By the end of today Londoners will have voted to elect a new mayor. The victor will have a significant impact on road freight, with both regional and national players affected by the policy decisions taken during the next four years.
MT cherry-picks some of the key promises from the mayoral candidates to find out what they propose to do to aid, or harm, the road transport industry.
Ken Livingstone - Labour Party candidate
Livingstone's manifesto pledges that, as mayor, he would:
- Cut congestion through SMART parking, based on San Francisco's SF Park experiment. It would make it easier and quicker to find parking in London.
- Focus on roadworks: better co-ordination and procecution of utility companies that break the rules.
- Ask Transport for London to look into more freight consolidation centres for the capital.
- Maintain the exisiting Congestion Charge Zone and freeze prices for four years.
- Safer cycling: safer junctions and Cycle Superhighways; increasing policing of cycle lanes and expansion of the existing Cycle Hire scheme into South London.
Boris Johnson – Conservative Party candidate
Johnson’s manifesto pledges that, as mayor, he would:
- Establish a £50m roads blackspot fund to relieve congestion in key locations in London. The money will be spent on redesigning roads to improve traffic flow; optimising traffic signals, removing street clutter and improving conditions for pedestrians and cyclists.
- Establish a London Roads Task Force to create long-term proposals to tackle London’s most notorious roads – including the Hammersmith flyover, Purley Way, Wandsworth town centre, Euston Road, Archway and Kings Cross. The task force will report to the Mayor within six months with a strategic review of London’s roads.
- Introduce a ‘lane rental’ scheme to tackle roadworks (money raised would be used to cut roadworks derived congestion), as well as expanding the report it system for potholes.
- Continue with his review of traffic light phasing.
- Triple the number of cycle superhighways to 12 by 2015.
- ‘Drive forward’ a new road tunnel between the Greenwich Peninsula and Silvertown.
- Never introduce a London-wide Congestion Charge.
Brian Paddick - Liberal Democrat candidate
Paddick's manifesto pledges that, as mayor, he would:
- Invest to get London moving; although this investment would be into improving the public travel network (Tube, trains etc).
- Provide more express bus routes as well as orbital bus routes to avoid the need to travel into central London.
- Encourage businesses to adopt flexible working practices to reduce rush-hour volume.
- Mandate "most" commercial vans to be electric by 2020.
- Set up a clean air zone for London modelled on Berlin's to enforce higher engine standards.
- Keep the Congestion Charge; rise fees in line with public transport fare increases; conult on whether road pricing for commercial vechiles at peak time should be considered.
