Steve Chambers

Transport for London is about to give the London Overground lines names. As the Romford to Upminster line is one of my earliest memories, I thought I’d give the potential name some considering.

The Romford to Upminster line was opened in 1893 as a branch of the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway main line that ran between Fenchurch Street and Shoeburyness.

There was initially only the stations at Romford and Upminster, and it was called the Romford branch.

So call it the Romford line, right?

Some services from Romford went beyond Upminster, crossing the main line and joining the Ockendon branch, going as far as Grays and Tilbury.

The route passed through the parishes of Romford, Hornchurch and Upminster, but in Hornchurch there was no station.

Romford and Hornchurch were in the liberty of Havering-atte-Bower and the ancient parish of Hornchurch, but Upminster was not. All three parishes had been part of the Romford Poor Law Union and other local government districts called Romford during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

So call it the Romford line, right?

When the three towns were forced together as a new London borough in 1965, both Romford and Hornchurch were considered unacceptable to all parties, so Havering-atte-Bower was settled upon (minus the -atte-Bower) as the name, despite Upminster having never been a part of it.

For this reason I’m not keen on Havering as the name.

The route crosses the river Ingrebourne (local people insist on pronouncing it Inga-bourn) between Upminster and Hornchurch, near to Upminster Bridge where the portmanteau Hornminster Glen can be found.

Not super keen on Hornminster really.

There is also a Hornford Way on the old Romford/Hornchurch boundary, but nowhere near the railway. Also not a great name to my mind.

The Ingrebourne name was used for a telephone exchange in Harold Wood, back when we tried to make exchange names match letters on the dial.

Kind of like Ingrebourne as the name. It isn’t a well known river, but you can point to it on a map.

Without doubt, the most historic thing on the line is the Hornchurch Cutting, now a site of special scientific interest that was discovered when the line was built. It provided evidence of how far south the ice sheet came during the Ice Age.

The geologist who made the discovery was T. V. Holmes and I like the idea of a Holmes line, mostly to confuse tourists. In 1983 the site was re-examined to find Jurassic rocks and fossils had been brought by the ice from the Midlands.

Let’s stop here and call it the Jurassic line.

A halt midway on the line was opened in 1909 to serve two exclusive housing estates built on the old manor of Nelmes. They gave the halt its name, Emerson Park and Great Nelmes.

Great Nelmes got lost along the way and now the whole of this section of northern Hornchurch is called Emerson Park.

Nelmes is a local name which can be traced back to the 14th century. Emerson comes from Emerson Carter, the name of the son of the developer of the Emerson Park housing estate. The family were from Parkstone in Dorset.

Not at all keen on calling it Emerson or Emerson Park and Nelmes or Great Nelmes feel too lost to time.

The railway was absorbed into the Midland Railway in 1912 and London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923.

The companies wanted commuters from Emerson Park to travel via Upminster and not via rival companies at Romford, so provided a number of short run services that only called at Emerson Park and Upminster.

The creation of British Railways ended the short runs and brought the line under the same region as other services at Romford.

Segregation of the District line at Upminster from main line tracks and electrification of Fenchurch Street services saw the line become the simple three station service we know today. The introduction of diesel trains in 1956 created a more regular timetable than had been possible under steam traction.

It was always called the Push and Pull from my earliest memories. I now realise this name had been inaccurate for twenty years by the time I was born, referring to a steam engine that does not need to run round to the other end of the train at the terminus.

In any case, the Push and Pull name is not unique to the line.

The line was electrified in 1986. This appears to be for the convenience of the railway, so that diesel traction could be eliminated from depots in the region. It must have made the case for inclusion of the line in the London Overground in 2015 much stronger.

I started writing this not sure what to call the line. I’m still not entirely sure, but I really don’t know why you wouldn’t want to call a railway the Jurassic line.

I was unable to have a good look at the Superloop bus announcement until a few days after it was made. Lots of people were ready to quickly pour cold water over it, but on reflection I think it has its merits. It could be a useful piece of London’s transport infrastructure, but only once it gets over a number of hurdles.

If you are unfamiliar with it, the Superloop will be a series of orbital express bus routes around London.

Part of it already exists. In fact, as a concept it is far from new. You can trace orbital express bus routes around London as an idea back to the 1946 restarting of Green Line Coaches after the war.

The express orbital routes were introduced from 1953 and by the early 1970s ran as follows:

• 724 Romford-Harlow-Watford-Heathrow-Staines
• 725 Windsor-Kingston-Croydon-Gravesend
• 726 Windsor-Heathrow-Kingston-Croydon-Gravesend
• 727 Luton-Watford-Heathrow-Gatwick-Crawley

This list omits many service changes, but is intended to show the services formed a loop around London and also went to places now beyond the Greater London boundary. That is because the London Passenger Transport Area was much larger than the London of today. Conveniently, the “Central Area” that has/had red buses maps pretty much to the current Greater London and the rest of the area was Green Line or “Country Area”.

There was a gap in the orbit to the east because of the River Thames, and we’ll come back to that again later.

At least one of those routes might be partly familiar. Route 726 still exists as route X26 which is currently running from Heathrow Airport to Croydon. Superloop will use this route as part of its initial offering. Far from something new, Superloop is a revival.

Boris Johnson promised orbital express bus services as part of his 2008 manifesto and increased the service level of route X26 later that year. The policy was cancelled by 2010. Of the many reasons quoted for the cancellation, the one that caught my eye was the revelation that the buses would require subsidy. Welcome to Public Transport 101, Mayor Johnson! I suspect he was learning this as new information.

One of the claims against the scheme is that it is a desperate rebranding because of bad publicity for ULEZ. On the other hand it is claimed to be a bold innovative answer to the ULEZ. It is neither.

If anything, it is a delayed policy implementation caused by COVID. Orbital express bus routes have been in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy (MTS) since 2018. There are even some indicative corridors in the MTS (apologies if I’ve misread the waypoints on the maps):

• Heathrow–Harrow–Barnet–Enfield–Ilford
• Chiswick–Ealing–Wood Green–Walthamstow–Ilford
• Bexleyheath–Bromley-Beckenham

That’s right! Two orbits in North London, although the Superloop proposal appears to be a mashup of the two. You will also notice that part of it has actually been delivered as route X140 in 2019. It’s all part of the plan and it has been in plain sight for five years now.

So that’s the defence of the Superloop over. Now to the problems.

The biggest issue is going to be reliability. Bus priority schemes in outer London boroughs are not as comprehensive as inner boroughs. The X26 already suffers from poor performance because of congestion.

The indicative map of routes shows that the radial express routes in London will fall under the same brand. There is also the already announced express route from Canary Wharf to Canary Wharf due to start in 2025. This makes me wonder if Transport for London (TfL) have data to show a lot of lower paid workers in Docklands live in Grove Park.

Going back to the old Green Line routes you can see how much closer to the centre the Superloop is, with TfL’s focus primarily on London. That said, some outer boroughs have been omitted entirely from the scheme.

In the east the route is particularly odd. What kind of express bus between Walthamstow and Royal Docks goes via Ilford? Buses with circuitous routes are common, but surely the point of express buses is to get from A to B directly?

The issue of where the routes do and do not stop might prove thorny. TfL will want to keep the balance of speeding up journeys and serving as many passengers as possible. The calling pattern of X28 seems to have caused consternation in the past, but the introduction of X140 seems to have avoided this.

The closing of the loop in the east still presents a problem. Back in the Green Line days they didn’t yet have the Dartford Tunnel. But even when it did open, the connecting service only lasted a year. Lack of demand or congestion? There is currently a X80 route through Dartford Crossing, but it comes nowhere near the proposed Superloop and is notoriously unreliable.

The routes do not overlap in any way, so making orbital journeys between points close to the route end will require a change. Hopper fares will mean passengers are not out of pocket, but convenience will also drive up patronage. There is always the option to extend routes to overlap later, where there are sections of high demand.

TfL have recently announced work on improving bus priority, but more will be needed to make sure the Superloop routes are attractive to passengers.

The Superloop can best be described as having potential. There is a clear precedent, there are known problems and it is fairly clear how to overcome them. There just needs to be political will to see it through and a sustained interest in the policy.

Contactless bank card payments for ticketless National Rail journeys outside London is such a good idea that it has been announced many times, over many years, by many transport secretaries.

The latest re-announcement, with dates for delivery rather than seasonal timeframes, suggests we might be getting closers to it actually happening.

The popularity of paying for public transport with a bank card, smartphone, watch or other wearables took Transport for London (TfL) by surprise. Now more journeys are paid for that way than using their own proprietary smartcard, the Oyster card.

A happy consequence of the enthusiastic adoption is that it costs less to administer the ticketing system and reconcile payments because more of the work is done by the card companies. TfL also had the added benefit of being less reliant on their now aged Oyster card system, which has struggled to adapt to more complex fare regimes and additional fare zones.

This move suggests that the extensive variety of National Rail operator branded smartcards will disappear. The implementation of these products has been a disaster and never fully completed. With the dramatic decrease in the number of regular season tickets sold they have become obsolete for even the most basic task they were designed for.

The experience of TfL customers suggests that extending contactless to the Greater South East rail network will prove popular, with most regular commuters switching to the convenience of contactless payment and to take advantage of additional products not found on other ticketing systems, like weekly fare capping.

One of the worst limitations of the existing smartcard system is purchasing tickets for journeys that begin on National Rail outside London and end on the Underground within London, such as Basildon to Canary Wharf. Contactless removes the need to specify the ticket in advance and requires only a touch in and a touch out.

However, there are some problems. Firstly, railcard discounted tickets cannot be purchased using the contactless system. Extending the system deeper into National Rail territory without fixing this problem would eliminate the convenience for many passengers.

Secondly, we need to be careful to ensure that changes to the ticketing system do not harm the underbanked. Fee-free contactless debit cards are not available to everyone. This is one of the reasons TfL has to retain the Oyster card as a payment option, in particular if they plan to do away with cash-for-paper ticket sales on the Tube as they did with the buses.

See you all at the next re-announcement!

It is great news that the European Commission has reached agreement with the satellite navigation “satnav” industry to stop sending traffic down residential streets.

Google bought Waze for US$1.3 billion in 2013. They clearly thought the user generated data about which streets were more or less busy had value and started including the information in their Google Maps product.

The changes will not be implemented for a couple of years. And the implementation of the changes concerns me. The devil will be in the detail.

How easy will it be for communities to convince Google they are a digital low traffic neighbourhood and should be geofenced? Google and other tech companies are faceless monoliths and rarely interact with the public beyond web forms.

One of the criticisms of low traffic neighbourhoods, rightly or wrongly, is that they benefit the wealthy and redirect traffic down the streets of poor people.

Now, I’m not quite sure I believe that as a general rule. But without keeping an eye on Google we might end up with the digital equivalent as better connected folk are able to have their neighbourhoods digitally protected.

Have you ever tried to correct an error on Google Maps? There are footpaths that Google refuses to recognise, sending walkers on long unnecessary detours. I tried to get Google to include one that is clearly visible on the satellite view. After much delay, they said there wasn’t enough evidence of its existence.

Good luck convincing them your street has too much traffic.

What happens if there is a dispute between streets? Is Google the judge and jury? Who will be able to see which streets have been protected? The local authorities? Residents?

And what happens if a new entrant decides to reinvent the wheel and start Waze 2.0 with new user generated data?

This is good news, but we need to keep an eye on it to make sure we don’t end up with an even less equitable outcome.

I was alarmed to read that 15 minute cities are an evil plot to control society. But given everything that has happened in the last decade, not really surprised.

Back when social media was new, and mostly text and image based, we used to say that if you weren’t part of the conversation you would have others speak for you.

Eventually the environmental campaigning sector saw the benefits of social media. And text-based services like Twitter suited wordy, overeducated policy people.

Unfortunately things have moved on. The conversations are now taking place in spaces we do not occupy. I recently completed a quick review of campaigning taking place on newer social spaces, like TikTok, and it matches up pretty well with what this piece identifies.

We find “mostly scornful videos, including claims that the schemes will restrict residents’ movement and fine them for leaving their home districts” with slight adjustments depending on the policy, slightly different talking points for ULEZ for example.

When you look at the environmental campaigning sector they are either missing from these newer networks or are only making tentative steps in this direction.

History will most likely repeat and we’ll catch up by the natural process of relatively younger campaigners and comms people being recruited who are comfortable with newer services. But it wouldn’t hurt to help things along right now. Unless you want people to associate having amenities nearby with being under house arrest.

This website has implemented ActivityPub so you can follow authors on Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed and other federated platforms.

Search for https://planningtransport.co.uk/author/steve-chambers or steve.chambers@planningtransport.co.uk to follow this website on your favourite Fediverse service.

London transport is at a pivotal moment. With insecure funding, pressure to reduce service levels and put up fares will grow stronger. But there are other ongoing issues, many of which predate the pandemic. Here are they key issues to look out for.

Rail

The London commuter network that is outside the control of Transport for London has diverged from the services of London Overground and TfL Rail.

These services already suffered from pricing differentials, but these are becoming more noticeable with continued above inflation fare rises. Passengers who rely on both services to complete their journey pay much more than London Underground passengers. This particularly affects South London passengers.

Service levels are also diverging. Whereas TfL has maintained near full pre-pandemic levels on their rail services, the National Rail operators under the control of the Department for Transport have provided much more unpredictable and reduced service levels. Again South London is disproportionately affected, but all National Rail users have been subject to seemingly random changes in service levels and timetables.

Further down the line, the upcoming changes as part of the introduction of Great British Railways could include more threats, and indeed opportunities, for London.

Roadspace

The roadspace reallocation programme which was accelerated by the pandemic appears to have ground to a halt. Even in places with exceptionally low levels of car ownership schemes have been reversed, reviewed and removed.

We would expect to see innovation and iteration with these schemes, but there is a real sense that the whole business of improving opportunities for active travel has been put on hold because of the 2022 council elections. I remain unconvinced these will prove to be a significant vote switcher. We cannot afford to delay dealing with the climate emergency because of the electoral cycle.

Ticketing

Oyster cards and contactless bank cards still do not have parity of features and fares. This remains an unacceptable oversight for Transport for London. It is particularly galling to see attempts to remove cash payments at London Underground stations when it is known that people who do not have contactless bank cards will be frozen out from the best value fares. This has been an issue since contactless payments were introduced almost ten years ago. Is TfL sitting on its hands?

Buses

London Buses are in a precarious position. They are the most commonly used form of public transport, but do not produce the most revenue. Fares have been cross-subsidised by the London Underground for as long as the two modes have shared common ownership. Until the Tube returns to profitability there will be calls to make savings on the buses.

The TfL business plan was already looking to make cuts in bus services in Inner London with a view to increasing services in Outer London, as part of a strategy to decrease car dependence in parts of London where private vehicle trips remain high. It is hard to envisage this transfer taking place in the current post-pandemic reality. Watch for the cuts, but not the service level increases.

Then there is the matter of road trips now being above pre-pandemic levels. Despite bus lanes and other prioritisation being in place, the buses are particularly vulnerable to delays caused by congestion. Delayed bus routes are more expensive to run as you need more buses running to provide similar levels of service. But of more concern is the effect unreliability has on patronage. Put simply, people stop using unreliable services.

What not to do

Putting up fares and reducing service levels is a recipe for a downwards spiral to oblivion. We’ve seen public transport run down in other cities and towns until the services became so unviable for passengers they were abandoned by all but those with no other option and then scrapped. And London has been here before too, many times in its history, trying to deal with effects of budget shortfalls and congested roads. These problems are not new, so let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past.

What would you do?

Service levels must be maintained to keep public transport competitive with the car. Fares need to be revisited to make sure they are appropriate for new flows of passengers. It might be appropriate to have higher fares at different times of day, but simply keeping to the old fares structure and ramping up the price isn’t going increase patronage.

Congestion is now a serious concern to more Londoners than ever before. There are now several schemes in place to deal with air pollution and congestion, but they do not go far enough. Fair and comprehensive pricing needs to be introduced to bring down traffic levels and provide new revenue for public transport.

South Londoners and others who rely on National Rail need a plan in place to ensure their service levels are protected. Perhaps this is suburban rail coming into London Overground or perhaps it is something short of that like TfL controlling all fares within the London boundary. Whatever it is, passengers should no longer get a worse deal merely because the train they get on is controlled by a different part of the state.

I first noticed several years ago that mapping and directions apps have a tendency towards evil and will prioritise driving and getting a taxi over active travel options.

In a response to a call for evidence by the London Assembly on future mobility I noted:

“If TfL do not plan properly, active travel options, which cannot currently earn revenue for the app providers, could be deprioritised in the app user interface (shown with less prominence, not ‘front-and-centre’).”

Call for evidence: future transport, Living Streets submission to the London Assembly, October 2017

I don’t really think much has changed since then. Micromobility partnerships mean e-scooter or cycle hire might show up more prominently, but there still isn’t anyone effectively championing the position of walking in these apps.

Now we have National Highways England going into schools to do deliberate evil, using Minecraft to normalise road building schemes for kids. This is not an exercise in encouraging a generation of engineers, but an attempt to build support for unpopular and environmentally damaging schemes.

As I thought back in 2017, we need to be doing two things to combat this. 1) Lobby technology companies not government and 2) Create our own better apps.

The environmental movement still appears largely blind to apps, algorithms and technology as far as I can see. This is because it is a professionalised movement organised around public affairs. It is only really interested in government advocacy and behavior change. There needs to be greater strategic understanding of the risks (and potential benefits) of technology for sustainable transport and the environment.

We do see alternative apps and services being created (this gives me hope) but they are too often small scale, not real competitors or a little too homespun. Nonetheless they could be an important tool in showing another way when trying to make technology companies do better.

If you are interested in saving the planet then please learn to code. Not just to help us create our own apps and services, but to help us understand what prejudices and objectives underpin those we already access.

Update

There is now a petition against the gamification of environmentally damaging road building.