Author: Phil

The Mayor’s press people seem to be a little slow on the draw. Yesterday in a press release he was complaining about an article by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard on Monday. Gilligan was in turn complaining that the Mayor was exaggerating somewhat about the benefit to young people of his freebie bus passes. The Mayor says they are worth £350 and Gilligan says £280. Anyway the Mayor laboriously explained that there is no such thing as a young person’s concessionary annual travel pass at £280 so Gilligan is the one who is wrong. The Mayor then says that most young people used to buy weekly bus passes which would be £7 each at today’s rates. He manages to multiply the weekly rate by 50 to get to the £350 benefit he is quoting.

There are two problems with this. First is that the school year typically comprises 190 days or 38 weeks. If you think in terms of the young persons’ concession being made available to get kids to school then the concession is worth £266 which is even less than Gilligan’s figure.

It gets worse though because for young people not in education the actual weekly fare is £6 not £7. So 38 weeks at £6 is £228.

The bottom line is that the Mayor couldn’t brag what a boon to people his concessions were if the fares weren’t so stupidly high in the first place. Doh! The Mayor can’t have it both ways.

The Mayor published his London Climate Change Action Plan yesterday. It is all cheerily endorsed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Green Party. It is mostly outside the Mayor’s competence too if he was honest.

There are some things the Mayor can control and he really should focus on these. The funniest graph in his document was this one:

It seems if you jump in your car you often do so with other people, so average car occupancy in London is 1.6. This results in cars only pushing out 110 g/passenger kilometre compared to buses which push out only slightly less, 80 g/passenger kilometre. The figures show that cars are 37.5% worse than buses. The document points out that if there weren’t 1.6 people in each car then car emissions would be 60% higher. Yes, but they aren’t. The report does not point out in the same way that bus occupancy is 15 so if there was only one person in each bus then bus emissions would be 1400% higher.

Of course the Mayor is relying on journalists to only read the management summary of his document so the Evening Standard yesterday repeated this factoid from the management summary:

For the average Londoner, switching from driving to work to taking the bus will save 0.6 tonnes of carbon per year; taking up cycling instead would increase these savings to 1.1 tonnes.

This carefully phrased sentence inflates the carbon impact of cars by 60% above actual, delivered performance today by ignoring the extra 0.6 person in each car. When I saw the figure in the Evening Standard my first thought was that London’s buses are so empty that they are only 0.6 tonnes better than a car. The reality is that they are only 0.3 tonnes better. The Mayor is saying travel on my dirty, vandalised, wildly driven, inconvenient, stand-out-in-the-rain-waiting-at-a-bus-stop buses and save the planet.

One thing the Mayor can actually really do is to look at bus engine efficiency and occupancy. His action plan does not spell out what he will do to improve bus engines. His action plan does not spell out what he will do to improve London Buses’ low bus occupancy of 15, ie the average bus only has 15 people on it. Although the Mayor has no powers in this area the action plan does call for “support of car sharing to increase passenger occupancy”. The Mayor just wants to push out hot air rather than stick to what he can actually do.

According to the Sunday Times this morning our London Mayor, like our Prime Minister, is anxious about his legacy.

Apparently he is considering 6 monuments at the major entrances to London so that people know they have arrived. These would be situated where motorways hit the boundary of Greater London. Funny how our anti-car mayor wants to give motorists an eyeful.

The whole thing is being driven by the Mayor’s mini-quango Design for London, who come complete with their own website, their own brochure, etc, etc. They are based with the London Development Agency in the swish new Palestra building right. OK for some.

Since he has been mayor Livingstone has spent £100,000s of public money to play around with questionable pieces of public art on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square. Again it has its own website, etc, yawn, waste. We are due to have something new in spring of this year.

You may remember the Mayor saying in 2000 about the two generals, Napier and Havelock, whose statues adorn two of the remaining three plinths:

I think that the people on the plinths in the main square in our capital city should be identifiable to the generality of the population. I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did.

I imagine that not one person in 10,000 going through Trafalgar Square knows any details about the lives of those two generals. It might be that it is time to look at moving them and having figures on those plinths that ordinary Londoners would know.

What the Mayor probably does not get is that these two statues, like Nelson’s column itself, were paid for by public subscription. In other words the 19th century public had a choice and they voted with their wallets. Indeed it is said that by far the largest number of subscribers for Napier’s bronze were private soldiers.

If Livingstone wants his monuments he should test whether Londoners’ admiration for him runs to actually putting their hands in their pockets rather than the usual situation which is the mayor putting his hand in their pockets.