Christian Wolmar

They were talking about Boris Island on Radio 5 the other day. We’ve already got Boris bikes, the tortuously alliterative alternative to Barclays Bikes, which presumably the sponsor had hoped would be common parlance, and even Boris buses, the replacement for Routemasters that will supposedly bring back conductors, but Boris Island? That really does seem a little over the top. After all, it is, in fact a plan for an ...

Boris Johnson is discovering the hard way that as mayor he cannot just be the blond buffoon with the good one-liners but that running London involves making tough decisions. He faced a difficult choice between cutting back services, particularly buses which eat up £600m of subsidy per year, or putting up fares to ensure that service levels could be maintained. .  Johnson was in a hole, which he partly dug himself. ...

Big fares rises, especially on buses, are going to be announced on Thursday morning by Transport for London. Boris Johnson, the mayor, has chosen to impose the massive increases in order to retain services, rather than announcing a series of cutbacks. It is the right decision, though it must be galling for the Tory blond bombshell.  He probably realised that keeping the £600m subsidy for buses was important for the outer ...

The London mayor's cycle hire scheme terrifies me. Superficially, it sounds very exciting. There are to be 6,000 hire bikes which, it is hoped, will generate 40,000 extra cycle journeys per day in central London. The idea is to effect a substantial modal change, attracting people who would otherwise take the tube or a bus, or even possibly out of their cars.  So how can this be anything other than good ...

I would like to take Boris Johnson seriously. I would like to think that behind the buffoonery and the TV shots of him falling into swamps there was a coherent set of thoughts that would gradually improve the transport situation for Londoners. But after more than a year of the Boris show, it is really impossible to discern anything like a coherent narrative. Instead there are a bunch of disparate policies ...

Boris Johnson is scrapping the congestion charge in the western zone despite clearly having doubts over the policy after his election victory.  He is bowing to the pressure from his cheer leaders in the Tory party and the Evening Standard, despite the thinness of the evidence suggesting that the charge was doing any harm. The Standard yesterday reported that retailers had reported a two per cent decrease in sales during the ...