Earl Purple wrote:
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.

I doubt that's a benefit worth factoring in when you build a new road.
"I'm afraid we're demolishing the houses next door to put in a six-lane
motorway, but it's OK because you can put a big advert on the side of
your house..."

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

The point is that the people who have to suffer the negative
consequences of the new road are not the ones who benefit from it.

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.

Have you done the amount of research into congestion charging that TfL
have done when considering where to draw the boundary?

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, it's nice to be able to get around. However, this has to be
balanced against worsening air quality and extensive environmental
damage. The M25 is here to stay, and it's changed the way people travel
around London. Its construction was inevitable so there isn't much point
arguing about how good or bad it is.

What I'm saying is that the M25 proves that orbital routes in particular
generate extensive numbers of new or longer car journeys. New or longer
car journeys are not a particularly good thing, as they increase the
damage to the environment, cause more air pollution and increase our
dependence on oil.

If you have an issue with that final point then I suggest we drop this
line of argument, because we won't get anywhere with it.

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.

As mentioned above, I'm not saying the M25 was a mistake. It's there
now, our region depends on it and it's there to stay. I'm saying the
trip generation it causes proves that we shouldn't build another one,
especially not in inner London.

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.

I agree that we should improve orbital public transport (as is now
beginning with the ELL extensions and NLL/WLL improvements) - but
orbital public transport can *never* compete properly with orbital
journeys by private transport, because of the huge number of different
origins and destinations involved. Therefore, don't build new roads
which will generate new orbital journeys, because the majority of
travellers just won't choose public transport for those journeys.

The ORBIT multi-modal study recently carried out by the DfT said two
things. Firstly, public transport improvements will make a negligible
difference to traffic levels on the M25. Secondly, creating new orbital
road capacity (e.g. widening the M25 or improving/providing other
orbital roads) will generate enough new traffic within a few years to
negate the benefit of the new capacity - and the only way to avoid that
scenario is to toll the road.

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.

You brought it up before. You may not want to go to central London, but
hundreds of thousands of other people do - and their journeys can be
catered for by public transport, whereas growth in employment around
motorways like the M25 cannot.

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 catchment area of an employment or commercial destination built
deliberately next to a high-capacity road is *much* wider than the
narrow band alongside the main road that public transport would serve.
You may attract some people to public transport along these roads, but
only a small proportion of the people who use cars.

People are also unwilling to change that many times on public transport
- and even changes on a totally integrated service add time to the journey.

It can also be extremely difficult to devise effective routes to link
business parks etc. on a trunk route (which generally bypass town
centres) with the town centres themselves.

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.

I think total lack of integration is a bit too far, especially in
London. At Hammersmith, I can get off a Tube service and go upstairs
into a bus station to catch a bus for the final leg, or change between
buses with ease. At Victoria, I can walk straight out of the station and
onto a bus. At Stratford, I can change between the DLR, two Tube lines,
an orbital rail route, high frequency rail services to Essex and soon
international trains to Europe and local trains to Stansted Airport.

Of course there are bad examples, but there are good ones too. The bad
examples tend to be the result of historical construction that is
expensive to rectify, and sometimes it can be difficult to justify the
benefits. Providing an interchange at Hampstead would cost in the
hundreds of millions of pounds, since both lines are in deep tunnels
underneath the hill. Hackney is annoying, but the result of historical
construction which would also be quite expensive to fix.

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.

That's a shame. I find it difficult to justify the expense of a car from
a 15-minute wait. But I rarely find myself needing to wait that long.

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.

That's also a frustrating experience but not one that I share
particularly regularly.

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.

Well, there's the next bottleneck for you. There may not be massive
queues at Beckton - but when the capacity of the road is increased with
improvements at Henleys Corner, then more cars will use the road, which
will fill up that capacity, causing congestion at the next limited
point. If the road were I suspect that's Hanger Lane rather than
Beckton. In any case, it's a fact of traffic engineering, and I direct
you to your local library or university to look it up if you don't
believe me.

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.

That's an interesting idea (which is used sometimes in this country too
at places like Bicester and Banbury) but is it really relevant to the
rest of the conversation? Sorry if I misunderstand.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London