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 Khan sparks outrage by increasing London fares,charging kids |
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 May 16 2020, 04:31 PM
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#21
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 Radical Pink Troll
Joined: 11 March 2006
Posts: 26,599 User: 177 
  
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It’s not like you’re actually rushing to get anywhere at peak times right now though, is it?
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May 16 2020, 04:34 PM
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#22
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BuzzJack Legend
Joined: 7 March 2006
Posts: 22,001 User: 53
 
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QUOTE(T Boy @ May 16 2020, 05:31 PM)  It’s not like you’re actually rushing to get anywhere at peak times right now though, is it? Well not really, no. 
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May 16 2020, 04:40 PM
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#23
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Say that hiss with your chest, and...
Joined: 24 May 2016
Posts: 18,442 User: 23,308
   
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QUOTE(J00psyMethyd @ May 15 2020, 06:20 PM) ...did you miss the pandemic on? This is specifically to discourage people like you who are more at risk from travelling when public transport is busiest. Indeed! |
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May 16 2020, 04:41 PM
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#24
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Cœur poids plume
Joined: 3 November 2007
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QUOTE(Crazy Chris @ May 16 2020, 04:25 PM) Also the fact that over 60's, like me, and more importantly all disabled with Freedom passes, will have to pay at peak times. I'll just wait until after 9.30. Then this means that the system is working as intended. If people do have to make journeys that could be made at any time of the day (e.g. food shopping), then it's best when the network is quieter rather than travelling during crowded peak times alongside commuters who can't work at home, as this week they have been ordered to work. |
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May 16 2020, 04:41 PM
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#25
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 BuzzJack Legend
Joined: 13 April 2007
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QUOTE(Crazy Chris @ May 16 2020, 05:25 PM) Am not really against that as fares haven't risen whilst Khan's been in office. Introducing the CC to weekends though will be a blow to families going in to London to the parks and attractions once they re-open. Also the fact that over 60's, like me, and more importantly all disabled with Freedom passes, will have to pay at peak times. I'll just wait until after 9.30. BTW hadn't read that the child fare would be 75p. Is that for all under 18's? Not too bad. Imagine the first day though, half the kids won't have any money on their Oyster. Will the drivers turn them off the buses or not? That still means you get more access to free travel than 60-year-olds anywhere else in the country. |
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May 16 2020, 04:43 PM
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#26
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BuzzJack Gold Member
Joined: 25 July 2016
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QUOTE(Harve @ May 15 2020, 05:34 PM) The terms of the bailout are the worst kind of politicking. The Tories disproportionately defunding services that are under the responsibility of non-Tory devolved/local governments, affecting the daily lives of everyone just so they can go 'look at how badly Labour/SNP perform [when stripped of all their resources]!' has been a common theme for all Tory brands we've seen over the last ten years Agreed. The response to Khan has been so predictable — especially in comparison to the government and Johnson over the past few months. I say that as someone who thinks Khan is just a disappointing centrist with little vision. You can't deny the running theme of private corporations being rescued whilst public services (TFL) are indebted with ridiculous strings attached. Clearly a 90% drop in usage — which is great in the context of this pandemic — is the perfect opportunity for some party politics. QUOTE(Crazy Chris @ May 15 2020, 09:10 PM) All Londoners are outraged. He won't be re-elected next May. There is little chance of Shaun Bailey winning in London. It doesn't really matter what people outside of London think of Khan either — they won't be voting. This post has been edited by blacksquare: May 16 2020, 04:47 PM |
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May 16 2020, 04:48 PM
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#27
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BuzzJack Legend
Joined: 7 March 2006
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QUOTE(Suedehead2 @ May 16 2020, 05:41 PM) That still means you get more access to free travel than 60-year-olds anywhere else in the country. Yes I know that. For an initial £20 then £10 a year admin charges up to aged 65 it's not bad really. This post has been edited by Crazy Chris: May 16 2020, 05:18 PM |
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May 19 2020, 03:12 PM
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#28
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Cœur poids plume
Joined: 3 November 2007
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Good explainer by Jonn Elledge on this, and how the problems will only get worse:
QUOTE Last Thursday evening, Transport for London came within hours of running out of money. What would have happened to the tube, the buses, the Overground and everything else TfL is responsible for if it had is unclear: I don’t think it would have meant bailiffs walking off with DLR carriages, but who can say?
Anyway, it didn’t happen: at the last minute the office of the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, agreed a £1.6bn bailout package with national government. In return, it had to accept two government officials on the TfL board, plus the inevitable public statements about how this proved the mayor couldn’t be trusted with money. In truth, it proves nothing of the sort: to hold Khan responsible you’d need to be politically motivated, innumerate or both. And while this may look like a little local difficulty of no interest to those outside the capital, the affair highlights the Tory party’s chronic inability to comprehend the difference between public services and private goods, and sends worrying signals for how the government might approach the question of public sector deficits across the country in months to come. To explain how we got here, you need to dig back into recent history. In 2015, the then chancellor and the then mayor of London agreed a new financial settlement for TfL. No longer would it receive £700m a year from the Treasury to keep its transport services running: instead, excepting a few quid from things like devolved business rates, it would be expected to pay its own way. And lo, it came to pass. Since 2018, most of TfL’s income has come from advertising, congestion charging and, predominantly, fares. Because TfL is also responsible for a certain amount of road maintenance in London, this has led to the frankly ludicrous situation in which tube passengers are subsidising drivers. The result, in the words of the current mayor, was that London would be “the only transport system in western Europe that gets no government grant”. Nonetheless, all this was working fine – ish – until the pandemic hit: at that point, people stopped travelling, fare income collapsed and TfL nearly ran out of money. Which brings us to the current situation. There are several things about this that are messed up. Let’s start with the conditions attached to the bailout. Barring the use of Freedom Passes – which offer free travel for Londoners over 60 – from peak hours services may not be pretty, but you can see the logic, in terms of both spreading demand and minimising the chance of older people catching the coronavirus. (Freedom Pass holders who work have seemingly not been considered.) But promising to raise fares at a moment of economic crisis – when it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who are least able to work from home – is not the action of a government that thinks we’re all in this together. Meanwhile, requiring TfL to switch its “stay at home” messaging for the baffling, government-preferred “stay alert” formulation is just plain weird. Then there’s the way the Tories are turning their own incompetence into an assault on a popular Labour politician. Assorted government outriders have tried to blame this mess on Khan’s fare freeze, which has been estimated to cost TfL around £640m over four years. They have yet to explain how avoiding such a freeze would have plugged the gap caused by the pandemic, which, at £600m every month, is roughly 45 times larger. Perhaps Khan will now spin a fare increase that would have happened anyway as the result of Tory cruelty; but you can already see the contours of the “Labour can’t be trusted with money” argument that still, somehow, resonates, even though the economy collapses every time we let the Tories anywhere near it. The really messed up thing about all this, though, is that the government seems genuinely to have believed that London transport should be self-funding. But millions of people use TfL services every day: they’re as basic to the successful running of the city as the roads or the sewers, and without them London would grind to a halt. It makes little sense to force the public infrastructure that underwrites London’s economy to “balance its books”, as if it were a private company looking to make a profit. It is telling that few major western cities have copied the UK capital’s unusual transport funding model: the closest seem to be Manchester and Toronto, both of which are also in trouble, and neither of which are nearly so dependent on their metros as London. By agreeing that deal in 2015, the men who signed it showed that they don’t understand what public transport is for. The current situation is not sustainable. Last week’s bailout was worth £1.1bn in cash, plus another £505m in loans. But with TfL down £600m a month, this won’t be enough to see it through to the end of the summer. And it’s no good looking elsewhere for inspiration: no other city has been foolish enough to get itself into this sort of a mess. An editorial in the Evening Standard on Friday claimed that Khan “has a bad habit of blaming others when things don’t work out”. It modestly neglects to mention that the editor of that paper, George Osborne, is the very chancellor who imposed this financial settlement on TfL in the first place. The mayor who signed it off, incidentally, was called Boris Johnson. This post has been edited by Harve: May 19 2020, 03:16 PM |
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