Be Excellent To Each Other

Funcushions Drive?

If it is that important, then funding it to the tune of £1,000,000 an hour should give you a damned good service.

I'd imagine they do, don't they? Easily.

[edit]Oh, per hour - maybe not.

1,000,000 x 24 x 365 = 8,760,000,000.

Unless my maths is out, £8.76bn.

I bet it's more than £1,000,000 a day, though. Nothing online seems happy to give up the numbers involved.

£39bn over ten years.

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/n ... /7386.aspx

Do they get the cash from the consumer on top of that, or is that already included in the 39bn?

The way I read it, I think it's on top. "Grant Funding" can't include ticket sales, can it?

Even so, that's £4bill a year, so roughly £500,000 per hour. Fuck me.

That is TfL, which is buses and the Tube. And presumably lots of other things as well.

I would do for £500,000 per hour!

True that. But still, £500,000 per hour to make London's public transport go? That's a shit load of cash, man.

[edit]@Plissken obviously.

Shit load of it though.

£0.5m per hour for a system where if 50% of it doesn't work it costs £2m a hour. That is a 3x profit margin. Not bad at all.

And that's without including fares, it seems.

I suspect the cost is the made up cost of people not getting to work etc.

Yeah, I guess.

For £500,000 an hour, I would give piggybacks to everyone in London. I'd only have to last a couple of minutes to earn more than I would in a year at this job.

When can I start?

Seems to suggest fares income (again, across the network) is in the order of £3bn pa.

That. Is. So. Much. Money.

6% of the NHS.

Tits Avenue? Tits Avenue station has to be open, hasn't it?

Upper Ladybumps? Surely I can get to Upper Ladybumps?

The tube strike did cause more traffic on the Pontypool bypass this morning.

Nightmare.

If only there was some sort of already existing vast underground tunnel network through which efficient, electrically powered trains could be happily trundled with only a miniscule energy and maintenance cost.

I agree with Grim... that's an metric fucktonne of money. How on earth are they spending it all?

I think the major problem with the tube is that it's always incredibly busy for about 3-4 hours a day and pretty quiet the rest of the time, but they staff it fully for 18 hours a day.
So staffing is very expensive as is maintenance. I've heard apocryphal evidence from engineers who work on the network that maintenance is really badly handled with no long term investment - it's a continuous round of short term money wasting. Simple things like escalators have to be custom engineered and built on a station by station basis and they never order duplicate spares so if one breaks down the parts have to be manufactured to order.

Morningwood Crescent.

Did I do that right?

I'm always surprised how run-down and dilapidated most of the tube looks, considering how much money runs through London. It looks like we're still recovering from the blitz at points.

I don't know if anyone else has been on the Leningrad Metro, but it's a world of difference and apparently more or less runs itself.
Fuck sake, Lundon.

I believe the problem is that every station is completely different. (That is what makes travelling on the Tube an enjoyable adventure each time I do it.) The lines are different, so different stock and so on and so on.

But you are right on the short term thinking - the system is very old and just muddles along in that classically British way. Having Governments and unions who have other priorities when it comes to the Tube (money, or workers) doesn't help.

Both the Leningrad Metro and the Moscow one are modern wonders. Beautiful stations, quick, cheap trains, and deep enough to serve as air raid bunkers. Of course, they were mostly built by slaves but, hey, nobody's perfect.

And Plissken's hit upon a big reason for this, I believe both of those were built in one go. The London one really wasn't. Nothing from the District line is of any use on the Central at all. The trains wouldn't even physically fit through the Central line's tunnels.

Yes. That's what comes of doing it first - you get to make the mistakes. They really need to be looking into automating the trains though. Really, it can't be that hard.

What would the poor working-class drivers do then? End of an Era must be spinning in his grave.

Tube drivers earn quite a bit of cash.
Also, old man afterthought used to be a tube driver.

Is he a (dead) tube driver?

Isn't the DLR automated?

Yup. Craster uses it every day - what's the service like, Cras?

Yes, and it's ever so fun sitting at the front pretending you're driving it when drunk.

Or was that the top of a London bus? I forget.

Both. Although the bus was funnier and there is photographic evidence of that.

Zombie drivers innit.


To be honest I'd doubt whether automating something like the tube would actually save money - the drivers' pay doesn't sound like it adds up to much in the grand scheme of things.

It doesn't, but it's always the first target for ideological reasons. You couldn't operate an automated system without a supervisor/equivalent, anyway.

I use it every day too. 3 years ago it was great, and generally it still is, but now has patches of 2 weeks every now and again where everything goes wrong. I'm blaming the upgrade works for it.

That's not true for the Pietari one at least, and it wasn't built by slaves either :

Line 1 (Kirovsko-Vyborgskaya) 1955 30,9 km 19
Line 2 (Moskovsko-Petrogradskaya) 1961 29,5 km 18
Line 3 (Nevsko-Vasileostrovskaya) 1967 24,3 km 10
Line 4 (Pravoberezhnaya) 1985 11.1 km 8
Line 5 (Frunzensko-Primorsaya) 2008 14.0 km 8

That table gives the date of opening, the length of the line and the number of stations.
And yet, all of the tunnels and cars are compatible.
There may be a valid argument that some of the LU's diversity is due to the original tunnels being very small and old due to their great age, and that bigger trains were needed, but I think it's a lot more to do with the different competing companies which originally developed the lines.
If it had been either a single company, or a state enterprise, then I am positive it would be a radically better and cheaper to run system today.

It wouldn't be but it would take ooh... let's say more than a month, during which the current drivers would paralyse the system.



A driver costs about £60k a year to employ. There's a LOT of drivers.

The DLR is very good, much better than my experiences of the tube have been. It still has signal failures, and suspect packages, and cocks on the line, but I've never known there be an issue with the actual automated driving. They need to hurry the fuck up with 3-carriage upgrades though, and stop only running trains as far as Crossharbour.

Does anyone know how many drivers they actually employ. I can't find a number.

118118 doesn't know either.

About 3500 apparently (according to the Telegraph). So that's 210 Million / year. That's peanuts compared to the 3 Billion a year income mentioned above.

I originally looked at this title and thought it was the latest in a long line of isometic helicopter shooters by EA.

Wasn't the original Underground built very quickly using/exploiting cheap Chinese labour - IIRC it was done in a couple of years and several thousand of the workforce perished because of the slave like working conditions.

I've sat in meetings a couple of years ago (taking pictures) with all the main parties transport secretaries and can remember saying that it would probably be cheaper to fill the entire undergorund network with quick setting concrete and start again. There was talk of an elevated monorail system for central London but the reason, according to the Lib Dem secretary I spoke with, that it was never greenlit is because it was too difficult to get passengers off it in case of emergency - it appears they hadn't thought about emergency inflatable sldes, like, y'know, they use on planes...