Specific information on public transportation in London
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been assuring Londoners that the cost of the Olympics will stay at the 38p per week that he promised it would. In his free newspaper The Londoner he says ‘Last year, we set the Olympics council tax precept at 38p. It will remain at 38p next year, the year after that and the year after that. When people see that it has not risen past 38p, they will accept my firm guarantee that Londoners will not be asked to pay any more to fund the 2012 Games.’
The council tax may stay the same but they’ll easily find other things to squeeze some cash out of. I wonder if there’s any money in his plan for a MonoMetro system in London like the one in this clever video below. It would certainly free up some road space.
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The other day I wrote about an Interactive Tube Map that wasn’t the best for planning journeys in London. TfL’s(Transport for London) website Journey Planner is much better.
It allows you to enter your start and finish point by station or stop, postcode, address or place of interest. You can enter the time and date you want to travel, any modes of transport you don’t want to use (Tubes, Bus, River etc), whether you have any special needs such you can’t use stairs, escaltors, lifts or you’re using a wheel chair, the amount of walking you’re willing to do and whether you want the fastest routes or the one with the least changes.
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I’ve been looking at a site that offers an interactive map of London, where you click a start and a finish point on a map of the capital and it works out the Tube route you should take. Handy I guess if you find map reading a struggle or the Underground map a colour coded maze but what it doesn’t do is work out the non-Underground part of your journey.
I tried putting in a number of my regular journey’s and rather than suggesting taking a bus or an overground train part of the way it only offers an estimated time to walk to the Tube stations indicated.
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Transport for London have announced a big investment in new tube trains on four of their lines. The Circle, District, Hammersmith and City and Metropolitan lines will be getting longer and redesigned trains that have air-conditioning, hallelujah. I was on a tube train last week and it was so stuffy on the platform, even in late November. Then a packed train rolled in and that was really not pleasant, squeezed in with elbows and armpits in your face.
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London’s black cab drivers have a reputation for knowing their stuff when it comes to getting their customers to the correct location by the shortest route. This is no bluff, to become a London taxi driver you have to pass a test known as The Knowledge and it normally takes between 2.5-3.5 years for people to complete the course.
Pretty much anyone can be a minicab driver, driving an ordinary car with a taxi sign on top but to drive one of the famous black cabs you have to put a lot of time and effort in at your own expense to earn the required badge.
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Starting the New Year as he means to go on, the Mayor of London has jacked up the price of fares on London’s buses and Underground system for people who are paying cash for single journeys.
If you want to go even one stop on the Tube now and go to buy a ticket for that single journey it’ll cost you £4(almost $8 or 6 euros), similarly even travelling one stop on the bus has gone from £1 to £2 if don’t have a Travel or Oyster card.
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There’s a report in The Times today about how London’s airports, Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted could have huge backlogs of travellers this weekend and next week as people start the Christmas holiday getaway. There was chaos in the summer after the extra security checks were brought in to deal with the liquids on planes situation.
Half a million passengers are due to go through Heathrow this weekend and 194,000 are scheduled for next Friday.
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London’s main airport, Heathrow, is to get a third runway but the government can expect big protests from local residents and environmental campaigners. Heathrow is the world’s busiest international airport and third busiest by passenger numbers, but the infrastructure is very old in lots of places.
It currently has two runways and four terminals. Heathrow Terminal 5 is due to open in March 2008 and a sixth terminal will be built along with the new runway, which will probably open in 2017.
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Eurostar is a great way to get to Paris or Brussels but its got less than a year at its present London location, Waterloo Station.
Waterloo’s one of the biggest railway stations in London, a few hundred yards behind the London Eye on the southern side of the River Thames, but from 14 November 2007 the Eurostar will begin using the redeveloped St Pancras Station, next to Kings Cross as its departure and arrival point in London.
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