Nick Biskinis: Getting back on track at City Hall should be the un-congested road to Downing Street

Nick Biskinis is a volunteer advocate for public transport users in South London.

The Conservatives need to revive in London if they are to be credible challengers for power at Westminster.

This in turn demands being able to take up pan-London issues with gusto and not retreat into (a long stale) ‘doughnut’ strategy of only looking at Outer London. A Conservative campaign that doesn’t speak to all of London will fail.

Whilst transport may not rank quite as highly as the economy or social care or crime you know it when it goes wrong. When your train is cancelled or the bus comes late (and is so packed you can’t board) or if you are stuck in traffic because the road has been narrowed to one lane. According to the INRIX Global Traffic Scorecard congestion cost the UK economy £8 billion in 2021 alone.

So why have the Conservatives been so reluctant to engage in this field?

An unfortunate perception has arisen that public transport is a policy no-go area – encapsulated by the misattributed quote to Margaret Thatcher that any man above the age of 26 who took the bus could be considered a failure. Conservatives have defaulted to only discussing transport in terms of ‘the war on motorists’ effectively vacating a large policy space.

Under David Cameron the Conservatives shifted to being more pro-public transport as a means of showing centrist credentials of ‘Vote Blue go Green’. Boris Johson when running for Mayor promised the ‘New Routemaster’ to bolster his campaign. Unfortunately under Johnson the pendulum swung into a radical direction where ‘going green’ shifted to ‘ecowoke’ and an obsession with cycling at any cost.

In his memoirs Johnson writes he couldn’t understand why people ‘wasted their time’ on trains when they could be cycling, devoting some 13 pages to explaining the ‘cycling revolution’. Under Johnson and his cycling adviser Andrew Gilligan ‘road modernization’ was rolled out, introducing a network of segregated cycle lanes by taking out bus lanes from key routes (including bridges), narrowing trunk roads to one lane, creating floating bus stops, pushing forward Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, reducing parking bays for the disabled and delivery space for businesses, all done with scant consideration of potential negative impact.

This continued as Johnson became Prime Minister, bringing back Gilligan and using the Covid pandemic to impose more of these schemes ‘experimentally’ (but with selective measuring of data to ‘prove’ they were working), threatening councils with cuts to funds if they tried to remove these installations.

The utopian bombast of Johnson and his successor as London Mayor Sadiq Khan relied upon a simplistic binary that anyone on a bike or e-scooter is one less car on the road, hence with a pan-London network of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and segregated cycle lanes, traffic ‘evaporation’ would take place where all motorists would osmotically switch to Boris/Sadiq e-bikes or e-scooters in dedicated lanes, freeing up general road space for buses and emergency vehicles.

During the pandemic these schemes were doubled down in anticipation of a tenfold increase in cycling as London morphed into Amsterdam-on-Thames. Boris Johnson’s puzzlement at why people ‘wasted’ time in public transport merely reflects his own detachment from regular commuting, allowing him the luxury of indulgence in fantasy policies not grounded in any operational reality.

The outcome has been gridlocked roads and public transport in crisis. TfL has spent nearly £1 billion since 2012 creating congestion, locking buses into a spiral of decline: from record ridership in 2008, the past ten years saw bus speeds slowing to 6 mph with passenger numbers falling around 6 per cent per year, costing TfL revenue, followed by cuts to services and further reducing passenger uptake.

INRIX consistently finds London to have the worst congestion in Europe.

For those of reduced mobility and sensory impairments, the last ten years have been particularly disadvantageous, having to contend with e-bikes and e-scooters speeding on pavements, or navigating cycle lanes when alighting onto ‘floating bus stops’ or simply left unable to get to work because buses are late or too crowded.

Pedestrians see pavement space being cannibalized by hastily implemented cycle lanes and/or becoming dumping grounds for e-bikes. Particularly disturbing are delays to emergency vehicles stuck in constricted traffic lanes when answering calls: the former head of the London Ambulance Service Garrett Emmerson acknowledged that some of these schemes may have resulted in deaths.

These measures were badged under the benign label ‘Healthy Streets’ implying that anyone who objected was against healthier environments. The shrill cry of ‘climate crisis’ was an alibi to mask ableism and policies which perversely penalised those taking public transport.

A war on motorists evolved into one on most commuters. Despite ten years of relentless promotion by TfL cycling barely registers at 3 per cent of commuting in London, compared to the (broadly) 40 per cent who take public transport in Outer London and 60 per cent in Inner.  It is significant that in Greater Manchester Labour’s Mayor Andy Burnham has put bus services at the heart of his transport policy platform rather than cycling rates.

Tube and Overground systems also suffer from poor reliability (the flagship Elizabeth Line is now one of London’s least punctual, plagued with shut downs on the western branches). Whilst bus stops may not have real-time displays of when the next bus is due, nor even a local map of services, they will have posters instructing people to ‘be kind’; virtue signaling is in the ascendent whilst in the real world commuters face signal failures. TfL seems to not listen to communities  yet employs  large numbers of communications ‘specialists’ in order to not do so. It is notable that the new Labour Government now seems unlikely to devolve any large suburban rail networks to TfL, perhaps sensing it is not currently up to the job.

Despite these issues the recent Conservative Mayoral campaign shied away from commenting on the quality of public transport and congestion problems beyond stating opposition to ULEZ expansion, itself hampered by the fact ULEZ was originally Conservative policy.

Yet recently London Assembly Conservatives such as Emma Best have been prominent advocates of disabled users with concerns about floating bus stops.

This points to the huge political opportunity for Conservatives to challenge the orthodoxies that have undermined London’s public transport network without looking as though they are only for the motorist.

Thousands may use e-scooters or e-bikes; but millions more use buses or the Tube and rail.

The Conservatives should become the champion of commuters and accessible travel in London, campaigning on reprioritising buses and dismantling schemes which delay emergency vehicles, under a policy of ‘putting passengers first’.

Cycling should be part of a wider inclusive transport policy governed by pragmatism within a TfL mission to move as many people as efficiently, safely and as accessibly as possible.  TfL should be reformed so that funding is spent on core transport services and improving accessibility, not squandered on e-scooter trials or vacuous niche ‘micromobility’ schemes, with TfL required to hold public meetings in every London borough at least every two years and a TfL board more representative of London with a role for user group representation.

Reducing congestion and car usage is a critical objective for London but requires reliable alternatives offering real choices to encourage modal shift that serves all and particularly the most vulnerable: transport must be enabling not ableist.

Millions of London commuters have been penalised by a failing policy consensus with no party listening to their concerns.

Campaigning to get London moving may be the catalyst for a return to City Hall in 2028 and beyond.

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