4 minute read
Frying pan/fire
Could the day of reckoning be nigh for Transport for London? The capital city’s regulator has suffered serious losses over the pandemic-ravaged past two years, and it is desperate for a government bail-out.
The trouble is, for the government to put the money in, it’s going to attach some stringent terms and conditions. When it pumped in £5 billion in 2020 to soften the Covidinflicted blow, part of the price was an increase in the congestion charge, along with longer operating hours.
Now the conditions appear to be focused on the tube network – which is also the biggest likely recipient of bail-out money. The government wants to part-fund signalling improvements and new Bakerloo Line trains through cutting the workforce, partly by introducing driverless trains on some lines. There is also pressure to cut bus services, especially on routes that are less profitable.
At a time when the cost of living crisis is brewing industrial unrest, you can be certain that these discussions will be opposed in the strongest possible way. Expect more strikes – as I write this column, most of London’s tube networks are out, along with a number of bus routes, and both RMT and Unite unions said the strikes would carry on for ‘as long as it takes’ to resolve their disputes.
And for TfL, this makes the outlook even worse. For the organisation to keep functioning, it requires high ridership within the London transport network. And right now, that’s not happening. Millions of workers have become used to working from home some or all of the time. So commuter traffic on the trains, tubes and buses is down anyway.
So a period of industrial unrest on London’s transport networks could wipe out any bail-out money. And it could even push TfL into bankruptcy.
If that doomsday scenario were to happen, the government would have no option but to take TfL over and run it directly from Whitehall.
Where does this leave the private hire sector? Might this actually be a positive for us? The current Tory government loves the gig economy, and many free marketeers in the government are very much in favour of ride-hailing operators.
The current government is less likely to want to spend money on cycle lanes, which would be good news for anyone whose workload has been blighted by cyclingsupporting ‘initiatives’ such as the loss of lanes on the Embankment and on Marylebone Road – the two major east-west corridors that are outside the C-Charge zone.
Where it would leave EV infrastructure is less clear. The government’s money pot for this is devolved down to local authorities, so it’s likely that local councils at London borough level would continue to be tasked with these installations.
In the short term, disruption to public transport might mean extra work for the taxi and private hire sector. You can be sure that Uber, Bolt and the other ridehailers will surge-price as demand for an alternative to striking tubes and buses is sought. Those operators that can hold their nerve and not surge might pick up some extra work from desperate commuters who don’t have the home working option.
If TfL is run from Whitehall, as Mayor Sadiq Khan (pictured) fears, we can only hope the new management has a more enlightened approach to our sector.
For a start, it would be nice to have a regulator that actually listened to the people it was tasked with regulating. A less dogmatic approach would have produced a more pragmatic solution to the problems operators face when trying to source and register an electric seven-seater.
On the other hand, we could find ourself in a far worse position, with TfL under new management of government appointees who don’t understand the sector.
And that could make our lives much worse, especially with the government looking to introduce new standards for taxi and private hire. Not so much out of the frying pan, into the fire, but into a bigger, deeper and dirtier frying pan.
