Travelling on the Northern Line is a miserable experience. Everyone who has to go to work in the morning complains of overcrowded trains, high ticket prices, boiling hot trains in the summer months, dirty carriages and no lifts for mothers with buggies or the elderly.
Firstly, London Underground have a grand plan to increase capacity over the next 15 years by 28 per cent. This sounds great… until you read the fine print. Across the same period, demand is projected to increase by 40 per cent. That means Northern Line trains will in reality be 12 per cent more overcrowded than they are presently and all that after many summers of disruptions due to engineering works. You would have thought that with all this disruption from engineering works we would have built a better Northern line not ended up with a more overcrowded one.
Secondly, when Ken Livingstone was Mayor of London, he cut the number of trains operating south of Kennington from 30 an hour to 28 an hour. That is a 7% cut. His rationale was truly extraordinary…
- he said that there were too many people trying to get on the trains so he wanted to cut the number to give people more time to get on the trains. So that means that the more passengers there are, the fewer trains there will be!! Just extraordinary.
- he said that if they have fewer trains they will have more reliability because they can extend the average journey time. So he planned to run a slower service and as a result improve their reliability. It just means that any ‘reliability’ improvements are just spin.
Mark Clarke is calling the Government to write a plan which works out how many people are going to be using the Northern Line and plans improvements to meet that demand. They should be planning to improve the Northern Line not to run it down.
Following Boris Johnson's election as Mayor of London in 2008, Mark Clarke and local GLA Member Richard Tracey are lobbying for this to be reversed.