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The most radical transport authority
The City of London has become by far the most radical local authority in Britain. It closed Bank, one of the busiest junctions in the City, to all traffic except buses and cyclists during working hours and is now embarked on a policy of trying to shift modal share radically away from cars. Cycling though the City has tripled over the past decade andthe whole transport strategy is...
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Terry Morgan is not the problem for HS2
The defenestration of Sir Terry Morgan, the chairman of HS2, has been as painfully slow as progress on the scheme. Speculation began on Friday and he was still none the wiser about his fate yesterday afternoon. Work on HS2 has only just started, nearly a decade after the project was first announced, and the scheduled finishing date of 2026 for the first phase is looking unlikely, as it is...
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FT review: The Crossrail story
By Robert Wright This book celebrates a triumph. The UK’s vast Crossrail project, managed by Transport for London, the mayor’s transport organisation, has successfully excavated a pair of tunnels through 21km of central London. Ten new stations, likely to be among the city’s most spectacular and efficient, have been built. By letting commuter services from Heathrow airport and Reading in the west run through central London to Shenfield...
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Nick Faith obituary: the gentleman mischief maker
The writer Nicholas Faith, who has died aged 85, was a gentleman mischief-maker. Courteous to a fault, he pursued those he took against with rigorous research and enormous energy, and was always looking for new stones to overturn. As his youngest son, Joe, put it, Nick was “critical of most establishments he wrote about”. And his work covered plenty of them. His journalism and 20 books dealt with subjects...
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Crossrail wait will be worth it
There’s been a lot of fuss about the delay and the extra cost of Crossrail in recent weeks but overall the project has escaped the sort of negative publicity which such projects often attract. Although 95% or so complete, the project is now appearing rather troubled and certainly there is a lack of clarity about when it will open as the time given ‘next autumn’ is sufficiently vague to...
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About Christian Wolmar
Christian Wolmar is an award winning writer and broadcaster specialising in transport and is the author of a series of books on railway history. He was Labour's candidate for the 2016 Richmond Park & North Kingston by-election and also ran to be Labour's candidate in the last London mayoral election. Read more >>
A short little rant about driverless cars, written for a transport techie conference iru.org/resources/news… in November but finally just gone online
