obieone Some Londoners - me for one, and there are many others - are very unhappy about Boris Johnson's performance as Mayor.
His term in office is littered with extravagant, unnecessary and loss-making projects such as:
The Olympic Orbital sculpture commissioned by BJ which cost £3.1 million and which has been losing £10,00 a week. Only 124,000 people visited it between April 2014 and March 2015, which is far below the estimated visitor numbers.
The cable car project between North Greenwich and the Royal Docks which the Mail Online described as "the most pointless piece of public transport in Britain", linking "two not very interesting places". It has been described as a "theme park ride" because virtually no commuters use it - whereas Boris Johnson said it was needed as a commuter route. It cost £16 million.
According to the New Statesman, he spent £5.2 million lobbying for his "Boris Island" Thames Estuary airport project, despite the fact that "none of the major players in the aviation industry thought it was viable".
Then there is the Garden Bridge - a bridge which is not needed and which, though primarily privately funded, will cost TfL £30 million and the Treasury £30 million, and involve estimated yearly maintenance costs of £1 million.
The Routemaster "Bus for London" was introduced in 2012 after Boris Johnson pledged to restore conductors and an open back door. After spending £11.37m getting the project off the ground there is no money left to pay for £62,000 a year “customer assistants”, who man the open back platforms, leaving many of them closed for good.
The bus has been branded as dangerous and inefficient. Temperatures of 37 degrees have been recorded of 37 degrees, due to a lack of opening windows.
The supposedly “green” batteries result in dangerous handling and poor fuel efficiency, according to their drivers. It is said that the hybrid batteries are not charging properly, leaving many vehicles to run solely on a supplementary diesel engine which cannot cope. Due to these failures, the promised reduction in pollution levels have not been achieved.
Despite making assurance that no ticket offices would be closed, in fact all of them will be closed, leaving travellers to the mercy of ticket machines. This is despite substantial numbers of passengers believing that the offices should remain open. At less heavily used stations, it is felt that elderly people, sight impaired people and anybody else who might require extra assistance, will be negatively affected by these changes. The Evening Standard has also reported that at some stations where ticket offices have closed people are queuing for around 30 minutes to get a ticket and sometimes for as long as an hour.
Some Londoners are "up in arms" about many of these, and other, issues. However, like much of the electorate, both locally and nationally, many people feel disconnected from, and disillusioned by, politics and simply shrug and put up with it.
