French-style cure for commuter nightmare

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 21

French-style cure for commuter nightmare

London’s ailing transport system, its swollen arteries clogged with more commuters than ever, is ready for emergency surgery. With constant traffic jams, travellers packed like sardines and no end in sight to London’s growth, the Government has announced a bypass operation worth £3.5 billion ($10.02 billion) to stop the capital grinding to a halt. It plans to build giant tunnels carrying commuter trains below and across the city by the mid-19905, linking up with the existing underground — “The Tube” — and joining many suburbs direct to the centre for the first time. But experts and commuter lobbies are asking whether the idea — borrowed from Paris’s fast, slick RER suburban express railway— will solve the problem fast enough. “Building new lines is going to take seven or eight years, and in the meantime the overcrowding will not only get worse, but lead to greater anger and frustration among passen-

From

MARK TREVELYAN,

of Reuters, in London.

gers,” says John Francis, a spokesman for the Campaign to Improve London’s Transport. "They’re paying more for a poorer service,” he says, noting recent 12 per cent fare rises on “The Tube” and mounting frustration which led to several tube “hijacks” last year in which passengers refused to abandon diverted trains.

The nub of the problem is overcrowding. London’s revival as a leading financial centre in the early 1980 s caught planners by surprise, spawning thousands of new jobs and reversing decades of slow decline.

Years of relative under-investment in transport came back to haunt the capital as it swelled to a city of seven million, with 700,000 workers travelling in every day from outside. The underground, 125 years old in some parts, has found itself facing a 35 per cent rise

in rush hour demand and 80 per cent growth off-peak. State-owned British Rail also acknowledges overcrowding on long stretches of its network around London. The issue hit the headlines again last December when three trains, two of them packed with commuters, collided in south London at Britain’s busiest rail junction, killing 35 people. “An expanding London, propelled by seven fattish years of prosperity, is simply, painfully and expensively grinding to a halt,” the “Guardian” newspaper wrote in a recent editorial. “People are fed up with being compressed ever more densely into commuting cattle trucks.” The Government plans, just announced, aim to ease the pressure by carrying commuter trains below ground across the centre of

London instead of stopping on the edge. The new lines will take more passengers straight to their destinations rather than spewing them on to an already overloaded tube. But the plans are based on forecasts of a 20 per cent rise in peak rail demand by the turn of the century, which experts say could err on the side of optimism. “The trend is so strong at the moment that they should have gone for higher employment forecasts. I think they’ll find that they will have to build more later on,” says a transport consultant, Dr Martin Mogridge. While the new lines are being built, he says, “it’s, unfortunately, going to get worse because we’ve taken a long time to realise just how serious the problem is.” According to Mogridge, the only way to tackle road congestion is to make “The Tube” and railways fast and efficient enough for people to want to use them in preference to cars.