Transport upgrades are vital to keep London at the top of the financial table
Ask most of those who are yet to come back to work three or four or five days a week what the biggest barrier is and the answer is usually either the commute being a pain in the neck or being too expensive.
So it won’t necessarily shock you to learn that in the aftermath of the Elizabeth Line’s arrival – relatively cheap, and very easy – the number of people going back to work more regularly has gone up. That data, from office firm IWG, points to another truism: if you build it, they will come.
The UK’s inability to plan and execute national infrastructure schemes is as much a part of our culture as tea and biscuits. Let’s take just two: the south east is in dire need of runway capacity, but both building at Heathrow seems to be impossible and a new airport vetoed as too costly.
And HS2 – whether it’s a good idea or not – has somehow managed to be started without anyone knowing whether or where it’ll be finished, leading to roadworks on the Euston Road turning a key London axis into gridlock in order to build a platform that may or may not be used.
It’s silly to compare the UK to China or anywhere else without democratic recourse, but it is nonetheless staggering.
Amidst this miserable track record, the over-budget and delayed Crossrail stands as something of a triumph – and it might be a model for London’s infrastructure projects going forward. In part funded by the businesses who would get the most benefit from it, raising the capital wasn’t ever a serious problem.
Could that be a way for Crossrail 2, or other projects, to go from drawing and design to on-the-ground reality?
One thing is for sure – it doesn’t look like the capital is set to receive much cash from Whitehall to build future-proofed transport projects, with even the current TfL budget dependent on protracted negotiations to come. And the danger of that is the capital’s vital moving parts fall behind international rivals. London is still the golden goose, but that’s no reason for complacency.