For some reason this last week the Northern Line has been horrific. I had thought people were still on holiday but apparently everyone who isn’t appears to be jostling for the same space on the same line. Dealing with it tarnishes my soul a little bit every day. It appears to be designed to frustrate — honestly, who put’s a ten minute gap in service at about 8pm going South? What half-wit thought up that little gem?

But I don’t like to rant. Well, I do; but no one likes to read one. Really I wanted to discuss transport in the capital more broadly. I’ve heard before that the average speed of movement through central London hasn’t increased in 400 years and I wanted to try to understand why.

Now obviously we are hampered by our own history in a way that comparable cities aren’t. In Zone 1 in particular our streets are the same as they were since time immemorial, Robert Hooke’s grand plan of grid-like regularity scuppered by the petty venality of London’s property owners — a venality still much in evidence to hundreds of tenants across the capital to this day. Our Tube, the oldest in the world, runs on the same lines as it’s Victorian antecedents. The Central line contorts and writhes across the City, apocryphally to avoid the Vaults of the Bank of England, but more realistically to take advantage of a leasing loophole and save a bit of money.

But such a history should not be dismissed. London’s bus network has been arguably the best in the world for at least the last five years, even if the situation is bleaker across the country (I was delighted to see the recent anti-competition investigations launched into Stagecoach, First, et al.). The night-buses are the great equalisers of the city. We’ve all been part of that happy band of brothers sailing gently home on a busy bus, bailed out after the ridiculously early closure of the Tube, happily surprised by it’s deceptive speed. The man on the Clapham Omnibus — well, these days, he’s probably a trendy media type — has a firmly enshrined place in legal history as a reasonably educated and intelligent man.

Inevitably any discussion of London’s current transport situation leads us to the current policies of our Mayor, Boris Johnson, and his unelected and inexplicably unaccountable advisers; although the policies of the Government of the day (currently Labour) are equally important due to the nature of the beast. Commuter-dom is not a purely local issue and the transport necessities of London are different to the situation in any other town in the country.

This country has a truly terrible recent history with big infrastructure projects. Witness the still-ongoing debate about the Trident renewal plan, or the outrageous equivocation from our current government over our new aircraft carriers — although I will save my criticisms of the MoD and it’s more-than-questionable cosiness with the “private” defence industry for another post though. Look at the delays and cost overruns on the Channel Tunnel, the never-ending sequence of improvement works on the M25 — even the diabolical mismanagement of the current gritting crisis indicates a fantastical managerial ineptitude from all levels of our government. However the national government has only a limited affect upon London’s specific problems.

Yes, yes; commuting is a large and integral part of our problems. All “gateways” into London should be upgraded and improved: what, for example, is happening with the old Eurostar station at Waterloo? Why are we wasting these valuable platforms? And please can someone explain to me what on earth is the point of the now-labyrinthine route around KX underground station? Coming in from the South, going past Victoria or Waterloo or London Bridge, you can see how massively over-crowded each of these becomes during rush-hour. Fortunately we have the CrossRail, hailed as a saviour to a commuting problems. This is probably true for Essex, Surrey and Berkshire although I would ask if there weren’t other areas which would benefit more.

But what about within the M25, for local commuters? Well first of all the current funding gap — a well chosen euphemism for “massive financial mismangement” if ever I’ve heard one — needs to be addressed. The scrappage of the Western Extension of the congestion zone has drained finances with no discernible reward. In fact I’ve noticed (in an extremely unscientific survey conducted over the course of about ten taxi and car rides) that the traffic situation is worse. And what was the reason? Basically a good old fashioned bit of Tory Tax-cutting.

And yet the services we receive from TfL are not going to be fixed just because we can afford to run them — although running with the same level of “service” as we currently suffer on budget would be nice. The PPP initiatives have demonstrably not worked: costly, ineffective, and with huge delays. Therefore I would bring maintenance and upgrade work entirely “within house” and remove the profit-seeking middlemen from the picture. Please don’t misinterpret me: I’m all for profit-making free enterprise, yet I would suspect even Milton Friedman would be on my side in this debate (see, for example, Capitalism and Freedom). Simultaneously I would hope that they break Bob Crowe’s tyrannical hold over the transport system: the unions have to realise that their pension demands, for example, are overly-optimistic and that unionisation in the civil service (and their tendrils, offshoots and related bodies) is, to put it mildly, not needed and not supportable.

A fully working Tube service would be an immediate improvement on our current situation but the problem as ever with infrastructure projects in this country is our chronic short-term attitude. We need something which would make the Tube work for at least the next twenty years. We don’t even have air-conditioning, for crying out loud. I’m no engineer (I am a Mathematician) and I’ve no immediate ideas beyond the approaches they’ve already made; and I can appreciate the difficulties in making wholesale changes. But as ever I am an optimist, and I believe that someone will come up with a great solution to all our problems (and I kinda hope it’s me).

I would also look to expand the current Tram network in South London — unfortunately the geography of the region prevents an expansion to the tube network. Anyone who has been on it, or any of the great Tram services across the country or the continent (I’m thinking of Amsterdam in particular here), can testify to their regularity, speed and the fact that they can quite happily go down a High Street.

All of these measures could go a long way. But perhaps we need to be truly radical to solve our problems — a change beyond something we could even begin to imagine. Maybe everyone in the city will out of choice decide to give up their unnecessary car! But something must be done to bring the rest of our creaking transport system inline with the night-buses.