The Tepid Take

1. MY KINGDOM FOR A BRUNEL      It can often feel like the United Kingdom is eternally haunted by some Victorian spectre: from foreign relations, to architecture, to things wrapped in pastry, so much of the country harkens back to an imperial institutional dream - and it is a dream.      The railways of Great Britain, among the oldest in the world, are haunted in the same way. But they also suffer more recent spectres: British Rail, the state-run provider of passenger rail transport in Great Britain, has been dead for barely twenty five years. Now, the country runs a compromise. The tracks themselves sits in the public sector under Network Rail, following the dire safety concerns of privatised Railtrack. Meanwhile, the train operating companies (TOCs) and rolling stock companies (ROSCOs) are private tenders.      Crucially, however, Great Britain and the UK are not one and the same, and it is Great Britain that has part-privatised rail. Acros...

1. BAIL OUT TfL, BAIL ON CROSSRAIL Sadiq Khan can count himself lucky for the latest bailout package TfL has received from the Department for Transport. Not because it is particularly large or unprecedented, because it isn’t, but because it was a particularly hard-fought battle. Despite being prepared to offer an immediate bailout to train operating companies, the government was not prepared to issue an additional bailout to TfL unless they agreed to substantial changes. These included scrapping the Zip and Freedom passes (forcing under-18s and over-60s to pay for travel regardless of circumstance) and the extension of the Congestion Charge (which I’ve already explained would be a poor policy decision). The demands posed by the DfT are exceptional themselves given the amount that TfL makes back from subsidy; compared to other transport networks, under normal circumstances, the London Underground makes back 1.2x its costs in revenue. That's incredible compared to the New York s...

The congestion charge is one of the most progressive examples of road pricing. Here’s why extending it would be regressive.  It pays to begin with a history lesson: the congestion charge was launched – against a wave of substantial political opposition across the board – by Ken Livingstone, in 2003. Responsible for substantial reforms in his time as the first Mayor of London, Livingstone saw backlash  for the congestion charge from across the political spectrum, not just from taxi drivers or private car users but theatre workers and the Samaritans. Livingstone was himself a prominent part of Labour’s Militant faction and leader of the Greater London Council when the Thatcher administration saw it as an enfant terrible deserving of abolition. This provocative background has left the congestion charge tarred with a red brush. But road pricing is not a left-wing policy; it was first suggested by Milton Friedman. For related reasons or not, road pricing is not nominally progressiv...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2020. I’m walking through a lush river valley, home to cows, sheep, and even baby Shetland ponies. I can see the surprisingly steep banks of the River Chess ahead, formed when the owner of Latimer House chose to enhance the natural beauty of his rear view with an unexpectedly wide lake. This is the Chess Valley, on the borders of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire, and it’s totally perplexing that this 15-mile long stretch of rural land, totally outside anything resembling London, gets a good six stations on the Tube map. This is the outermost part of the Metropolitan Line. As the first railway to tunnel under London, it gave birth to the Underground, but it never really stopped being a bit like a heavy-rail train – so once it’s in the Home Counties, the line feels a lot less like rapid transit and a lot more like commuter rail. The Metropolitan Line bore a child, and that child was Metroland: a hugely ambitious attempt to encourage ...

This article was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan’s government commissioned a report intended to modernise Britain’s railway system, and to make it profitable for the first time in ages. Victorian “railway mania” had generated some of the most impressive railway routes in Europe, but it had come at a cost: early investment in railway infrastructure had grown and grown, even in areas where it was economically unsustainable. The changing transport habits of the post-war period proved the final straw: by 1963, fully half the train stations in the UK only brought in 2 per cent of the revenue, with many routes running almost empty trains at a heavy loss. This problem, outlined by the report, was not controversial; indeed, it was factual. But it was the solution, proposed by the now infamous Dr Beeching, that proved so radical: closing almost half of the United Kingdom’s railway infrastructure for good. The “ Beeching Axe ” has been loathed by ...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2019. There are 14 railway terminals in London. That sounds like a lot, even by the standards of London’s 8 million strong population. For context, Beijing has just six terminals between its 21 million people. So if you decide where to live based on the obscure metric of “number of railway terminals per million people”, London is doing really, really well. But it’s such a bother, isn’t it? Making the inconvenient, interchange-laden journey from Liverpool Street to London Bridge, for example, is the price we pay to travel cross-country; changing in Central London is the norm for many a journey, even though it’s expensive, inefficient, and adds to the footfall at stations that are already stereotypically congested. In fact, as is so often the case, there’s actually a pretty sensible explanation for why London ended up with so many railway stations, even by European standards. As pioneers of the industrial revolution, Britain was the ...

Hello! Back from the dead after finishing my dissertation, of which you can read a jazzed-up version here . This piece, however, is on something completely different, a topic I've dabbled in that remains close to my heart: the Tube Map. Aficionados amongst you are probably already aware that the newest iteration of the Tube Map is different to the old one. Okay, it'd be weird if it wasn't. But the difference with this one is particularly radical and novel. It meant adding a kink in the characteristically straight Metropolitan Line at Finchley Road, and it finally admitted that Camden Road is dead close to Camden Town. This piece will argue that this particular change is momentous, more momentous than most of us realise. Not just because it added another level of pseudo-ergonomic complexity to the car crash that is the complete Tube Map , but because it could revolutionise how we use the Tube. In 2017, on the cusp of my mediocre "career" as a journalist, ...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2018. Imagine, for a moment, that you are wandering through the old town of Amsterdam. As a tourist, you might not be au fait with the smartcard system there, so you buy a “1 hour ticket” to travel across the city. You check in upon entering your first mode of transport, and then you’re free to mix transport modes as much as you like until your hour is up, when you are obliged to check out. This is only one fare of many different types that exist in Amsterdam, but it already differs radically from how things work in London. Here, buses and trams are consistently separate from the Underground and Overground when it comes to how much you pay. The only similarity is that both London and Amsterdam will ask you to pay extra if you want to use a national rail service. To make it plain, the difference is thus: fares align in Amsterdam – everything is included in the same fare, and it’s how long you travel for, not exactly where you tra...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2018. Multiple tram lines, excess of bendy buses, modern cycle hire scheme… Transport in Bordeaux is about what one might expect from an up-and-coming European city of its size. But Bordeaux’s public transport is anything but typical – and its oddness stems neither from the places it serves, nor the vehicles that take you there, but rather from their presentation. Public transport in Bordeaux is painfully passive aggressive – like if you took “Please mind the gap” and replaced it with “Would you mind causing yourself grievous bodily harm elsewhere?” Allow me to elaborate. In the UK, it’s au fait for national rail services, especially those running without ticket inspectors on board, to run the following legal message (or a variant thereof) mid journey: “Please make sure you have a valid ticket for your journey. If you cannot produce a valid ticket when asked, you may be liable to pay a penalty fare.” Beyond this message, and subtle ...

I have a peculiar history when it comes to being a ‘road user’. I actually had my first go in the drivers’ seat of my mum’s Smart 4x4 before I learnt to ride a bike: aged 16, an embarrassing race against time in preparation for a school trip to Rendlesham Forest. The go in the car happened just a few months prior, in a field just opposite where I learnt to cycle. Of course, I got the hang of the bike a bit quicker than the car; I would be 19 before I could drive with a full license. But then cycling was metaphorically resigned to the back seat, to cycle hire romps and Santander Cycles. Meanwhile, I drove up the various arterial spines of the UK and, clips in multi-story car parks aside, it was all very comfortable. I took up cycling again last summer as a distraction, and, finally riding on routes I’d rode to death in the car, I realised the difference. For the first time in years, I was afraid to use the road. Why? Cycling has been, for the best part of the last century , a ni...

This piece was originally published in CityMetric in 2018. King’s Cross Central is one of the larger re-development projects currently underway in in central London. A decade in, the area now plays host to the Guardian’s London offices, the Central St. Martin’s art school and an obnoxiously large branch of Waitrose. Only last month, indeed, King’s Cross Central played host to the greatest share of events for the Lumiere light festival. All very prestigious – enough, indeed, to earn the area a shiny new postcode, N1C. What it hasn’t earned it is a new tube station. Okay, there’s King’s Cross St. Pancras itself, at the area’s southern tip, but the northern end of the development zone is as much as 1km from there. And the rebranding of Nine Elms and Battersea to house the new American Embassy , remember, merited the development of two additional stops and an entirely new branch of the Northern Line. The partnership behind King’s Cross Central presumably thought that the existing – admit...