This issue is quite tough for the mayor's office, as there aren't all that many levers they can pull on air quality. Ultimately what would result in clean air in London is improved rail services (where they are reliant on national government for investment funding) and the uptake of electric vehicles (mostly left to the market although I guess TfL could be more proactive about installing charging points); ie it's mostly outside City Hall's jurisdiction. The ULEZ is an ugly demand-side policy but it's one of the few things they can actually do unilaterally.
That said, local government in London is ideally placed to attack housing costs by building more accommodation, and rather than do that Sadiq Khan seems content to moan about how he can't implement rent controls. So maybe he just likes demand-sidd solutions to things in general, and the ULEZ would be something he went ahead with even if he were given total policy freedom.
Yep, think you're 100% right. It's why if I were Khan, I'd still do the ULEZ given the lack of better options. And if I were me, I'd still support it, even though I live just outside of London and drive one of the few cars that actually gets stung by the scheme (!).
I mostly agree - except for the idea that people won't vote to make their lives worse. A lot of the examples I know of have a bottom line of racism in America. People regularly vote for people who oppose policies that would help them, and AIUI, research tends to show that it is because it might help someone else more. When places in the South were told they had to desegregate swimming pools, they chose to fill them in, rather than allow the blacks in, and so they were worse off.
Liberating the PAF is still the ultimate goal of the movement. If we have to fix climate change and the housing crisis to get there in order to do it, so be it.
Kahn could fix some of the missed connections in North West London - i.e add a station to connect between the metropolitan line and the Bakerloo line where they cross and between the metropolitan/piccadilly lines and the central/chiltern lines at West Ruislip.
And given the vast majority of the railways costs are fixed if the fare revenue you gain from that proposal are larger than the construction costs plus the marginal driver costs for the extra stop - which they almost certainly are - then its worth doing.
Broadly agree - and I don't know about the specific case of NW London but sometimes fixing "missed connections" is not always optimal. Eg, if Oxford Circus was on the Elizabeth Line, the station physically wouldn't be able to cope. Or if the DLR was entended westbound, perhaps to the old Jubilee platforms at Charring Cross, though it would be pleasing from a map perspective, it would defeat the point of running it to Bank, as it would already be full by the time it gets there.
I think thats very much a central London problem 🙂. I don’t think better connections in North West London will net you 50 million rides or whatever a link between Oxford Circus and Crossrail would get you.
And if they did it would very much be a good problem!
The biggest cost is probably increased journey times. The whole attraction of the Met line is very few stops between Central London and Metroland. This means high average speed and fast commutes. Maybe the tradeoff here is worth it, but it's very easy to just "add one more stop" until journey times become unpalatable.
To be honest the change you would actually make to achieve these changes would be to add a new stop at Northwick Park on the Bakerloo line and you’d run some central line trains from Ruislip Gardens to Uxbridge using the bypass tracks that already exist.
This means Metropolitan line journey times wouldn’t change.
In fact it would let you have a saner train schedule. On the Uxbridge branch off peak you could have 6tph central, 6tph Piccadilly and 6tph metropolitan line, that would let you run 4tph to Amersham and 2tph to Chesham, or 3 and 3 if you reopened the second platform at Chesham. The additional traffic from the Bakerloo line would probably also justify increasing the service to Watford to 6tph - that might even make it viable to run the Amersham and Chesham trains fast from Harrow on the Hill to Moor Park off peak.
Then on the central line you could still have 6tph to West Ruislip and therefore a consistent 12tph from Ruislip Gardens and 12tph from Ealing Broadway with the core frequency staying the same.
1. Massively overbuild wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal (if TRL provides).
2. Make life great and cheap and plentiful housing and GDP go vroom.
3. Get to Net Zero by building Direct Air Capture plants like Climeworks.
4. Release the PAF.
5. ?
6. Profit.
This issue is quite tough for the mayor's office, as there aren't all that many levers they can pull on air quality. Ultimately what would result in clean air in London is improved rail services (where they are reliant on national government for investment funding) and the uptake of electric vehicles (mostly left to the market although I guess TfL could be more proactive about installing charging points); ie it's mostly outside City Hall's jurisdiction. The ULEZ is an ugly demand-side policy but it's one of the few things they can actually do unilaterally.
That said, local government in London is ideally placed to attack housing costs by building more accommodation, and rather than do that Sadiq Khan seems content to moan about how he can't implement rent controls. So maybe he just likes demand-sidd solutions to things in general, and the ULEZ would be something he went ahead with even if he were given total policy freedom.
Yep, think you're 100% right. It's why if I were Khan, I'd still do the ULEZ given the lack of better options. And if I were me, I'd still support it, even though I live just outside of London and drive one of the few cars that actually gets stung by the scheme (!).
I mostly agree - except for the idea that people won't vote to make their lives worse. A lot of the examples I know of have a bottom line of racism in America. People regularly vote for people who oppose policies that would help them, and AIUI, research tends to show that it is because it might help someone else more. When places in the South were told they had to desegregate swimming pools, they chose to fill them in, rather than allow the blacks in, and so they were worse off.
I thought the O’Malleyist agenda was set squarely on the release of the postcode address file
Liberating the PAF is still the ultimate goal of the movement. If we have to fix climate change and the housing crisis to get there in order to do it, so be it.
Kahn could fix some of the missed connections in North West London - i.e add a station to connect between the metropolitan line and the Bakerloo line where they cross and between the metropolitan/piccadilly lines and the central/chiltern lines at West Ruislip.
And given the vast majority of the railways costs are fixed if the fare revenue you gain from that proposal are larger than the construction costs plus the marginal driver costs for the extra stop - which they almost certainly are - then its worth doing.
Broadly agree - and I don't know about the specific case of NW London but sometimes fixing "missed connections" is not always optimal. Eg, if Oxford Circus was on the Elizabeth Line, the station physically wouldn't be able to cope. Or if the DLR was entended westbound, perhaps to the old Jubilee platforms at Charring Cross, though it would be pleasing from a map perspective, it would defeat the point of running it to Bank, as it would already be full by the time it gets there.
I think thats very much a central London problem 🙂. I don’t think better connections in North West London will net you 50 million rides or whatever a link between Oxford Circus and Crossrail would get you.
And if they did it would very much be a good problem!
The biggest cost is probably increased journey times. The whole attraction of the Met line is very few stops between Central London and Metroland. This means high average speed and fast commutes. Maybe the tradeoff here is worth it, but it's very easy to just "add one more stop" until journey times become unpalatable.
To be honest the change you would actually make to achieve these changes would be to add a new stop at Northwick Park on the Bakerloo line and you’d run some central line trains from Ruislip Gardens to Uxbridge using the bypass tracks that already exist.
This means Metropolitan line journey times wouldn’t change.
In fact it would let you have a saner train schedule. On the Uxbridge branch off peak you could have 6tph central, 6tph Piccadilly and 6tph metropolitan line, that would let you run 4tph to Amersham and 2tph to Chesham, or 3 and 3 if you reopened the second platform at Chesham. The additional traffic from the Bakerloo line would probably also justify increasing the service to Watford to 6tph - that might even make it viable to run the Amersham and Chesham trains fast from Harrow on the Hill to Moor Park off peak.
Then on the central line you could still have 6tph to West Ruislip and therefore a consistent 12tph from Ruislip Gardens and 12tph from Ealing Broadway with the core frequency staying the same.
Fair enough, I'm too far out of my depth to comment further, you've sold it well though!