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Is Tube down escalator more TfL ‘upgrade’ hooey?
THOUSANDS of commuters should sigh with relief next week when the down escalator at Camden Tube Station is expected to start up again.
But as a start date for a new escalator has swung back and forth among staff at the station for some time we will not be surprised if commuters find the opening day has been postponed.
Meanwhile, the station – one of the busiest in central London – hasn’t been fully operable at weekends for six years with travellers only allowed to exit from it.
Readers may recall that Transport for London took this action in 2003 in order to cope with the great weekend rush by hundreds of thousands to the Camden Market.
At the time, TfL promised the partial closure wouldn’t last for more than a year.
That was six years ago.
TfL issue press releases that recognise the Tube station is ageing and creaking.
It would “benefit” from an “upgrade”, say TfL. But – and there’s often a “but” from bureaucrats – there is “no funding available” at the moment.
All we are left with is a “long-term aspiration” for redevelopment.
In other words, all we hear from TfL is a lot of hooey!
Recently, we directly asked the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, whether he had, personally, looked into the closure of the down escalator. We believed he should have done.
We also asked whether he had studied a report on the escalator by the engineers – and did he
think three months was a reasonable time span for a replacement for it.
We repeated these questions recently to TfL in the hope the mayor would see them.
In their reply, they didn’t refer to them once.
Did they pass on our questions to the mayor? Was he indifferent to them?
Were they all too parochial for him?
• SOME 24,000 authors receive payments for loans of books, their intellectual property, from public libraries each year. Payments to authors are made on the basis of how often their books have been borrowed.
Could the technological advances proposed by our councillors lead to a decline in book borrowing?
After all, which will lead to more books being taken out – the malfunctioning scanner or the literary know-all who has sorted and stacked the shelves themselves?
Free book-borrowing is something we take for granted and surely something not to be tampered with.
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