Chucking millions down the Tube

16 September 2009

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Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in?

At the end of every government’s life there come events, big and small, which show quite clearly that what was once a convincing credo — convincing enough to win an election, anyway — has completely lost its bearings.

George W. Bush’s brand of conservatism died in the floodwaters of New Orleans. For two vital elements of New Labour — fiscal extravagance and gesture politics — some of the last rites are being performed in the rather more prosaic surroundings of Green Park tube station.

Transport for London has, you see, noticed that the tube, being underground and reached by steps and escalators, is not terribly accessible to wheelchairs. It is therefore proposing to spend extraordinary sums of money — £97 million at Green Park alone — to dig new lift shafts and passageways through the earth in order to deliver what it calls ‘step-free access’ for the disabled to some of its Edwardian stations.

Buried in the small print of the plans is the final, definitive lunacy which trumps all the other lunacies. It turns out that the £97 million to be spent at Green Park, and the roughly £300 million to be spent elsewhere on TfL’s tube access programme, will only deliver step-free access from the street to the station platform. Boarding almost any train will still involve... a step — insurmountable to wheelchairs.

It turns out, therefore, that Transport for London is to spend not far short of half a billion pounds on something which will not substantially benefit even a single wheelchair-bound tube traveller; something which amounts to little more than the largest subsidy for disabled trainspotters in the history of the world.

There are about 3,500 disabled people — as measured by the number of holders of the disabled person’s free travel pass — living in Westminster, the borough where Green Park station sits. It would quite literally be cheaper to give every single one of those people a free car for the rest of their lives. Of these 3,500, only about 600 actually live close enough to the station to reach it in a wheelchair. It would be cheaper to give each of those people a free car and chauffeur for the rest of their lives (assuming they don’t have one already — this is Mayfair, after all).

Or, for the price of the works at just that single station, you could give every one of the 121,000 Londoners who qualify for a disabled travel pass £800 worth of taxi or minicab vouchers — enough to go to the supermarket or see friends every few days for a year, with a bit left over for the odd trip to the theatre.

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Vettekulla

September 23rd, 2009 3:51pm Report this comment

I always find disabled access facilities, particularly kerb-side ramps so thoughtfully provided throughout London, immensely helpful for the international traveler's ubiquitous suitcase-on-wheels. The only draw-back is having to share these ramps occasionally with anti-social cyclists. To make the Tube wheelie friendly will be a godsend. No more heaving that 23 kilo suitcase up and down steps. We owe a great debt to the disabled whom one rarely sees enjoying the benefits of these large investments.

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