2nd february 2009, with a good week weather forecast warning, experiencing continious snowing over night, London (and most parts of the UK) were covered in 20cm of snow, a 20 year record. Was it bad? Well, it looked unusual and beautiful, walking through Victoria Park. Families were playing, everyone was smiling and taking many, many pictures.
8.45 traffic was slow and we discovered, to our surprise, that the buses weren’t running. Which was odd, as visibly, London’s street were clear enough to drive on as many commuters did with their cars, trucks and othercommercial buses(like London-Stansted bus link Terravision). So where were the buses?
Next problem, Mile End station. Central line was only running every 20 minutes, even though being completely underground and district line wasn;t running at all, even though there was no icing on the tracks, just soft snow. 15 minutes later, district line was running every 6 minutes and hey hopp, I got to South Kensington, with only one hour delay, which in the end could have been any old London Transport day (kind of).
Yet because of many people couldn’t get into work(Bloomberg: 20% commuters didn’t make it to work), shops stayed empty and closed and the Science Museu, where I work, closed at 3pm. So getting back from work by picadilly line and northern line, I sat down in a cafe and waited for the busses to start working again. At about 5pm, lines along shoreditch high street like 67, 242, 243 and 48 were working again. A few really amongst all the other London traffic, which were doing fine. When I finally made my way home at about 7pm, this sporadic recoverage of the London Transport system seemingly hadn’t improved. So I had to walk the last part of my way home.
This morning, buses were seemingly all working again, yet, the district line had been suspended in the area of Mile End, despite working the day before. So my way to work was one of many changing trains.
Now as happy as I was over the happiness this snow event induced into the London community, I am also very much apaule, by how ignorant and irresponsible London Transport yet again has been (non)acting.
France and Belgium experienced the same amount of snow, yet no breakdown of transport. I remember in germany, in less dens city areas, where temperatures are lower and snowfall was occasionally much higher, transport was doing it’s job. How could London Transport let us down(again) so much? It’s not the first time we have snow in London. The weather forecast was showing a week in advance about the cold front with very possible snowfall. Were you guys sleeping? How can it be that a service, for which I have to take a more than 5 % increase in costs EVERY year(monthly card costs: 2007:£89, 2008:£94, 2009:£99), which is already the most expensive transport system in the world, keeps on breaking down and keeps on being incapable of improving the situation?
So far the most visible improvement to London Transport, were the installing of a many a digital screens all over the network to show advertising and the allowance to have the undergound and bus system spammed by free newspapers. So the corporations get what they need and London Transport makes a bit more money, maybe. At the same time fuck the additional amount of paper waste this all creates and the additional amount of energy all the flatscreens and oversized plasma screens need in order to run all day long. I am not even starting to mention the distraction those new animated movie trailers cause, when they draw the attention of commuters and by that slowing down the flow of the system that has to carry millions of people each day. No research has been done on that, but one can imagine that they take away the alleged improvement in flowtime the system received when introducing the digital oyster card, whose card readers already need as much maintenance as the old paper card system.
The weather generally seems to be a problem. I remember last year when it was raining very heavy, trains were delayed and you can’t tell me London doesn’t know about rain. The situation in in both tube and bus in summer is awful, as there is no air-conditioning even in the new bus models and some have to run the heating even in summer(???, someone explain that to me, please. Also the last generation of new mercedes busses had a clever designer make the top windows sealed close without any chance for fresh or colder air circulation. As long as kids can’t throw stuff out of the window(which they seemingly do all the time, even then I would consider this a trash and behaviour issue, not a climate one, who needs to care about pensioners fainting in busses and tubes by the wagon load(and its not just pensioners!).
So, London Transport, what have you done for us lately? What have you done to us in the last decade that justifies increasing costs. When are improvements gonna be happening?
What have you done with the at least 120 million pounds extra money we gave you in the last two years only? Plastering the tube with posters that you are improving something isn’t enough anymore. We are not buying it anymore, yet we will have to pay(more).
Honestly, what the filibuster?
