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Transport woes - a tale of two boroughs (Thursday 10/01/08)
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Christmas really brought home to me just what a raw deal H&F and West London as a whole is getting from TfL. That’s when I received a Christmas card from Hackney Council boasting about all their transport improvements.
By 2010 Hackney will be served by new stations on the East London line at Dalston, Haggerston, Hoxton and Shoreditch High Street. That’s on top of major improvements to the North London Line, including bigger trains and more frequent services.
Contrast this with the situation in the west of London:
- In February, the Shepherds Bush Central Line tube station will shut for 8 months to replace old escalators.
- Both the Shepherds Bush and Imperial Wharf overground stations appear on the A-Z map but are still not open to the public. At Shepherds Bush, safety experts have ruled that the newly-built platform is 18 inches too narrow to use and the construction of Imperial Wharf is in jeopardy because of Network Rail’s spiralling cost estimates.
- The western extension of the C-charge zone has caused a flood of drivers to park in our roads to avoid the £8 toll. In the four parking zones near the edge of the zone in H&F, the number of extra cars has increased by 33%.
- West London Line services to Gatwick Airport will all be terminated at Clapham Junction from December this year. Passengers to the airport will have to get out at platform 17, which is very narrow and has a large gap between the platform and the trains, and carry their luggage up a very narrow staircase and over the footbridge, to catch a train coming from Victoria.
- There is no improvement to the north/south road routes in the borough, which are becoming virtually impassable.
- Frustrated residents are reeling from the shock admission by TfL that improvement work on the District Line will not be completed until 2017, despite the fact that H&F has the highest per population tube usage rates in London.
- And meanwhile, £34 million has been wasted on the cancellation of the ludicrous Uxbridge Road tram project.
We want to create a borough of opportunity. But to achieve this we require a functioning, 21st-century transport system. If we are going to succeed in our plans to bring in investors to regenerate parts of the borough, they need to be confident that our transport system is up to scratch. We want to work with neighbouring boroughs and partners like TfL and Network Rail to improve the transport situation locally.
While TfL put the focus on the East, there is a feeling that we are languishing at the bottom of TfL’s list of priorities. This is why we are inviting them, among others, to a major transport summit at town hall to get some urgent answers. We need to some straight answers and realistic solutions to get things moving again as soon as possible.
If you have questions or suggestions you would like me to raise at the summit, I would be very interested to hear from you. Email me your views.
Cllr Stephen Greenhalgh
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