Kevin wrote:
dwb wrote:
Bearing in mind that that I got on a train at Canada Water at 9am the
train was probabley no more than 10-15% full at any point, I hope that
the billions of taxpayer money being spent on this line is being well
spent.
Considering that the ELL will go from nowhere to nowhere it seems alot
of money to spend.
It's not just about the present, it's about the future too.

Take a look at the figures for the Jubilee line, and what they are now,
along with the areas in which it runs to see what could happen.
How can you compare the ELL and the Jubilee? Given the number of jobs
being created in Docklands the Jubilee was essential to make Docklands
viable. The passenger numbers would always have increased.
On the ELL line there are no areas ripe for mass development. Just
makes me wonder if the money being invested in the ELL wouldn't have
been better spent going towards Crossrail, given that the latter can't
get the funding.

That suffers the misconception that cancelling project X means the money
being spent on it could go to project Y instead. A lot of funding is
very project-specific - for example, if that were not true, the DfT
would have a list of schemes ranked by benefit-cost ratios, and would
fund them down the list from the top BCR until they ran out of money.

Although the list(s) exist, money is definitely not spent in that way -
sometimes for logical reasons, sometimes not.

The money being spent on the ELLX is from TfL's pot whilst the money for
Crossrail will largely need to come from the Treasury pot. "Saving"
£1.5bn or so on the ELLX wouldn't mean that Crossrail would go ahead -
there would still be a big funding gap to overcome. Then you might end
up with no Crossrail and no ELLX.

--
Dave Arquati
Imperial College, SW7
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London

On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Dave Arquati wrote:

That suffers the misconception that cancelling project X means the
money being spent on it could go to project Y instead. A lot of
funding is very project-specific - for example, if that were not
true, the DfT would have a list of schemes ranked by benefit-cost
ratios, and would fund them down the list from the top BCR until
they ran out of money.

Even worse is the philosophy that if the current budget isn't spent
out, then the department or division in question is deemed to have
over-budgeted, so their next budget can have an equal amount deducted
from it too.

So, towards the end of the budgeting period, departments/divisions are
inclined to throw money at anything they're allowed to fund,
irrespective of need, to make sure the budget allocation will be spent
out by the end of the period. The fact that something else (that
they're not authorised to fund) is justifiably crying out for
resources, has no place in that logic, unfortunately.