“Supermodern Aesthetic” For All-New Foot Tunnels - And No More Staff in the Lifts

It’s tunnel week in Greenwich. Many people are just finding out about Transport for London’s plans to close the Blackwall Tunnel to all southbound traffic between 9pm and 5am, five days a week, for the next three years.

We are already half-way through the last uninterrupted week there’ll be until 2013. The closures start this coming Monday and the tunnel will henceforward be closed southbound after 9pm every night except Friday and Saturday.

Anger is whipping round the web. A meeting has been called on February 12 (see this Facebook site) to discuss some form of protest. As someone on the site says, “the bloke in Shawshank Redemption didn’t take that long to sort his tunnel.”

Does it really take 6,240 hours to fit “new safety, lighting and communications systems”? Surely not. Couldn’t they keep both directions open by having a contraflow in the remaining bore, without HGVs if they’re worried about a collision? Of course they could, but they won’t.

Boris Johnson told me a couple of weeks ago that his TfL officers simply refused point-blank to implement his election manifesto commitment to restore the old tidal flow arrangement in the tunnel during rush hours. They claimed that it was not safe. The contraflow during closure has no doubt been scuppered on the same pretext, even though that too was the preferred solution during tunnel works for many years.

Safety seems unlikely to be TfL’s main motivation, since it was perfectly happy to allow contraflows for many years and since, as far as I know, no serious accident ever occurred. Nor was the ending of the arrangement the result of any considered or empirically studied process - it was just stopped one day, and that was that. The main reason is that it is another part of “Transport for Livingstone’s” historic and continuing jihad against the motorist.

You should be going by Tube instead, scum! No, hold on - the Jubilee Line’s closed quite a lot of the time too, isn’t it? Oh well, you’d better cycle then, through the foot tunnel. Not a chance, buster. That, too, will be closed at night (and possibly during the day) for months this year and next as Greenwich Council carries out yet another tiresome, unnecessary and frankly offensive piece of Olympic-related window-dressing.

We still don’t have a clear timetable for the closures, although we’ve been demanding one for months. But, in the second tunnel-related story of the week, the plans for the refurb have been published - so we do have an idea of what the all-singing, all-dancing, refurbished tunnels are going to look like.

“Our approach to the new installations has been bold,” say the designers, “meeting our clients’ challenge to bring the tunnels into the 21st century.” The design, they say, “aims at a ’supermodern’ aesthetic… a contemporary aesthetic that acts as a counterpart to the old” and will make “use of the tunnels an event in itself.” Oh, God.

One of the nicest things, I think, about the foot tunnels is that they are not supermodern or contemporary - but a little breath of Edwardian Britain, from the unflashy white tiling to the wood-panelled lifts.

The lift panelling will be kept, it turns out, but will be placed behind glass screens on stainless steel fixings, with a stainless steel railing round the car at waist height and “LED feature lighting to highlight the panelling.” All the hallmarks, in other words, of the 538 other clueless, over-buffed heritage sterilifications there have been in London over the last ten years.

The glass panels in the domes on at either end will be stripped out and replaced with… almost identical glass panels, only these ones (wait for it), these ones will be aligned “in clearer association with the meridian, with each segment representing 30 minutes of the time dial.”

The claimed objectives of the refurb include “improved safety” and a “more welcoming environment.” This will no doubt be why those dreary heritage features so totally irrelevant to safety and welcoming, the lift attendants, are to be scrapped. As the document admits, “the lift cars will no longer be manned.”

At tunnel level, the tiling stays, but there is a “central services spine… designed to emanate a serene glow.” The lighting will “allow colour and animation to be subtly manipulated to create different moods at different times of the day,” will “wash a feature colour on the walls,” and will provide “the infrastructure for contemporary art installations so that the tunnels can contribute to cultural life in the locality.” The brochure is full of lower-case, marketing-man’s promises about “invitation, exploration and exhilaration.”

Let us pause briefly here, to collect our thoughts and grind our teeth. Since this scheme was announced, life in Britain has changed. The country faces a public spending deficit of £175 billion; a deficit that will require painful cuts to things we actually value. Does anyone really think that, in this new Britain, spending £11.5 million to damage the aesthetic of the tunnels, get rid of the staff and install “mood lighting” should be a priority?

The tunnel is not a “cultural installation,” but a transport one, a job (subject to simple mechanical repairs of the lifts) that it does pretty well at the moment. As for my “mood,” it would be much improved if basic infrastructure was just allowed to carry on doing its job. I do not want my use of the tunnels to be an “an event in itself,” particularly since the most regular event over the next two years will be closure. You want to see “exhilaration?” Scrap this idiotic scheme, and all the other woeful 2012 nonsense. Stop meddling, and just leave us alone.

Andrew Gilligan: Locog Admits Windsor Is a Better Venue

TODAY is the official deadline to object to the stupidest planning application since somebody tried to build a life-sized copy of Buckingham Palace out of processed cheese. The Olympics want to come to Greenwich Park, and aren’t we all thrilled? No, actually: of the 286 responses received by the council so far, 265 - or 92.7 per cent - are against.

That won’t be the final figure - there are some big wodges of objections still to be registered - and in practice you can carry on submitting objections until just before the planning meeting, which I strongly recommend. Over the next few weeks, as councillors look through the application, I’ll be unpicking some of its key weaknesses.

Let us start this week with London 2012 (Locog)’s legal obligation (under the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations) to assess alternative sites and explain why Greenwich Park is better. A potentially tricky task, you might think, given that (a) the alternatives are spacious existing equestrian courses, used to hosting tens of thousands of spectators and (b) Greenwich Park is a cramped, totally virgin site, needing to be transformed from scratch, that has never handled such an event in its life.

The assessment is given in chapter 4 of Locog’s environmental statement, the key planning document (downloadable from the council website). The criteria include the ability to use “existing facilities where possible;” the ability to “provide facilities which meet International Federation and IOC standards;” the ready availability of public transport, the need to ensure “no potentially significant impact on amenity for local residents” and the need to avoid “potentially significant environmental constraints.”

That’s clear enough, then - Windsor Great Park it is! As the document admits, Windsor “has existing facilities which could be used… there are public transport services… approximately 0.3 miles from the venue… there would be no temporary loss of public amenity.”

The stunning fact is that even in Locog’s own assessment, Windsor scores higher than Greenwich Park on facilities and the ability to host the contest, and the same on all the other criteria I’ve mentioned.

And the reality, of course, is that Windsor outscores Greenwich on most of those other criteria too. Completely dishonestly, the Locog assessment scores Windsor and Greenwich the same for “impact on amenity for local residents.” But while large parts of Greenwich Park will be closed for eight months, and smaller parts for five years, no local resident in Windsor would lose a single inch of park for so much as a single day if the Olympics were held there. As the document itself admits, the Windsor site which would be used for the Games “is not currently open to the public.”

Furthermore, the number of local residents around the Windsor site, though not nil, is vastly lower than the number of people living around Greenwich Park, and the traffic problems the event would cause in Windsor are far lower than in Greenwich.

Equally dishonestly, Windsor and Greenwich are given the same score for “environmental constraints.” But they would not have to chop bits off any trees to put in a cross-country course at Windsor, or level any ground to build a showjumping arena.

There is, admittedly, one criterion I haven’t mentioned on which Greenwich scores higher than Windsor - that of “close proximity to the Olympic Park.” The sole, slender thread justifying the despoilation of Greenwich is the mantra of a “compact Games” with riders able to live in the Olympic village and be “competitors, not commuters.” But this is simply not a good enough reason to ignore the advantages of Windsor.

Most riders will, in any case, not live in the Olympic village - they will stay with their horses; and since Greenwich Park is too small to stable them all, many are likely to be widely dispersed across south London. Even the Olympic village is a 25-minute commute away from Greenwich Park. The planning application predicts there will be 35,000 competitor vehicle movements to the Park during Games time - also suggesting that there will be a certain amount of commuting going on.

If the “compact Games” slogan were taken to its logical extreme, we would have the rowers on the Thames at Woolwich - never mind if they drowned in the tides or got run over by the ferry. The rowers are, in fact, going to - well, quite near Windsor, as it happens. They won’t be wedged into the Olympic village - they’ll be in spacious and almost-new student accommodation blocks at Royal Holloway College, in Egham. If the equestrianism was at Windsor, the riders could be there, too

The fact is that the riders could stay much closer to their competition venue in Windsor than in Greenwich. Royal Holloway College is five minutes’ drive from Windsor Great Park - and, contrary to another dishonest claim in the planning application, there’s plenty of room.

The only other argument produced for choosing the massively inferior site at Greenwich is the need to host the showjumping element of the modern pentathlon in London. This is true, but a red herring. The riding part of the modern pentathlon does need to be in London to be near the other four sports which make up the event. But a pentathlon riding arena is far simpler and cheaper than an equestrian one, reflecting the fact that the entire horse part of the pentathlon takes just three hours over the whole Games (90 minutes each for men and women.)

This year’s modern pentathlon World Championships - a “class A” event equivalent to the Olympics - are being held in the athletics stadium at Crystal Palace at a total cost to the taxpayer (for all five events, not just the riding) of £660,000. They could put the horse bits of the pentathlon there, or in The Valley - or indeed in a big enough back garden.

In short, Locog is asking for planning permission for a venue which is not just destructive, but which even they concede is inferior to the alternatives.

Andrew Gilligan: Railways’ Snow Failures Show Need for the Riverbus

Yesterday, Boris Johnson and I launched a new pamphlet for the Policy Exchange think-tank, At A Rate of Knots, advocating a dramatic expansion of the Thames Clipper commuter riverboat service. I confess that, given the weather forecast, we had high hopes last night of a repeat of February’s total snow shutdown - when Thames Clippers was more or less the only public transport in London that kept going, and certainly the only link between Greenwich and the rest of the world. What more demonstration of the river’s usefulness could you ask?

Looking at the fairly light snowfall in inner London yesterday, I thought we were destined to be disappointed; and certainly the main roads were clear, with buses, DLR and Tube running well. I reckoned without the unique and seismic hopelessness of Southeastern Trains.

This ridiculous company decided on Tuesday night to axe two-thirds of its daytime service and its entire evening service, hours before so much as a flake of snow even fell. The daytime frequency was cut to half-hourly and the last train from London to Greenwich was at 7.47pm. It is doing exactly the same today, even though there has at the time of writing been no snow for eighteen hours and none is forecast until a very light shower at 3pm.

Southeastern (in its earlier guise as Connex) is of course the company that cancelled trains because the sun was shining, memorably described by Connex announcers as “adverse weather conditions” (it got in the drivers’ eyes, or warped the rails, or something.) But this performance over the snowfall, or in south-east London the snow-dust, is far worse. As far as I can tell from their websites, every single other London commuter operator - including those in areas of the capital with much heavier snowfall, such as South West Trains - is trying to operate a proper service today, though there will no doubt be cancellations. Southeastern isn’t even trying, even though there’s not actually that much snow in its part of London.

Since Southeastern can no longer be seen as a serious transport operator for several months of the year, it has made my case about the river for me. I confess that I didn’t go to the launch last night by Thames Clipper - I used my lovely new Boardman mountain bike - but I should have done. (The bike’s thick tyres and the full suspension are more suitable for this weather than my normal hybrid - but it doesn’t, unfortunately, have mudguards, meaning that I arrived at the high-powered event with a brown stain down the back of my trousers.)

The riverbus would have whisked me from the launch at the Shell Centre, Waterloo, to Greenwich in about 35 minutes - about the same time as the train, now you nearly always have to change at London Bridge (another Southeastern triumph.) They run every 20 minutes during the day, and every 30 minutes in the evenings, with the last one from Waterloo Pier at 12.15am - half an hour later than Southeastern, even on a normal day. That last boat, and the entire service, ran normally yesterday and is expecting to run normally today.

If Southeastern stops bothering with us, it is time to stop bothering with them. If you travel every day between Greenwich and central London, the riverbus price is almost exactly the same as travelling by train. And it is about a million times nicer, with a guaranteed seat, even in the rush-hour, guaranteed no jams or points failures, an on-board coffee bar and a view of the world’s greatest city unfolding before your eyes.

Our pamphlet proposes that the service be jacked up to operate every ten minutes, and that there be a second, westerly route between central London and Putney - making the riverbus the equivalent, in passengers carried, of about half a new Underground line, in a tenth of the time and for about a thousandth of the cost.

Look at our pamphlet and try the riverbus - here’s the timetable. You have nothing to lose but your trains.

Andrew Gilligan: Rail Fares To Fall Tomorrow - Shock News

SO there I was, all set to write an angry piece about Boris Johnson’s “massive fare rises.” (The fare changes happen tomorrow, by the way). But then I thought: you know, I’d better check the new fares, hadn’t I?

And guess what? If I use my new Oyster card, the ticket I most often buy (an off-peak single from Greenwich to London) hasn’t gone up at all. It has in fact fallen - by nearly 30 per cent, from £2.40 to £1.70. (If I travel in the peak, it will be £2.10 - still a reduction of 12.5 per cent.)

Maze Hill, Westcombe Park and Blackheath single fares fall even further, by up to 35%.

The ticket I occasionally buy (an off-peak return from Greenwich to London) hasn’t gone up either. It too has fallen, by 3 per cent, from £3.50 to £3.40. Peak returns have fallen by 2 per cent, from £4.30 to £4.20.

Maze Hill, Westcombe Park and Blackheath return fares fall by 2.5 per cent.

The ticket I always used to buy before I got a bike (a one-day Travelcard) hasn’t gone up. It is still £5.60. The tickets I would buy if I commuted to work by train - period Travelcards - haven’t gone up. They are the same price, too. All this applies almost universally across the zones, by the way.

In other words, virtually every National Rail journey in Greater London will in fact be cheaper, in real terms, this year than it was last year.

It really does serve me right for believing this recent attempt by a declared political partisan to spin the change as “London’s great train robbery” in which “voiceless commuters get screwed again.”

Of course, if you look hard enough, like he does, you can find someone who’s going to pay more. But you do have to look pretty hard (in this case, someone who decides to carry on buying off-peak returns on a paper ticket will indeed pay more).

Or you have to be deliberately misleading. Look, for instance, at that sly reference to evening peak single fares being higher than off-peak for the first time; no mention of the fact that even the evening peak fares will still be lower than they are now.

Look, to take another example, at the claim that “South London families” will “lose out in [the] Oyster upgrade.” Well, it’s true that a concession on the Tubes allowing under-10s to travel for free with an adult is not going to be extended to the National Rail network south of the river. But since we never had such a concession in the first place, it is not something that we have “lost in the Oyster upgrade,” is it?

You have, I suppose, to admire the hours which must have been spent combing through the detail in order to find examples this obscure. But the desired political effect is likely to be rather short-term. Because from tomorrow, real train passengers will start paying real fares. And when almost all of them find that, contrary to the propaganda, their prices have not gone up, it’s going to hurt the credibility of the wolf-cryers.

The benefits of Oyster are not just limited to lower fares, either. Never again will I have to allow five minutes to buy a ticket. Never again will I have time-consuming confrontations with penalty-fare Nazis at the other end.

There certainly are losers from tomorrow’s fare changes - on the buses, where the single fare rises by 20 per cent. A headline about Greenwich’s “great bus robbery” would have been honest - and might also have provided a genuine attack line about Boris’s cynicism in holding down the fares of rail commuters while hammering bus passengers, who tend to be rather poorer and less Tory-voting.

But for rail users in general and Greenwich rail users in particular, this is a boon. Just remember your little piece of blue plastic.

Rail fares (Oyster) to London from…

Town Centre Pedestrianisation: Modest Benefits, Big Drawbacks

The council’s plan to pedestrianise part of Greenwich Town Centre, being consulted on now, is one of those things which looks, at first glance, worth having. But any close examination of the proposals shows them to be damaging, if not indeed unworkable.

No-one, of course, can be happy with the present situation in the town centre - and the new proposal is not without merits. But on balance, what’s proposed is appreciably worse than now.

The suggested changes will only remove traffic from a relatively small part of the centre. But they will impose extra traffic on the rest of the centre - and across a far wider area. Most options proposed will also devastate Greenwich’s bus service, hardly conducive to a car-free future. The only one which doesn’t do this will, as the council admits, lead to extra congestion.

The main beneficiaries, as the council explicitly states in its Greenwich Time advert, will be tourists (”the millions who will visit Greenwich in 2012, and in the years to come”) and the businesses that serve them. The main victims will be local residents and non-tourist businesses.

The consultation

The consultation is in the very finest traditions of Greenwich Council - a loaded questionnaire; a short deadline for replies (15 January); a public exhibition lasting all of three days, tucked away in a room down a back corridor of a building accessed via a path leading off a side street; and no data to back up their claims. They say some of the pedestrianisation options would “reduce overall congestion and pollution,” but the people at the exhibition admit that no modelling has in fact been done on how the proposals will affect traffic flows. If you do want to go, today is the last day of the exhibition and you have until 8pm. Or you can respond online.

The proposals

The easiest way to understand what’s proposed is to look at the maps in the consultation booklet, downloadable here. But here’s my summary of it.

The plans would pedestrianise the College Approach and King William Walk parts of the one-way system. Traffic travelling east from Creek Road to Romney Road would go the other way round the town centre - that is, turning right into Greenwich Church Street then left into Nelson Road, which would become two-way.

There are two options for what happens to traffic going west after it leaves Nelson Road. In option 1, it would turn right into Greenwich Church Street, which would also become two-way. This option would almost certainly lead to enormous traffic congestion at the junction by St Alfege Church and is thus, as one of the officers admitted to me at the exhibition, probably “unworkable.”

Option 2, which the council appears to prefer, is turning the whole of west Greenwich into a giant gyratory system. Greenwich High Road (between the town centre and the North Pole pub) would become one-way, westbound-only. The whole of Norman Road would become one-way, northbound-only. Creek Road (between the top of Norman Road and the town centre) would become one-way, eastbound-only.

Under this option, westbound traffic from Romney Road/ Nelson Road to Creek Road would use Greenwich High Road as far as the North Pole, then turn right into Norman Road, then left into Creek Road.

No traffic would be able to approach Greenwich on Greenwich High Road. Everyone coming from Greenwich South Street, or the lower reaches of Greenwich High Road, would have to go all the way round via Norman Road and Creek Road.

All this, it seems to me, would have the following - positive and negative - consequences.

Advantage: a traffic-free King William Walk and College Approach.

This would make it easier for people to get from the market to the naval college and Cutty Sark. King William Walk and College Approach are the least well used parts of the town centre by pedestrians at the moment, because there are few shops along them. However,

council officials talk lyrically of creating new promenading areas along these streets, with their buildings (currently mostly residential) turned into new shops and restaurants.

Advantage: some widening of pavements elsewhere.

Notably along Greenwich High Road between the station and town centre.

Disadvantage: traffic would increase substantially in the parts of the town centre that most pedestrians actually use.

Neither of the town centre’s main shopping streets (Greenwich Church Street and Nelson Road) would be pedestrianised. Traffic on Nelson Road would almost double, since it now becomes two-way (it wouldn’t quite double, since traffic from, say, Creek Road to Greenwich High Road would no longer need to go round the one-way system.)

Traffic on Greenwich Church Street would double under Option 1 and increase somewhat under Option 2 (because of journeys into the residential streets of West Greenwich, see below.)

There would probably also be serious congestion on Greenwich Church Street - right in the heart of the town centre - as two lanes of eastbound traffic narrow down into one to pass along Nelson Road.

Disadvantage: pedestrianisation is no panacea.

Pedestrianised streets can be bleak, particularly at night. Pedestrianisation would probably lead to a rise in Greenwich’s already growing problem of drunken anti-social behaviour.

Disadvantage: bus services would be devastated.

Assuming, as we probably should, that option 1 is a nonstarter, under option 2 more than100,000 bus passengers a day on all seven routes passing through Greenwich would suffer disruption. Many would suffer massive disruption.

- The 199 (coming from Catford and Lewisham) would simply no longer be able to serve Greenwich town centre at all - the closest it could get would be the railway station. It would have to turn right from South Street into Greenwich High Road, then into Norman Road and then pick up its old route at Creek Road, skipping the centre. Alternatively, it would have to make a double loop of Greenwich, adding perhaps 20 minutes to the journey time.

- The pedestrianisation would swallow up the current terminus for the 129 and 286. The people at the exhibition had no idea where these buses would turn round under the new scheme. They too might not be able to serve central Greenwich at all.

- The 180 from Lewisham and 386 from Blackheath would be able to reach the town centre, but would have to make a huge detour via the station, Norman Road and Creek Road, adding at least another ten minutes to their journeys (probably far longer in the peak) and at least doubling the journey time from Lewisham to central Greenwich. If the 199 did not do a double loop, the frequency of service from Lewisham to central Greenwich would also be halved.

- The eastbound 177 would have to make a similar lengthy detour and would no longer be able to serve the railway station.

- The westbound 188 would also have to make a lengthy detour via Greenwich High Road and Norman Road.

- There is currently a bus lane eastbound along Greenwich High Road which significantly speeds buses. However, there will be no bus lane along Norman Road, the proposed eastbound diversionary route, meaning even slower journeys for bus passengers.

- There would be enormous confusion generally among passengers. Many passengers (particularly those travelling to Creek Road and Greenwich High Road) would be faced with longer walks to or from their nearest bus stops.

One possibility to address most of these problems is the council’s option 2b, which puts an eastbound bus contraflow lane along Greenwich High Road (between the North Pole and the town centre) and a westbound contraflow lane along Creek Road (between the town centre and Norman Road.)

However, this would, the council admits, result in “additional traffic congestion” because buses turning right at St Alfege Church and stopping on Nelson Road to pick up passengers would significantly slow down the traffic flow through the town centre, causing major jams. It would also preclude the pavement improvements.

Disadvantage: traffic and pollution would be spread over a wider area.

Even if the total number of vehicles does not change, most drivers coming from the east and south will have to use more roads and drive significantly further to pass through the area. This means more pollution for everyone, and more traffic for many.

On Greenwich High Road, for instance, there may no longer be any eastbound traffic - but that will be more than made up for by a significant increase in the amount of westbound traffic. All the westbound traffic which currently uses Creek Road, as well as High Road’s current westbound traffic, will have to pass along here. Norman Road will also see much more traffic. Residents of Roan Street, Randall Place, Straightsmouth and the Tarves Way/ Haddo Street estates will effectively find themselves in the middle of a giant roundabout.

There will also be traffic jams in new places: for example, at either end of Norman Road.

Disadvantage: many local journeys will become very long and convoluted.

It will no longer be possible to approach Royal Hill or Stockwell Street/ Crooms Hill from the west - or leave them if you are going east. To reach these streets from central London, or leave them towards east Greenwich, you will have to go round via Norman Road, Creek Road and the town centre (getting caught in all the traffic congestion on the way.) It will become much more difficult to drive to Somerfield or the cinema. There is an option 2a allowing two-way movement on the High Road (as far as Stockwell Street) which would mitigate this.

Disadvantage: more rat-running.

Rather than go all the way round via Greenwich High Road and Norman Road, many rush-hour drivers driving up through Greenwich Park would instead cut through the back streets of west Greenwich, such as Circus Street and Gloucester Circus. The proposals contain nothing to prevent this. The convoluted journeys for local residents will also lead to significantly more rat-running by locals.

Disadvantage: more traffic through the Park and over the Heath.

It is likely that rather than brave the new gyratory, some traffic will divert to the A2 - further increasing congestion on this route - or come through the park, perhaps rat-running through residential streets as before.

Conclusion

Unsatisfactory as it is, the status quo remains the least worst option. The latest proposal seems yet another of the council’s ill-thought-out Olympic-related schemes. Its benefits are modest and its drawbacks far greater.

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