‘Crossrail - That dismal, costly, insecure little railway – running the wrong route’
On BBC2 next week the second series about London’s Crossrail underground line construction begins – as if the first series wasn’t sufficiently annoying. No doubt it will be uncritically hailed as a triumph of British engineering – built at cost and on time.
Digging a little further the true awfulness of the Grand Projet emerges. With the full line due to open in December 2019, 10 years after construction began, at a cost of £15bn – travellers and taxpayers will get two lines only across the capital. If a single train on the line stops at any time – the entire line comes to a complete halt – like a tube of glue – a flaw that often strikes the Jubilee Line.
Contrast this with the much preferred alternative – a surface, multi-tiered, multi-mode system – running along the Marylebone and Euston Roads. With several layers of road and rail, and cyclists on top – the route could have linked for the first time in 150 years the main London railway termini – Kings Cross, Euston, St Pancras, with Paddington and Liverpool St – creating a dynamic, fast-moving rail artery that telescopes the time-consuming changes across London endured by hundreds of thousands of passengers each day – and not just duplicate the Central Line.
With at least four tracks in line on one tier the artery would have much greater continuity of service even if two tracks were faulty. Two tiers of traffic could have tripled capacity of the oft-clogged Marylebone-Euston Roads. The cost: just £5bn, especially if offsite construction techniques were deployed. Time to completion: potentially less than four years, or less than half the time taken to build Crossrail. The failure to choose a surface option is the biggest missed infrastructural opportunity of the past half century.
If connectivity and value are poor, low capacity is Crossrail’s worst aspect. It is highly unlikely that the line will be able to cope with demand at peak times. Even the former head of TfL, Sir Peter Hendy, predicts the Crossrail lines will be “immediately full” as soon as they open. He should know. He was the man who eagerly implemented Ken Livingstone’s road narrowing and closure programme 10 years ago that has crippled traffic flow ever since.
The eight-second-at-green traffic light in Trafalgar Square – whose roadworks actually took longer to complete than the Hoover Dam – still stands as a monument to dear Peter’s malign interventions.. along with 3,000 extra traffic lights.