It is 15 years since I shared a train with John Major and various other dignitaries that took us under the Channel for the inauguration of the tunnel. The day was rather marred for the British by a typically provocative comment from the Président François Mitterrand about how travellers would have time to admire the [...]
Archive of May, 2009
May
26
Lessons from New York
It is extraordinary that the Americans are showing us how to do things in terms of urban planning. Not only are light rail schemes popping up everywhere, but now New York is shutting several major intersections around Broadway to give pedestrians exclusive access.
Yet in London, the backward looking Boris, who is showing himself up to [...]
Road safety is one of the issues where one feels that the government is going through the motions. Yes, you can hear ministers and senior officials think, road accidents are bad and we ought to do something about it, but at the end of the day there will always be deaths on the road because [...]
I have been taken to task by various readers for my piece on high speed rail two issues ago which raised a number of questions about the project. In order to learn more about the government’s plans and to respond to their criticisms, I went along to the offices of HS2, the government’s specially created [...]
One cheer for iain Coucher for foregoing part of his bonus. But listening to him on the Today programme yesterday, it was clear that he - and indeed the executives like him - do not understand the bonus issue. Coucher stoutly defended the bonus system, despite John Humphries rightly raising the question of why he [...]
Tim O’Toole was by no means an obvious choice for the job of running London Underground but he proved to be an inspired one. His experience as an American freight railman, at one point running the huge Conrail which ran most of the freight operations in the lucrative north east of the United States, seemed [...]