeding drivers and red light jumpers who would previously have been sent fines.
What is particularly worrying is that this cutback on enforcing the rules of the road is happening at the same time as the Mayor is promoting trials of the naked streets idea and the removal of traffic lights.
Now read on.
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Tube Lines, TfL and the Law
Mar 10th
In case you missed him, here’s Dan Milmo:
Boris Johnson must consider making cuts to London’s public transport network or postponing improvements to one of the capital’s busiest underground lines after he was told to plug a £460m funding gap in a controversial public-private partnership to repair the tube system…In a final ruling today, the arbiter of the PPP contracts, Chris Bolt, said Tube Lines’s work programme over the next seven-and-a-half years should cost £4.46bn. Publicly owned London Underground, which still runs the tube network on a day-to-day basis, must fund the Tube Lines work and has budgeted only £4bn for it – leaving a shortfall of £460m on its already stretched balance sheet.
What happens next? Boris says he’s considering legal action. Amusingly, Ken Livingstone has not only told the BBC he’d do the same, he’s also echoed his nemesis’s observation that the funding gap practically matches the amount stumped up by the tax-payer so Tube Lines could borrow staff from its own parent company. And, of course, both agree that in the first place it’s all Gordon’s fault.
Tube Lines’s response has been more hedged. Their press release says it is “pleased that the Arbiter has been minded to instruct Transport for London (TfL) to fully fund the works,” and adds that, “The [arbiter's] findings are extremely complex and Tube Lines will be carrying out a full assessment to better understand the basis of the judgment and its implications.”
Hmm. A source at TfL murmurs that Tube Lines might try its own legal challenge to the arbiter’s calculations – remember, they had wanted £5.75 billion to finish the job, not a piffling £4.6 billion. But a spokesman for the company demurs. “It’s a price that we can work with,” he tells me, “though there’s a lot of work to do with London Underground. A legal challenge can’t be ruled out, but we’re not thinking that way at this stage.”
Perhaps we should think of it, for now at least, as a few more million saved.
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TfL must make cuts or postpone upgrades to plug £460m funding gap
Mar 10th
Arbiter rules taxpayer must fund Tube Lines’s additional costs for improvements on the London Underground
Boris Johnson must make cuts to London’s public transport network or postpone improvements to one of the capital’s busiest underground lines after he was told to plug a £460m funding gap in a controversial public-private partnership.
The London mayor said taxpayers were being asked to “write a blank cheque” to fund Tube Lines, the last surviving PPP contractor responsible for maintenance and upgrades on three tube routes: the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines.
In a final ruling yesterday, the arbiter of the PPP contracts, Chris Bolt, said Tube Lines’s work programme over the next seven-and-a-half years should cost £4.46bn. The publicly owned London Underground, which still runs the tube network on a day-to-day basis, must fund the work and has budgeted only £4bn for it – leaving a shortfall of £460m on its already stretched balance sheet.
Johnson, who ultimately controls LU and its parent Transport for London, said he would consider taking legal action against Bolt, who rejected demands that Tube Lines fund the difference by raising debt privately. Instead, Bolt said TfL should either cut back on an upgrade to the Piccadilly line – the only tube link to Heathrow airport – or find cost cuts elsewhere in its £9bn annual budget.
“Londoners will also be outraged that the tube upgrades promised to them are now threatened,” said Johnson. The mayor claimed that Tube Lines’s co-owners, Ferrovial, the Spanish owner of Heathrow airport, and Bechtel, the US project management specialist, will be paid £400m in management secondment fees by 2017.
“In other countries this would be called looting, here it is called the PPP,” he said.
But Bolt rejected the management fees argument, saying that Ferrovial and Bechtel managers were helping to keep down overall costs and, without them, the maintenance and upgrade work could cost more than £4.46bn.
Andrew Cleaves, Tube Lines’s acting chief executive, said delaying an upgrade to the Piccadilly line was one option for closing the funding gap. Bolt has already asked the Department for Transport whether funding set aside for purchasing new Piccadilly line trains, believed to be about £500m, could be used to plug the cost gap.
“There are many different variations around timing that we can work through with London Underground, including the timing of the fleet and the upgrade. That’s the sort of thing I want to sit down with London Underground about and discuss,” said Cleaves.
The Piccadilly upgrade is due to deliver faster and more frequent trains on the route by 2014 and failure to deliver it on time raises the threat of overcrowding on an already busy line.
The Tube Lines boss also denied that the ruling would threaten the company’s viability. Tube Lines had originally argued that the work should cost £5.75bn and faced an even greater funding shortfall than LU, which prompted Tube Lines directors to discuss whether the company is a going concern at a recent board meeting.
Johnson’s funding options are becoming increasingly limited after the DfT said it would not reopen a 2007 funding settlement that awarded TfL £40bn until 2017. Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, is adamant that TfL cannot increase its borrowing to fund the £460m gap.
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David Cameron rejects ‘left or right’ political labels | Andrew Sparrow
Mar 10th
In a Vanity Fair piece, Ed Vaizey says Cameron is ‘much more conservative by nature than he acts’ while in the same article the Tory leader tries to avoid left/right labels
I’ve only just got round to reading the Michael Wolff piece about David Cameron in Vanity Fair. Other bloggers (such as Peter Hoskin, Paul Waugh and Iain Martin) have already pointed out that Ed Vaizey seems to have embarrassed his leader again. Vaizey told Wolff that Cameron was “much more conservative by nature than he acts”. But what interested me was the way Cameron rejected the whole left/right mindset. He told Wolff:
There’s a left-right spectrum – where are you? I don’t really do it like that … What I’ve tried to do is marry a belief in market economics with the importance of a strong economy while restoring the condition of the Conservatives’ being social reformers and also addressing the future – climate change and the environment. It’s the full kind of package.
The whole article is quite jolly. It’s not half as good as the profile the New York Times published last year, but it contains some choice quotes. I particularly enjoyed Boris Johnson’s comic but rather scathing verdict on the Conservative leader’s philosophy.
[Cameron has] alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus … The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
Fraser Nelson, the Spectator editor, told Wolff that he thought Cameron’s rhetoric about the NHS was phoney.
I don’t believe for a minute [Cameron] believes protecting the NHS is a good idea.
And Cameron himself, when asked to explain why he thought Sarah Palin was so popular in the US, suggested, politely, that he was baffled.
It’s hard for us to understand, if I can put it that way.
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Boris Johnson: is his Cycle Safety Plan enough?
Mar 10th
Waltham Forest’s Freewheleer, writing yesterday:
A male cyclist, believed to be in his early 20s, has been killed in a collision with a lorry at the junction of Snowsfields and Weston Street near Guy’s Hospital. With hideous and bitter irony this fatality coincided with Boris Johnson and Transport for London launching.
The victim, a 21 year-old man, collided with a lorry. The police are appealing for witnesses. Yes, it was indeed a bitter irony that the tragedy occurred at almost exactly the same time as the Mayor’s Cycle Action Safety Plan was being published. Its objectives are:
- To ensure the growth of cycling in London is accompanied by a reduced rate of cycling casualties.
- To increase the perception that cycling is a safe and attractive transport option
- To make progress towards achieving existing and future targets for reducing cyclists killed or seriously injured
- To ensure London continues to be a world leader in developing effective cycling safety improvements, underpinned by analysis and a sound understanding of the causes of collisions
Discuss.
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Greenwich Tory candidate on Boris Johnson
Mar 10th
Adam Bienkov:
The Conservative’s parliamentary candidate for Greenwich and Woolwich has spoken of his “huge disappointment” after the Mayor broke his promise to reinstate tidal flow in the Blackwall Tunnel. Speaking during a wide-ranging interview with Greenwich.co.uk, the current leader of the Conservatives on the council Spencer Drury said, “I think it is a huge disappointment because it does create congestion unnecessarily. For years it worked perfectly well and I can’t see why it suddenly had to change.”
In the run up to the Mayoral elections, Boris Johnson promised to reverse the controversial decision to end tidal flow “at the earliest opportunity.” The pledge gathered widespread support in the area and formed a major part of his transport manifesto. However, last month he admitted to LBC presenter Nick Ferrari that he would not fulfill his promise.
For more good stuff with Spencer, who also leads his Council’s Tory group, read on.
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A wage to live in dignity | Donald Hirsch
Mar 9th
Corporate governance in both public and private sectors will benefit from raising minimum pay
Sympathetic obituarists of New Labour will struggle to identify in its legacy a true step forward for social justice: it has certainly put this concept back on the political agenda, yet social inequalities remain as great in many respects as those inherited in 1997. Yet one of the most striking developments of the past 10 years has been the emergence of a concept resonant of old Labour and the cause of the trade unions – a living wage.
In 1999 Labour delivered on one of its few remaining commitments to the unions by introducing the national minimum wage, but set it at the very low level of £3.60 an hour. It has risen by a third in real terms since, and is now accepted by employers and the Conservatives who initially opposed it. More strikingly, a strong movement has grown up for a wage floor set not just at the level considered by the Low Pay Commission to be economically viable for employers, but at a higher level designed to sustain a socially acceptable standard of living.
The Living Wage campaign has scored some extraordinary successes, most famously by recruiting London mayor Boris Johnson as a supporter. City Hall and a number of boroughs are guaranteeing staff a wage of £7.60 an hour, rather than the current £5.80 minimum. David Cameron’s head of strategy, Steve Hilton, is also a convert, though said to be struggling to convince colleagues.
These initiatives are not just creating havens of decently paying public employment funded by the taxpayer. Living wages are being specified for private firms bidding for public contracts, and being adopted by high profile employers like KPMG and Barclays for their own contracted workers. Paying a living wage is becoming a symbol of responsible corporate behaviour at a time when firms need to show they have values that connect their executives with the rest of the human race.
However, while it makes a nice slogan, a “living wage” can only thrive in the long term if people are convinced that it’s what it says on the box – that is, what people genuinely need as a minimum to live on. New evidence gives robust support to a wage level substantially higher than the present minimum. Detailed research by Loughborough University’s Centre for Research in Social Policy, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, looks at what things people need to buy in order to afford a minimum socially acceptable standard of living. This is based not, as in past calculations, on judgements made by experts, but on what things groups of ordinary people agree are required as a minimum in Britain today.
This Minimum Income Standard, published annually since 2008, has been used to calculate a living wage requirement, which comes out at £7.14 an hour nationally (compatible with a higher figure for expensive places such as London). While people with different-sized families require different amounts, £7.14 is enough, with the help of tax credit support, to cover the estimated minimum in over 90% of cases. Almost nobody gets their basic needs covered by the existing minimum wage of £5.80.
Campaigners and experts who recently met to consider a national figure for a living wage agreed that £7.14 is the best available, and it will be used as a common figure across the country. The annual minimum wage uprating announcement, later this month, is likely to be only a few pence above the current £5.80, leaving a big shortfall. In the near future, the government will be cautious about increasing burdens on employers in a fragile jobs market.
Yet the campaign for a living wage has been skilfully handled, and is a long way from old-style trade union tactics of banging one’s fist and demanding a higher statutory minimum. Its advocates aim in the first instance to build new norms among responsible employers, not to force sudden, unaffordable pay rises on small businesses. With support in local government spreading, there could be growing pressure on central government to give the living wage some endorsement, at least as a voluntary benchmark.
An attraction for any government in the years ahead of making the living wage a tool for social justice is that it shares the funding burden between a damaged public purse and a recovering private sector. Nor is such a policy, intelligently applied, likely to be as expensive, overall, as it might sound. Companies and councils often find that treating their lowest-paid workers better brings important paybacks, including greatly reduced staff turnover. And the public cost is offset by a reduced bill for in-work benefits and tax credits. So the net cost can be tiny when set against the benefit to society of recognising that workers need a minimum income to live with dignity in modern Britain.
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Is Boris’s ‘cycle revolution’ for real? | Dave Hill
Mar 12th
Posted by Dave Hill in Politics
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Until he takes bolder anti-car measures, Boris Johnson’s plans to promote cycling in London are little more than hype
Here are two versions of the same story. The way the authorities tell it, London’s “cycle revolution” is set to intensify thanks to the brilliant innovations of its mayor, Boris Johnson. May’s completion of two of his promised dozen “cycle superhighways” linking the capital’s suburbs with its core will be followed by the summer launch of his central London bike hire scheme. Mindful that apprehension deters many potential converts to pedal-power, he has just produced a cycle safety plan that firmly asserts that “Cycling levels in London have increased sharply in recent years while the rate of casualties has declined,” and that Johnson wants these parallel trends maintained.
But some of London’s two-wheel travellers relate the tale differently. One has made a video of riding a stretch of one of the superhighways-in-progress and isn’t impressed. It seems to amount to a long, narrow strip of Smurf-blue where there were previously shorter narrow strips of green. I posted the clip here and high-grade comments ensued. All were critical, not least because the lanes aren’t wider or more protected against incursions by motor vehicles. “I’ve yet to hear a single experienced cyclist say anything good about the ’superhighways” wrote JimG, who linked to this critique of Transport for London’s plans. Its author, Dave Hembrow, was born in the UK but lives in the Netherlands. He says they do city cycling much better there.
And then there are the deaths. There were 13 in London last year and 15 in 2008. One took place near Guy’s hospital on Tuesday, coinciding with the cycle safety plan’s appearance. Another happened in Hackney the following day. Both followed collisions with tipper trucks. Lethal contact with large commercial vehicles is cyclists’ greatest safety fear, one Boris Johnson surely shares given his “near-death experience” in Limehouse. The safety plan points out that a “significant growth” in the number of cycle journeys between 2003 and 2008 was accompanied by a relatively small increase in the number of cycling casualties of all kinds, but also acknowledges that collisions involving cyclists are “still one of the most serious challenges to road safety in the capital”. Recorded injuries ranging from fatal to slight totalled 3,409 last year.
Anxiety about safety is a major obstacle to maximising cycling in London. Around half a million journeys are made on a bike each day, double the number in 2000. Yet this is a fraction of the number made by car, and Boris has argued that many of those could be cycle ones instead: a daily 2.4 million in the 12 Outer London boroughs alone – around half. His safety plan lists training courses, better information and education, improved vehicle technology and stronger action against irresponsible road-users as aspirations. His goal is for the present number of cycling journeys to have quadrupled by 2026. He’s obviously working on it, not least by setting a conspicuous example. The London Cycling Campaign seems broadly behind him. But should he be doing more?
As a bus addict I’m unlikely to ever switch to two wheels in a big way, but until London’s roads feel far less hostile to cyclists I remain reluctant to even sample joining their ranks. When commenters at my blog – enjoy their insights here and here – advocate doubling the width of cycle lanes, bold adjustments to road rules, markings and architecture or doing far more to highlight safe routes, it strikes a chord. I start imagining a future in which cars and trucks are minority road transport modes and buses and bicycles dominate. To reach it, though, would require the political will and skill to persuade voters to support bolder measures. The present mayor, mindful that motorists regard him as their friend, seems prepared to go only so far. Until a successor goes much further, the term “cycle revolution” will sound more like hype than reality to me.