London could be about to endure the embarrassing and possibly tragic fate of electing its own version of the Hartlepool monkey as mayor. Boris may be a bit of a laugh and quite a nice chap really, but behind the buffonery there is a right wing mindset that will do untold damage to the capital.
First, just imagine what it would have been to have had Boris as mayor when the 7/7 terrorist outrage occurred. The trouble with Boris is that he just does not do 'serious' and when he tries it just comes out as unconvincing. You cannot play the clown all your life and then turn on a completely different mode.
Secondly, though, in terms of transport, Boris will try to effect a reactionary reversal to Ken's all too timid attempts to constrain the private car. At least, though, Ken was trying through the congestion charge, the possible implementation of a 20 mph limit, getting rid of some gyratory systems, creating more bus lanes and so on. Boris may like cycling but he will not be prepared to implement the car-constraint measures that are the only way to really boost two wheel non-motorised travel.
There is, too, a good cynical reason to vote for Ken. There is no doubt that the generous deals on transport and refinancing of the PPP which he has obtained will be threatened should he lose the election. Gordon Brown will have no hesitation on putting the squeeze on a Tory mayor, especially as he will be very high profile and seen as a dress rehearsal for a Cameron victory.
So much as you may dislike Ken and his shenanigans, if you live in London put Livinsgstone as at least one of your two preferences. You know it makes sense.

As ever, have been a bit busy to blog but the coincidence of the deaths of two very significant, if totally different, transport campaigners has made me put finger to laptop. I just learnt of the death of John Tyme, who fought a series of campaigns against roadbuilding in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably at the Archway Road enquiry. Every time I cycle or drive up the Archway Road dual carriageway north of Archway roundabout, which is part of the A1, I think of Tyme and his campaign which stopped the rest of the road being widened. The desultory shops which he saved are gradually coming back to life and a few posh restaurants have even opened there, and the area retains a modicum of sanity. Without him, there would have been a huge dual carriageway all the way out to the M1, destroying the community of that part of north London.

His tactic was quite simple, turning up at enquiries and refusing to be silenced. There were attempts to throw him out, demonstrations, adjournments, retreats and huge publicity. It was wonderfully effective. He believed, quite rightly, that the case for roadbuilding had not been made and that these various road schemes were part of a much wider policy to create a road-oriented transport policy that was never properly and honestly set out by government.

The other sad loss is, of course,Gwyneth Dunwoody, the chairman (she insisted on being called that) of the Commons Transport Committee. Her renown was made all the greater when the silly control freaks at Labour HQ tried to oust her after the 2005 election in order to silence one of the critics on their own side, but she easily fought off this daft attempt. She used her position well, launching enquiries on the most obvious government failings and using her wit and sharpness to put down the most illustrious witnesses in their place. Although the committee only has the power to highlight and publicise issues, she used its strength to the maximum, ensuring that ministers and officials came to the committee room in a state approaching approaching terror. Indeed, she was the Commons' true terrorist.

God does the world need people like Dunwoody and Tyme. They may have chosen very different paths, but they were both fighters against far bigger forces and yet they often won or at least brought about changes to iniquitous policies. There seem to be far fewer of them these days. It takes so little to disrupt the smooth progress of capitalism towards the creation of a corporate world in which all life is extinguished - a clever publicity stunt, a bit of digging into the facts, the odd piece of direct action, effective lobbying of sympathetic people and so on - and yet so much these days gets passed with nary a word of dissent. The people battling against 4x4s are a good example of how a small campaign can really help to change the political climate. There are scandals and outrages a plenty to expose, but it takes a few doughty campaigners to highlight them. So step forward the new Tymes and Dunwoodys, the world needs you.

An article on an American website asked a question which has long intrigued me: why does the Right favour roads given they require a massive subsidy from the state as well as the direct intervention of government in order to be built, and yet is suspicious of public transport spending? The article, by Alex Marshall, at http://www.governing.com/articles/0804trans.htm argues that building roads is a manifestation of state power and that they require some $150bn of state funding annually, enough to wage a war on Iraq.
Marshall points out that a whole host of right wing think tanks in the US lobby strongly for increased spending on roads, while simultaneously trying to kill off public transport systems, arguing they are inefficent and expensive. In trying to work out why the Right He asks a leading lobbyist, Robert Poole, why his Reason Foundation supports roads given its general dislike of government involvement. Poole is completely flummoxed: "I'd never thought about it that way", he says, and is unable to give a coherent answer, arguing that they are not anarchists seeking to allow anyone to build competing roads everywhere.
I remember asking pretty much the same question of Digby Jones at a press conference when he was head of the CBI. I questioned why the CBI was always asking for more money to be spent on transport when generally it was constantly lobbying for reduced government spending.Much to my pleasure, he totally lost his rag and spoke for 10 minutes without really answering the question. There is indeed a contradiction. As Marshall points out, 'our national road system would never have been built if every street were required to pay for itself'.
Indeed, one could argue that many small country roads are totally uneconomic by any criteria and should be closed down, in the same way that railway branch lines should be shut. Or they should be allowed to decline with no maintenance, leading to the imposition of 20 MPH speed limits, as happens on little used parts of the railways.
More widely, though, Marshall raised a fundamental point. What is it about roads that attracts the Right? Surely they must, by now, realise that the freedom afforded by the car is illusory, since, as usage rises, the extra societal costs of more people getting on to the road outweigh by far the benefits. And the simplistic view that roadbuilding is the answer has been widely discredited. There is a gaping intellectual gap in the Right's thinking which environmentalists and public transport supporters should be more adept at exploiting.

Staying in a small town 10 kms from Groningen, I borrowed my host's bike and rode in to town to see how it managed to become the place with the greatest modal share of cycling in Holland. I had been there five years ago and discovered that it was not just happenstance,but a deliberate result of keeping cars out of the city.
Riding in, it was noticeable how car traffic thinned out as I got closer to the rather badly reconstructed main square, which had been badly damaged by heavy fighting in the war as the Canadians chased out the Germans in 1945. The inner ring road has virtually no cars and, of course, lots of space for cyclists. Inside that ring, there are virtually no cars. Indeed, the crucial decision to encourage cycling rather than cars had been made in the 1970s when that ring had become chock full of traffic.
The reason for the town's success in achieving a modal share of over 50 per cent for cycling is nothing very complicated. The crucial point is not only being pro-bike but to some extent being anti car. That is the stumbling block for policymakers in this country. You need both the carrot and the stick.
John Whitelegg made that point in a critique of the Lancaster Cycling Demonstration Town about which I have written previously on this blog. There's no getting round it - policymakers have to start putting the squeeze, ever so gently at first, on car users in order to encourage a modal shift. Sadly, I don't think they will ever do it here.
While Groningen is famous in transport circles, Utrecht is a town best known for its once powerful bishops and for having the largest tower in the Netherlands but there too the number of cyclists was really striking, even more so than in Groningen. People say, rather dismissively, that its because Utrecht and Groningen are student towns, but that is to underestimate the sheer ubiquity of cycling.
In Amsterdam, too, jogging round the Vondelspark at 8am, the streams of cyclists in all directions, sizes, ages and speeds using it as a short cut on their way to school, college, business or leisure.It was the sheer variety that was so wonderful - kids with their dads pushing them on gently, mums with two toddlers in a front trailer, besuited gents on their way to their accountancy firm and old age pensioners off to look after their grandchildren. Oh God it made me feel wistful and wonder where we went wrong...

The Dutch train system is little more than the size of the old Network SouthEast with more major towns connected by services called Intercity but which trundle along principally at 100 kph. The trains are pretty basic, the seats hard, no creature comforts, fairly surly ticket inspectors but as a way of moving lots of people around reasonably quickly and efficiently, it works.
In my Dutch travels, I have so far taken half a dozen trains and they have all been on time. I even made a 4 minute connection with ease, not something that the National Rail Enquiries timetable would suggest.
Lots of people seem to get on and off at every stop, which suggests that the average distance travelled is quite short. Oddly, not many people carry bicycles, which is somewhat discouraged by the authorities. They prefer people to have cycles at each end of their journeys and judging from the astonishing number of bikes at every station, lots do.
Like with all train systems, it is not all that easy to manage if you are not sure where you are going. The information on the panels is all in Duch, with no translations other than at the really big places and sometimes a train will indicate a destination implying it is a direct service when, in fact, a change is required.
The service is all clockface, the same time past the hour, every hour, and are timetabled so that you can get from any town to any other with a quick change. It is noticeable that the trains stop at the main stations for quite a few minutes which is presumably padding in the timetable to ensure that the timetable is adhered to. Apparently, there were major problems a few years ago when the track company was separated off, but these have been resolved and certainly I have had no trouble at all. And one final thing - all the trains are electric which is extremely pleasant and something that the Department for Transport could come and observe.

I am in Holland for a ten day speaking tour to local groups of the Anglo-Dutch friendship society and I plan to post regular items on the blog on my thoughts. Whenever I go to Europe and spend a bit of time there, it amazes me just how different each society is from Britain, and indeed from each other. I hope that the growing dominance of the European union does not change that.
I went for a run this morning in the suburbs of a small town called Hengelo, in the Eastern part of Holland, near the German border. It is remarkably suburban, the houses are small and built to very tight specifications demanded by the Dutch authorities. My host Giles, tells me that this extends to ensuring that everyone has the same type of roof on their houses, the same colour front doors and does not work in their gardens on the Sabbath.
Just on this short run, it became so apparent the way that life is organised around the bicycle.
I ran along a Fitspad, a bike path, for a couple of miles, and when I ran outwards, there were just a few students and the odd youngster on their bikes, but on the way back, the cycle path was full of kids, parents with kids on bikes, parents with kids on the back, and groups of teenagers. It was cycle rush hour just before school was starting and it was so nice seeing all these children cycling to school, from rather stern looking little blonde girls, maybe just 8 - 9 pushing determinedly to teenagers larking about and waiting for each other on corners.
And of course none were obese. Nor did any have flash bikes and not a helmet in sight - why would you need one when you had cycle paths all the way. It was such a heartening sight. This is so good in so many ways: the kids are learning independence in a way that ours are not allowed to do. How many British parents would allow eight year old girls or boys for that matter, to cycle to school on their own? Or even walk there? You could see what the arguments would be about in Holland: some parents were accompanying their five year olds, pushing them along a bit, and you could imagine that soon these kids would be demanding to go on their own.
But it is a win win situation in so many other ways, too. The environment, of course, but also these children's fitness and wellbeing. Just cycling a mile or two to school every day, and, as my host told me, also to school outings - going by bike to swimming lessons or the local museum is apparently compulsory - ensures these kids are far healthier than they would be if driven in their parents' cars. There were far fewer cars on the road at that time in the morning than there would be in an equivalent suburb in Britain.
These advantages are all so obvious - but why is Britain so different, so reluctant to see these advantages? Your thoughts would be most welcome

Next entry will be on the train service, which, surprisingly perhaps, is not all good news!

One of the great ironies of rail privatisation is that the rail industry is under far stricter control from outside forces than it ever was when it was a nationalised industry. Recent events, such as the fines imposed on both Network Rail and First Great Western have reinforced that view.
Yesterday, Chris Bolt rail regulator announced the way that Crossrail paths would be allocated once the scheme is completed some time at the back end of the next decade. Broadly, he accepted the application by the Department of Transport and Network Rail for most of the paths, though he reserved his decision on two daily paths at each end of the new line as there was no business case for so many trains.
This though is the madness of the way that the industry is being micromanaged by outside forces. Frankly, it is nigh on impossible to judge what the London commuter market will look like in 15 years time. The impact of just a few factors – say, growth patterns, the use of technology, the impact of global warming, possible terrorist attacks – shows that such calculations are based on wholly contestable assumptions.
The words ‘business case’ send a shudder down my spine every time I see them used. It is a pseudo science that pulls the wool over the eyes of politicians and business people alike. You only have to look at the ex post facto results of previous ‘business cases’ to show that they are largely a convenient fiction to mask a series of value judgement. For example, the case for the PPP for the London Underground was built on precisely this type of assumption and look what happened to Metronet. How do we know that will not be the case with Crossrail?