I don’t entirely see how else you’d go about measuring modal transport share – I know everything’s a Livingstone plot with you, but this is the system also used by ONS. It is accepted by the National Audit Office, and this supposed figure fiddling has evidently pulled the wool over the eyes of transport practitioners, specialists and academics worldwide. No, the overall modal shift isn’t huge (I never said it was), but it doesn’t have to be in order to be unique: no comparable city has managed any modal shift away from the car at all.

And you say that buses ‘aren’t the answer’. If they aren’t, what is? How is a boat going to get me from Westcombe Park to, say, Lewisham? From Peckham to Greenwich? From Holborn to London Bridge? I don’t think anyone is about to pay for an ‘attractive’ light rail scheme or an underground for all the journeys that can only be made by bus. To my mind, therefore, improving buses is the most effective use of any spare cash that happens to be floating around. But maybe I’m wrong. You’ve told us that buses aren’t the answer. What is?

So lets suggest for one moment that the cash is sitting there in TfL’s coffers. Are boats the best place for the money to go? The key route they will serve is Central London – Docklands – Greenwich – Woolwich. This is an axis served by both the Jubilee Line and the DLR, both of which have significant multi-million capacity increases coming on stream in the next year or so. Yes, Southeastern has it’s moments of utter crapness and there isn’t a huge amount of scope for capacity increases there – but both Woolwich and Docklands will have the extra capacity provided by Crossrail in (in transport investment terms) the medium term. I’m afraid that this simply isn’t an area that is going to be top of anyone’s priority list for further large scale investment – it’s basically quite well served. I’m not sure if I have political barricades, but I do have political priorities – and I’m afraid that means prioritising genuinely public transport deprived areas like Thamesmead or Camberwell before, say, Greenwich.

“No one is suggesting the river will rival the bus network as the major mover of people.” – indeed, no one sensible is. Sadly, that seems to be Gilligan’s position. According to him, buses aren’t the answer, but boats somehow are. Hmmm.

One comment in your post has me confused: “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.”

This comment left me feeling a little annoyed with myself that I had just bought a train season ticket when I could have got a river one (I agree, the service is much better). I travel every weekday from Maze Hill to Charing Cross and would dearly love to stop bothering with Southeastern.

My recently renewed season ticket cost £760 (it was only about £400 3-4 years ago, but that’s another story). A season ticket on Thames Clippers http://www.thamesclippers.com/images/pdf/season-ticket-form-dec09.pdf costs £1,120, or almost 50% more. The differential for a rail ticket from Greenwich is presumably bigger.

So I made the right choice. What did you have in mind when you made your ‘almost exactly the same’ comment? I’d love to find out how I can get the river in every day without spending any more.

In their travel censuses, they count “journey stages” rather than journeys. Each change to a new mode counts as a new stage. If I travelled from Greenwich to Oxford Circus by car, it would count as a single journey stage. If I modally shifted to public transport, it would involve a walk to the station, followed by a rail and tube journey, and would thus count as three journey stages. The effect of this is therefore to exaggerate the effects of my modal shift threefold. Just one of the many ways in which a lot of Ken’s claimed achievements didn’t quite stack up when held to the light!

I think it was in 2004 that I photographed the eastbound traffic stream on Creek Road, in Greenwich, at about 5:00 pm. The result made the M25 look like a speedway. I than walked down to the Thames and took an upstream view of a virtually unused river.

Increasing road capacity on south east London roads would not just be a matter of very considerable cost but of the compulsory purchase of wide swathes of housing. A few years ago, TfL and Greenwich Council devised a truly wondrous scheme to improve local bus services, a waterside rapid transit system made up of new bus lanes. Unfortunately nobody seemed to notice that Trafalgar Road is 3 lane and that it is bordered by the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Park, to the south, and the Royal Naval College on the north. On the other side of Greenwich, towards Deptford, it only gets worse.

I’m sure that there will be many who will ask why so much money should be spent to improve the lot of the good citizens of Greenwich but there are only two significant thoroughfares Central London bound that serve communities way out to the east of the Borough. Furthermore, because riverside land provides an attractive opportunity to developers, housing development is dense and getting rapidly more dense.

The problem is that a wide east – west river provides a partial but significant barrier to the construction of interlinked alternatives. Well, no actually! The river provides that alternative conduit and, like most other things, the price of use depends on the scale of use. The more punters, the less the unit cost.

There is another economic argument, too: roads require expensive regular maintenance and are subject, not just to this maintenance, but to maintenance by all of the providers of services that are buried under the road. The cost is not just of buses and train rolling stock, nor even the addition of the initial construction. These costs appear elsewhere so they don’t get factored in either the economic cost nor the carbon emissions. The Thames, on the other hand doesn’t require resurfacing and doesn’t get regularly dug up.

Crossrail demonstrates, far better than any argument that I can provide, the huge cost of providing a new transit artery through the densely crowded Capital. River transport costs are not so great as they, at first, appear.

It’s in this context that Boris Johnson’s plans to cut bus routes and frequencies is highly dangerous for Londoners and their economy. How exactly will millions like me who rely on bus services, get to work if we cannot get on a bus due to cuts ? It’s difficult enough as it is right now. I’m afraid these plans and those that support them, suffer from a total misunderstanding of what makes London tick and what London needs.

I feel defrauded. At least Ken Livingston initiated a whole raft of improvements that will be delivered like Oyster, ELL, Crossrail, supported Thameslink, London Overground, DLR extensions and more buses. What exactly has Boris delivered for that well-meaning vote I cast for him back in 2008 ? Cut TfL’s funding from the Western CC and polluting vehicles and delivered a new Routemaster no one needs. It’s made decsion making at the next election easy.