High speed rail’s tenuous connection to Heathrow
Lord Adonis rather lets the cat out of his bag by accepting that a High Speed rail connection to Heathrow would do little to reduce the number of flights from the airport. This is commendably honest but rather undermines the case put forward by his boss, Geoff Hoon, for the railway as a green alternative to flying which was the rationale for including it in ...
Fares rises anger commuters
Moans about rail fares rises always greet the New Year. But commuters paying the new fares for the first time this morning - the rises came in last Friday - will be fully justified in their anger. They are being hit by above inflation rises just at the time when the recession is beginning to bite hard and their pay cheques are not getting bigger. ...
Oxford Street nightmare must end
Oxford Street is a nightmare. Billed as Britain’s premier shopping street, in reality it is a permanent gridlock of people, buses and taxis with a polluted, congested and dirty atmosphere which is increasingly becoming unacceptable to shoppers.
Everyone agrees that it can’t go on like this. Even the New West End Company, representing Oxford Street’s retailers, accepts that "there has got to be a better solution" than the current ...
Your first job, Boris, is to get London moving
Perhaps it was inevitable that Boris Johnson would mark his first 100 days as Mayor today by issuing a list of his achievements. Never mind that it is impossible to have much of an impact on a huge city like London in such a short period, making his list of 15 achievements look a little thin. More important, ...
What Boris must do to get Londoners on two wheels
The sun is out and so are the cyclists. Suddenly they can be seen zipping round London like water boatmen on a pond; many are clearly novices, cycling tentatively around parked cars and fearfully trying to avoid the bendy buses.
This happens every summer as more and more people realise the flexibility and fitness that cycling promises. Slowly, too, the authorities have begun to realise ...
Why our railways keep on failing passengers
THIS was supposed to be the weekend that Network Rail made up for its disastrous performance of Christmas. Instead, once again, Liverpool Street is effectively closed thanks to engineering overruns, with thousands of commuters forced to make other arrangements. And it is not about to get any better: travellers can expect further disruption, especially on the West ...