Transport for London will "declare itself bankrupt" by end of today (14 May 2020) without emergency finance

[Boo_]

London buses aren't too cheap, especially for the low paid workers who rely on them. Manchester buses are too expensive for a worse overall service.

I disagree what makes London a special Case? Then other citys or towns. Cheap fares also mean more local passengers who could walk.

Also, as TFL also have the role to get people to cycle and walk to work it also their duty to try cut bus use by pricing people off the buses and trying to get them to walk if they can. just like they are with the car trying to get them off the road. So less passengers less buses lower co2 emissions.

Lower costs for TFL. also, Bus fares in my view should be higher than they can put their money into season tickets for low paid workers. So, the ones who can pay more for buses should.

But London buses have more passengers than Manchester so How come London can't pay for their buses. and running costs are higher so should cost more in London.

Without the bailout money given they would of been forced to let the bus companies take the fares.

 

[telstarbox]

Which routes have too many passengers who could be walking then?

 

[Ianno87]

Which routes have too many passengers who could be walking then?

I don't get why we're suggesting disincentivising short hop jouneys, which are highly incentivised by the £1.50 single.

This is one of the disadvantages of the Oyster flat fare, and where two or three bands of fare might drive more revenue out of longer journeys.

Perhaps the Singapore / Hong Kong model of the fare being based on how much of the bus's journey is left to travel?

 

[Boo_]

I don't get why we're suggesting disincentivising short hop jouneys, which are highly incentivised by the £1.50 single.

This is one of the disadvantages of the Oyster flat fare, and where two or three bands of fare might drive more revenue out of longer journeys.

Perhaps the Singapore / Hong Kong model of the fare being based on how much of the bus's journey is left to travel?

Someone who uses bus to travel few stops to then get tube or train well do they need that bus if they can walk?
or like Oxford Street how many buses are needed turn them beforehand and then make the limited buses full that do travel along.

Birmingham got it right. £1.50 upto mile or £2.40 that the real cost.

 

[Daniel740]

Someone who uses bus to travel few stops to then get tube or train well do they need that bus if they can walk?
or like Oxford Street how many buses are needed turn them beforehand and then make the limited buses full that do travel along.

Birmingham got it right. £1.50 upto mile or £2.40 that the real cost.

And how would you charge those fares using the Oyster card system?

 

[duncanp]

Birmingham got it right. £1.50 upto mile or £2.40 that the real cost.

And in Birmingham it is £4.60 for a day ticket (if travelling before 09:30 Monday - Friday) and £4.00 if travelling at any other time.

 

[Boo_]

And how would you charge those fares using the Oyster card system?

you have standard fare and the short hop fare you have to touch on with driver.

 

[mattdickinson]

And how would you charge those fares using the Oyster card system?

Touching in and out is used in several areas already including GoAhead and Trent Barton.

 

[Boo_]

And in Birmingham it is £4.60 for a day ticket (if travelling before 09:30 Monday - Friday) and £4.00 if travelling at any other time.

most people would need a return so £2.30 (£2) each way is a fair price after that your better letting them have a day ticket.

 

[Daniel740]

you have standard fare and the short hop fare you have to touch on with driver.

Which would massively slow down journey times if the driver had to input fares into a machine

Touching in and out is used in several areas already including GoAhead and Trent Barton.

Whats to stop people immediately touching out as soon as they board? The reason why touching out works on Trent Barton is due to single door buses, it’s pretty hard to short fare when the validators are right beside the driver.

 

[Boo_]

Which would massively slow down journey times if the driver had to input fares into a machine
Whats to stop people immediately touching out as soon as they board? The reason why touching out works on Trent Barton is due to single door buses, it’s pretty hard to short fare when the validators are right beside the driver.

Does not slow people down that much just means they have to touch in with driver like they do with paper tickets. if you touch with other reader you pay full fare. or they just do a touch in and touch out system. They could not do this when Oyster started due to the computer systems.

 

[telstarbox]

Reports that TfL are considering a £3.50 daily charge for vehicles entering Greater London (if registered outside the boundary). That's probably too low to affect "white van man" traffic which makes up a lot of rush hour flows.

Motorists face £3.50 daily charge to drive into Greater London

The radical move is among a series of options suggested to Sadiq Khan as a way of restoring TfL’s long-term income

www.standard.co.uk

 

[Mojo]

Reports that TfL are considering a £3.50 daily charge for vehicles entering Greater London (if registered outside the boundary). That's probably too low to affect "white van man" traffic which makes up a lot of rush hour flows.

Motorists face £3.50 daily charge to drive into Greater London

The radical move is among a series of options suggested to Sadiq Khan as a way of restoring TfL’s long-term income

www.standard.co.uk

Here is the full report that was published today on the TfL website http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-independent-panel-review-december-2020.pdf.

This is the ‘Independent’ report that was commissioned at the same time as the DfT/KPMG report that was commissioned as part of the first bailout.

 

[bramling]

Reports that TfL are considering a £3.50 daily charge for vehicles entering Greater London (if registered outside the boundary). That's probably too low to affect "white van man" traffic which makes up a lot of rush hour flows.

Motorists face £3.50 daily charge to drive into Greater London

The radical move is among a series of options suggested to Sadiq Khan as a way of restoring TfL’s long-term income

www.standard.co.uk

People are going to become extremely sick being stuck in the middle of this constant game of cat and mouse between Khan and the government, and the petty parochialism this is encouraging.

I suspect this is more political posturing. We’ve already had the government dump the brown stuff over Khan and Labour-voting London, now Khan is trying to respond in kind by dumping the brown stuff over the Conservative-voting Home Counties.

 

[Vespa]

Reports that TfL are considering a £3.50 daily charge for vehicles entering Greater London (if registered outside the boundary). That's probably too low to affect "white van man" traffic which makes up a lot of rush hour flows.

Motorists face £3.50 daily charge to drive into Greater London

The radical move is among a series of options suggested to Sadiq Khan as a way of restoring TfL’s long-term income

www.standard.co.uk

Wait til lorries start boycotting London because of the charges, the shelves will be empty in 3 days, less if there's panic buying.

It's just a cash cow for Khan, flogging motorists and commercial vehicles.

 

[joncombe]

What a stupid thing to be suggesting. Does it occur to him that most motorists living in London will also venture outside the capital using roads that, in Khans' eyes they haven't paid to use. So perhaps Surrey/Essex/Hertfordshire/Kent should also charge motorists leaving London because they haven't paid any tax outside London. Sigh. It's just idiotic. Especially so since he was arguing against the extension of the congestion charge when the Government proposed it!

 

[Bald Rick]

Wait til lorries start boycotting London because of the charges, the shelves will be empty in 3 days, less if there's panic buying.

Err, what? Why would they do that?

 

[MotCO]

How would they effect the charge? Surely it would need congestion charge-type cameras on all roads entering the GLC area, basically the M25. That is a lot of cameras which will need a hell of a lot of £3.50s to recoup. Is this man for real?

 

[telstarbox]

Those cameras already exist to enforce the Low Emissions Zone - you'll see green signs for this around the boundary.

 

[Bald Rick]

How would they effect the charge? Surely it would need congestion charge-type cameras on all roads entering the GLC area, basically the M25. That is a lot of cameras which will need a hell of a lot of £3.50s to recoup. Is this man for real?

The charging infrastructure is already there, and has been since 2008, for the HGV LEZ. ANPR and cameras at the GLA boundary.

 

[Vespa]

Err, what? Why would they do that?

It would eventually come to a point where its become financially unsustainable and if the retailers resist paying extra to cover the charge if the haulers need to pass on the extra cost if they can't absorb it, then lorry deliveries can stop or make a drop in a warehouse outside the zone, then the retailers go out and pick it up..

There is no exemption for commercial haulers and many of them are running at a tight margin, diesel supplement on top of the basic congestion charge soon adds up, I drive lorries there's a lot of rules and regulations, driving hours, O licence etc they cost time and money.

If I was I a leader of the haulier association, I would organise a boycott to make that point, Khan us the most useless Mayor ever who is only interesting in attending social media events to make his instagram acoount look good.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Wait til lorries start boycotting London because of the charges, the shelves will be empty in 3 days, less if there's panic buying.

How much do you reckon the average supermarket-stocking lorry typically carries? I'd hazard a guess that it would normally be carrying food and goods with a combined retail value in the £tens of thousands. Next to that, a charge of maybe £10 for coming into London is negligible. And if such a charge reduces congestion in London, you may find that the supermarkets and suppliers recoup more than that in reduced journey times/lower labour/diesel costs. So I think we can be fairly confident that virtually no lorries carrying goods to stock shelves with will boycott London. At worst, there could be slightly higher charges for delivering to London.

It's just a cash cow for Khan, flogging motorists and commercial vehicles.

So how do you propose Khan solves TfL's funding crisis?

 

[bramling]

So how do you propose Khan solves TfL's funding crisis?

A good place to start would be looking at the fares freeze and Night Tube, whilst meanwhile perhaps a few pence could be saved by not plastering TfL premises with "The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has..." posters, which are quite clearly thinly-disguised electioneering material.

Having said all that, two of the biggest issues to be fair aren't really Khan's fault. The lack of government grant, which is essentially a government punishment for being a Labour-voting city, and to some extent Crossrail which is largely before Khan's time, though it seems remiss that he claims to be blissfully unaware of the over-run until weeks beforehand when anyone looking at a station construction site could see quite plainly it was nowhere near finished. Some sound politics could raise the salience of all this, but instead Khan is bull-in-china-shop and sinks to the same level as Johnson's lot.

It's extremely regrettable that part of the job description for being a London mayoral candidate is that one seems to have to be a sewer-grade freak. London only seems to want to elect maverick types, and that's part of the problem.

 

[Vespa]

How much do you reckon the average supermarket-stocking lorry typically carries? I'd hazard a guess that it would normally be carrying food and goods with a combined retail value in the £tens of thousands. Next to that, a charge of maybe £10 for coming into London is negligible. And if such a charge reduces congestion in London, you may find that the supermarkets and suppliers recoup more than that in reduced journey times/lower labour/diesel costs. So I think we can be fairly confident that virtually no lorries carrying goods to stock shelves with will boycott London. At worst, there could be slightly higher charges for delivering to London.



So how do you propose Khan solves TfL's funding crisis?

Most deliveries are on just in time basis with floating stocks being replenished as and when required, they are not usually kept in the back has floor space is dedicated to retailing, if there is no supply, stock will go low after 3 days.

Most hauliers are independents picking trailers for jobs and the big four have their own fleet, both have their costing structure when bidding for jobs they have to factor in fuel, wages and congestion charges.

The problems is, I have seen no evidence that congestion charging has used for or done anything for TFL and why should motorists subsidise public transports.

Thankfully Manchester voted out congestion charging because they knew it won't be used to fund public transport, instead it would be used as a cash cow to plug funding gaps in the council budget, they didn't believe the council's promise that the "charge won't rise from a low introductionary price" as soon as its in, it go up very quickly and reduce the attraction of visiting Manchester.

It's a tax on driving.

 

[Bald Rick]

It would eventually come to a point where its become financially unsustainable and if the retailers resist paying extra to cover the charge if the haulers need to pass on the extra cost if they can't absorb it

But that, frankly, is rubbish. Retailers couldn’t ‘resist’ - they’d either pay what the hauliers charge them, or not get any stock and go out of business in short order. What do you think they would do?

Some hauliers, admittedly stupid ones, are paying £100 a day to enter London. It doesn’t seem to put them off.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

What a stupid thing to be suggesting. Does it occur to him that most motorists living in London will also venture outside the capital using roads that, in Khans' eyes they haven't paid to use. So perhaps Surrey/Essex/Hertfordshire/Kent should also charge motorists leaving London because they haven't paid any tax outside London. Sigh. It's just idiotic. Especially so since he was arguing against the extension of the congestion charge when the Government proposed it!

Well there are very good reasons that probably don't need to be recited why motorists really should be paying more to cover the congestion, pollution, loss of quality of life, and general environmental damage they cause, so personally I don't see any objection to charging vehicles for entering London. It helps solve two problems in one go: Too much road traffic in London and TfL's funding crisis. Politically it's quite astute since, on the whole, the people paying the charge can't vote for Khan, so it's likely to be more popular with London voters than a congestion charge extension for everyone.

I can't really see other counties around London retaliating in kind because they have less well developed public transport systems than London, so tend to have more businesses that rely on customers driving to them. And they don't have such severe congestion problems to solve. And I'm not even sure if the surrounding county councils even have the legal authority to impose congestion charges? Add to that that London already has congestion charging infrastructure - other counties would have to create that infrastructure almost from scratch. Besides, if you're - say - Hertfordshire - it's hardly practical to impose congestion charges ONLY on London-registered vehicles: If you want to impose a charge on outside visitors, you'd have to do it for vehicles entering from everywhere outside Hertfordshire. Having said that, if other counties went down the same route, it would be a bit tough on quite a few motorists in the short term, but would lead to a more sustainable transport network in the longer term, which seems to me to be a good thing.

 

[Bald Rick]

A good place to start would be looking at the fares freeze and Night Tube, whilst meanwhile perhaps a few pence could be saved by not plastering TfL premises with "The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has..." posters, which are quite clearly thinly-disguised electioneering material.

Have a read of the TfL document. The road pricing suggestion is one part of one section of the report. Fares are mentioned in another section, and abandoning the night tube and closing some ‘branches’ of the heavy rail system in another. As is abandoning 150 bus routes (which saves a packet, albeit at great social cost). Also TfL pay, and all sorts of taxation options.

There is another section on the TfL Pension scheme, and this is a dead cert to be tackled, as it already has been in much of the rest of public services.

It's a tax on driving.

Correct. In other news there’s tax on lots of things. The money has to come from somewhere.

 

[Mojo]

But that, frankly, is rubbish. Retailers couldn’t ‘resist’ - they’d either pay what the hauliers charge them, or not get any stock and go out of business in short order. What do you think they would do?

Especially when you consider London is the second most populated region in the country - can't imagine it's much of a recipe for success for a business to decide to stop stocking their branches in London.

 

[Vespa]

But that, frankly, is rubbish. Retailers couldn’t ‘resist’ - they’d either pay what the hauliers charge them, or not get any stock and go out of business in short order. What do you think they would do?

Some hauliers, admittedly stupid ones, are paying £100 a day to enter London. It doesn’t seem to put them off.

my point is unless you take a stand, the charges will go up and up while expanding the charging ring gradually.

£100 a day over 6 days is £600 =£31,200 a year times over so many vans in a fleet. That's a massive expense for a fleet

 

[bramling]

Have a read of the TfL document. The road pricing suggestion is one part of one section of the report. Fares are mentioned in another section, and abandoning the night tube in another. As is abandoning 150 bus routes (which saves a packet, albeit at great social cost). Also TfL pay.

I can't see Night Tube returning. With a backlog of driver training, why waste money paying to train staff who can only do 2 days of productive work driving largely empty trains around, when you can pay the same money to train staff who can do 5 days? I think I'm right in saying TfL pay has started to lag behind TOCs over the last decade or so, particularly for grades like driving, so possibly not that much scope here (as the report seems to acknowledge).

There is another section on the TfL Pension scheme, and this is certain to be tackled, as it already has been in much of the rest of public services.

Strikes ahead, then! It could be done by just making changes for new starters, but of course the savings would take many many years to filter through.