Taxi Driver Online

The Evening Standard (London)

December 4, 2006 Monday

HEADLINE: NAME THE BUS LANES YOU WANT TO HAVE SCRAPPED

BYLINE: DAVID WILLIAMS

MORE bus lanes could be scrapped by a London council in a move bound to anger Mayor Ken Livingstone. Ealing suspended two lanes earlier this year, saying it was fed up with complaints about them from residents. It said an 18-month study would determine whether the lanes would be re-opened or closed for good. The Mayors Transport for London authority threatened to get the lanes restored by legal action if necessary. Today, however, Tory-controlled Ealing invited residents to name other bus lanes that were problematic and said councillors would then consider what to do with them, including suspension or removal. Council leader Jason Stacey said:

We have had so many complaints and seen so much anger from residents towards these bus lanes. Now we have the chance to see if we can live without them and whether they have actually made congestion worse. Ann Chapman, chairwoman of Ealings transport watchdog panel, said: Bus lanes are a hot topic, so I hope residents will take this opportunity. We're interested in people¹s views on whether changes to how bus lanes operate would make them work better.

The location of a bus lane, its length and hours of operation or the road layout at junctions could all be considered, she said. The panel, which will make recommendations in January, will consider bus and car journey times as well as the reliability of the bus service. When Ealing announced the suspension of the lanes in Church Road, Northolt, and Yeading Lane, Yeading, in June, TfL said it was disappointed not to have been consulted. At the time, a TfL spokesman said: Bus lanes offer benefits not only to bus passengers, who enjoy improved reliability of service, but also to cyclists, a quarter of whom choose their route according to the availability of bus lanes. Ealings move was followed in the same month by Tory-controlled Richmond council, which announced it was to review its bus lanes. Richmond had already successfully campaigned to have a double bus lane removed from both sides of Kew Bridge.

A report by the London Taxi Drivers Association in December last year said the huge increase in the number of buses and bus lanes had created widespread disruption.
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Let's hope more bus lanes are binned.

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IDFIMH

Let's hope more Buses are binned.

We're in the process of binning buses in Reekie. We're spending nearly one billion of taxpayers' hard earned on .... trams.

Yup. Inflexible, expensive, rattly new trams. Which are such a good idea that no private capital could be attracted to fund them.

Nice to know the public purse is fuelled by patsies, ain't it?

You mean like the one's that used to run up Broughton Street in the fifties?

Mind you, theres lot's of things go 'up' Broughton Street nowadays.