Well, 600 homes were demolished to build the Westway, and their
surviving neighbours in some places were as close to the motorway as 7
metres. North Kensington suffered extensive blight, pollution and
disruption during construction - all in an already-deprived area. Prices
for those properties closest to the Westway are still depressed as those
properties still experience noise, visual and atmospheric pollution.

So maybe not the greatest location for homes, but there's always
offices and industrial estates. Many of the companies close to the
elevated M4 benefit from being able to advertise free from their
buildings.

And the area was already deprived, as you say. So not a cause of the
new road.

The effect of the extended congestion charging zone is anyone's guess -
but it should reduce pollution in the area. In a borough where 50% of
the population have no access to a car and almost three times as many
people travel to work by public transport as by car, the positive effect
of the congestion charge extension (an improvement in bus services) is
likely to be significant. Those figures refer to the whole of Kensington
& Chelsea - car ownership in North Kensington is likely to be
significantly lower.

If I were going to extend the zone I would take it along Sussex Gardens
and Bayswater Road, and would also allow access to Hyde Park.

I'm not sure I really understand what point you are making in reference
to my point that new roads generate new traffic. Public transport
alternatives are somewhat irrelevant here; the point is that the M25 has
encouraged people to make journeys (by car) they wouldn't have
considered making (by any mode) before the M25 was constructed.

So what? Why shouldn't they? It's nice to be able to get around. And
remember this also includes lorries delivering goods.

Yes, perhaps. We now have these sites which are poorly accessible by
public transport and hard to serve with it, so some way must be found to
make the use of the car to access them more efficient. However, we can
avoid repeating the mistake by stopping extensive new road construction
and holding back construction in areas only accessible by car.

I don't think building the M25 was a mistake. If there have been
mistakes it has not be expanding the rail network to include orbital
routes and ensure they have good interchanges with the radial routes.
If people who work in Slough, say, living in, say Finchley, were able
to get to an orbital railway (say approximately round the North
Circular) then interchange at Ealing to get a train to Slough, and then
had a decent bus-service to get them from Slough station to work, more
people would commute that way rather than in their cars. As it is, to
get to Slough from Finchley by train one has to go to Central London
(on an already crowded tube) and then make their way out towards Ealing
on the Central Line - well suffice to say it is not an easy journey.
Now if they can't make such railways lines then maybe buses. We'll come
to that later.

The only railway that takes you to one place is a shuttle
service between two stations with no onward connections at either end.
Crossrail will have connections to 9 different Underground lines, a wide
variety of other railway services and a huge number of local bus
services. If you're considering access to and from the motorway, you
have to consider access to and from the railway too.

Crossrail - yet another radial route. I don't want to go to Central
London.

Hardly. How many buses run on the Westway and the West Cross Route? Some
long-distance coach services use them, but these are of no benefit to
the local areas the urban motorway is meant to serve - and any local bus
service using an urban motorway bypasses most of the population it
should be serving.

I agree that express bus routes (particularly orbital ones) are a good
idea, but in order to provide a decent service, they have to penetrate
town centres and serve useful locations, rather than the side of a dual
carriageway.

But just off these main roads there are business parks and shopping
malls . Now if they got the buses to pull off the main roads to serve
these, say every mile or 2 miles (depending on the road), and there
were also buses from these going into the town centres, then you would
have integrated transport. The problem with the public transport system
on the whole I find is total lack of integration. This is noticeable
also in Hampstead where there is no interchange between the Northern
Line and the North London Line.
Similarly the North London Line (Silverlink) has no interchange at
Hackney with WAGN.

Really? I've found the improvement in bus services very pleasing, with a
higher frequency of buses available, more night services available and
more direct journey opportunities - all of which made me even less
likely to get a car than I already was.

15 minutes at a bus-stop is long enough for me to decide next time to
use the car. Again I have found that 2 routes go on approximately the
same route yet they are not spaced properly so both come along at once.
The most annoying thing is after waiting 15 minutes for a bus and
getting on a full one, an empty one passes you a minute later then
shoots off into the distance while your one stops at every single stop.

Perhaps. But whilst providing the tunnel under Henleys Corner may
improve the situation there, it will also just move the problem down the
road to the next limiting junction, as traffic along the A406 will
increase to fill the new capacity provided by the improvement works at
Henleys Corner. It's all a rather vicious circle, and it seems like the
only way to lock in the benefits of a scheme like the one you mention is
to charge people to use the road to stop new traffic using up the new
capacity.

So with a junction-free route from Palmers Green to Beckton you'd
expect massive traffic queues at Beckton (junction of A406 and A13) yet
I drive there every day and there are none. The only hold-up is
approaching the A12.
Yes, the A12 does provide an alternative route to Docklands just as my
proposed extension of the West Cross Route would provide an alternative
link from the A406 to the A40 (other than the A406 itself). By the way,
much of Cricklewood and Harlesden are relatively undeveloped, and
there's a disused railway line that crosses through Gladstone Park, so
part of the space is already there (albeit not exactly the line I have
drawn).


I worked as a minicab driver for about 18 months between July 2002 and
the end of 2003.

OK...?

Well for one, I know the roads of London pretty well. I also know that
a large number of minicab drivers are driving empty half the time while
returning to base, and work excessively long hours. If minicab
companies were better integrated (so you pick up where you drop) and if
driver hours were regulated like other professional drivers (to 90
hours every 2 weeks) then a driver could go out, work extensively for
45 hours then go home, and there'd be fewer cars on the road. Also a
number of these minicab drivers could train to drive minibuses instead,
and a "shared-minibus" scheme could be set up for some of the more
popular routes, particularly airports. They have this in other
countries.