Originally Posted by Paul Corfield

Not sure where Mr Kiley got his numbers from. I've trawled through
several TfL annual reports from the Ken era - with both Kiley and
Hendy as Commissioners - and the bus network support number got to
around £630m. The counter argument is that revenue grew, service
volume grew, ridership grew strongly as did customer satisfaction. In
other words you get what you pay for. Subsidy has fallen because of
changes to the bus contract payments and ever increasing fares and the
scrapping of almost all expansion of the network.

LT and TfL capital investment has been funded by government for
decades. LU just about covers its operating costs. Buses, DLR,
Overground, Cycle Hire, trams and roads clearly do not not.

Yes but that does not make it right or inevitable. As Steve Norris
used to point out, some of TfL's budget could have been used for small
scale projects.


Does anyone really expect him to change his tune at his age? He's not
going to be elected again so he can (almost) say what he likes.

Well, he has changed his tune on some subjects. Yesterday he was
talking far more sensibly about immigration than he ever did when in office.


To be fair to Boris (me?) he has continued to support the existing
tube networks. He got the money for ELLX Phase 2 which is now open.
The Cycle Hire scheme has been introduced, expanded and is being
expanded again. Cycle Superhighways have been introduced and more are
due. There is the New Bus for London, extra trams for Tramlink are in
service and more are planned. There is going to be significant
investment in the road network. Crossrail has now got shovels in the
ground after Boris shoved it across the starting line.

Now you can argue about whether the above is useful or the right thing
to do. However TfL is still investing across the range of its
services.

Johnson's agenda is to demonstrate to the Tory faithful that he is far
more effective than George Osborne at cutting expenditure and reducing debt without
seriously damaging services. So Johnson is using the money saved to pay
off the debt. (This was one of the points Livingstone made during the last
Mayoral election. Livingstone said he would use the saved money to reduce
fares.)

If Boris was really trying to demonstrate that he would have taken a
much bigger axe to the City Hall establishment than he has done.

Not so! At the Tory Conference in 2011 he emphasised that he was cutting costs
and staff numbers carefully, skilfully and humanely without any crude bloodletting.


There is probably an unwritten link which is that government will
continue to fund investment provided TfL and the Mayor have a fares
policy that increases fares ahead of inflation and which slowly boosts
the proportion of total expenditure funded by fares. We should recall
that the previous TfL fares policy was RPI+2% but is now back to
RPI+1% at government insistence. Looking back to the Ken era there
were two years where the bus fare increase was RPI+10%!! Boris hasn't
managed that yet! I believe those increases were the result of the
Labour government insisting that fares rose in return for other
investment being funded.

As for the quality of services, I suggest it may be more due to
management and the suspiciously high costs of every project. The more that is spent
on existing projects, the less there will be for other important work.

Out of curiosity what "other important work"?
--
Paul C