Congestion for London

Friday January 20, 2012

Simon Hills points to the gross mismanagement and double standards of our transport agencies

Last week I received a letter from a Mr Keith Gardner – ‘Strategy Director’ at Transport for London, don’t you know – asking me to switch my engine off when my car is stationary.

‘Leaving your engine idling unnecessarily can contribute significantly to local pollution levels,’ was the pompous imprecation, sent out by e-mail to me and presumably anyone else who seeks travel updates from this self-important organisation.

For sheer effrontery this is like someone in Athens who’s never paid any tax in his life asking me to give him all my hard-earned savings to pay for his pension… er, hang on… well… you know what I mean.

There can be little that gets near to Transport for London (TfL) for polluting London’s streets, principally by causing the traffic jams that have turned the capital’s thoroughfares into a serpentine crush of buses, lorries, taxis and the odd private car sending so many noxious fumes into the air. TfL’s strategy director’s solution? Turn your engine off. This is typical of an organisation that oversees the most unreliable Tube network imaginable, has buses that are incapable of running on time and makes London’s streets impassable. Perhaps if it went to solving those problems with as much gusto as it runs its propaganda machine, it wouldn’t need to persuade us of its merits.

The first moves to obliterate free movement for motorised traffic on London’s streets started, to be fair, before TfL came into existence, when some numpty from the department of somewhere, but probably the Highways Agency and probably with several committees’ worth of numpties, decided that what Oxford St and Regent St really needed was something approaching 540,000 traffic lights set permanently on red, acres of bus lanes and a forest of road signs.

But the mass throttling of London’s thoroughfares really began in earnest when Ken Livingstone came to power and TfL was created. Perfectly good roads were blocked off on the basis that cars are nasty and horrible and public transport is nirvana, the highways that you could still drive down were given over to massive bus lanes and side streets were festooned with speed bumps, traffic signals that would be over the top for New York City, or simply closed off.

But Citizen Ken and his merry henchmen weren’t done then, oh no. In the most outrageous con ever inflicted on the capital’s population, the Congestion Charge was introduced, forcing drivers to pay again for streets they’d paid for a thousand times over. The reason there are nice roads of tarmac and pavements and traffic lights and basic good order is because of the motorist. Without them, and the technology and wealth that grew around them, London would be a mish-mash of mud streets, cobbles and no pavements.

It is the most egregious achievement to decrease the number of cars in the city, yet at the same time increase its congestion. This is because roads are no longer for travelling along, but for pedestrians to cross.

I cycle around the city on a Barclays bike – provided principally for middle-class commuting men who have abandoned living in the city because of its appalling traffic to go and meet other middle class white men for lunch – and it is the most dispiriting experience. Great bottlenecks of traffic wait patiently at traffic lights that let about three of them through at a time before they escape onto a completely unused bit of major thoroughfare till they hit the next idiot lights.

High Holborn, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, Fleet St, Clerkenwell Road, London Wall, Bishopsgate: impassable. The Strand? Good Lord, you could miss three meal times trying to get along there of a morning.

Excuse this column for being so London-centric, but for sure every council in the land has some green policy unit bossing people around, telling them how to dispose of their rubbish, building cycle lanes used by no one and taking important decisions to install charging points for electric cars (although it should come as no surprise, given these cars a) don’t work and b) have batteries that are so risibly inefficient they are about as green as a Liverpool home shirt, there are more charging points than there are electric vehicles).

And now, having brought London to a grinding halt, we have the spectre if the Olympics. The Stalinist principles of our functionaries finally become manifest. Suddenly there’s a small matter of getting VIPs from one side of the city to the other (God forbid that anyone who is anyone should be expected to slum it and actually stay in East London). Welcome everyone to the Zil Lane, imported direct to the seat of democracy from communist Moscow and Leningrad.

Because what our political leaders mean by cars being a bad thing, is that they’re a bad thing for little people. We are to travel on Tubes (on only one day in the whole of last year did every line work properly), buses, which are as reliable as a Lucian Freud marriage vow, shanks pony or bicycles (pleasant journey, Mayfair to the Olympic Stadium). Politicians and those given their grace and favour are to be whisked across the city along dedicated lanes, while other road users are forced to one side. Probably with their engines running.

Because I’m sorry Mr Gardner, if I’m really forced to sit in one of your traffic jams, I shall probably want one or more of: the heater, the radio, the windscreen wipers, the air conditioning. And unless you want me to run my battery down and cause untold pollution dismantling it I’m going to keep my engine running. Perhaps you should spend time sending bossy exhortations across the capital and start getting your organisation to use its vast wodges of public money to do its job properly.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine