"Basil Jet" wrote:

Apparently one of the numerous green lights that a project goes through
has been given.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage...he-Thames.html

Loved the reader's comment "how long before we get the first 'MUGGING'
over the thames??"

Not quite what I'd regard as the pinnacle of wit, but anyway.

The 'we won't pay for it' - 'we'll provide upfront funding' - 'well, maybe
we'll end up paying for a bit of it' shift is kinda amusing - Boris might
eventually come to the realisation that fancy wordplay alone cannot make
things happen for free.

The Sun article is spawned of this comprehensive TfL press release:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/19805.aspx

The press release in turn refers to some new (?) 'Cable car' pages on the
TfL website (part of the 'projects and schemes' section), which features a
couple of fly-through videos:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/cablecar

The fly-through video of the route carefully glosses over the
quasi-wasteland east of Dock Road / Silvertown Way, part of which is used as
a breaker's yard, and is I think safeguarded from being developed because
it's a potential site of the approach roads to a new bridge or tunnel portal
linking Silvertown and the Greenwich peninsula.

As an aside, I hadn't come across the idea of a new vehicle ferry service to
Gallions Reach which is mentioned in the notes to editors at the end of the
aforementioned press release (not a brand new idea I see, but new to me).
It's perhaps slightly peculiar that there's all those mentions of vehicular
river crossing options appended to the press release, when the cable car
obviously isn't going to cater for that demand, but I suppose that might be
in anticipation of questions being asked as to why the cable car is
(supposedly) going ahead whilst the thorny issue of other new river
crossings remains up in the air.

Going back to the cable car - if it is going to be built to open in time for
the Games, then things are going to have to move rapidly - otherwise it'll
end up like the Millennium Wheel that missed the millennium celebrations
(note the careful wording, pedants!) - though of course that's ended up
being a great success anyway... but it is right bang slap in the midst of
things, which the planned cable car is not.