West London’s Hammersmith Bridge (Adam Davy/PA)
(Picture: PA Archive)It’s possible that, last April, you chose not to read Sadiq Khan’s Mayoral Manifesto. If you didn’t, I don’t blame you, but you’d have missed his transportation improvement pledge. He promised to “work with TfL on a strategy for the suburbs, designed to increase connectivity in outer London through improved bus networks but also considering the role of rapid bus transit and trams”.
As a London Assembly Member who did read it, my views were mixed. Whilst it was a good thing that the Mayor seemed to have finally recognised that London is more than Zone 1, there are many questions left unanswered. Does he also recognise that ‘outer London’ is itself a construct and that areas within might have differing transport needs from one another, alongside some catching up to do? How will he ensure the diverse and vast areas of outer London achieve appropriate transport provision? Is his plan based on local engagement and the specific needs of widely differing neighbourhoods?
Lumping outer London together as a single space requiring a single strategy risks treating it as one homogenous blob, missing vast local nuances. Chessington is not Chingford; Stanmore is not Sidcup. All told, outer London has a population of five million and an area four times the size of its centre. It’s massive, intricate, diverse, and endlessly fascinating.
Rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy, we need multiple transport strategies covering every area of outer London. Instead of a top-down approach where Transport for London and the Mayor determine local needs from on high, outer London boroughs and residents should explain to TfL what transport infrastructure they need. This grassroots feedback should be looped into development decisions and future transportation planning.
Imagine adding thousands more people to an area and not considering how those people will travel around: it’s tantamount to crossing your fingers, closing your eyes, and hoping for the best. Time and time again, residents tell me they want their leaders to take a broader view of local infrastructure needs so that much-needed new homes can be accommodated neatly.
Successful local strategies would lay out how to best use development funding to maximise the provision of new transport infrastructure from the outset. Strategies would also be pitched at the right level to recognise the many issues that cut across borough boundaries and show clearly what further transport infrastructure is needed to enable future local development.
This way of working would benefit not simply South West London but any given part of outer London, as it would first lay out the status quo and any existing issues. This might include roads struggling to cope with current traffic volumes, areas with weak public transport provision, routes where there are few realistic alternatives to driving or long-standing issues that prevent the easy flow of people and goods.
In South West London, for example, we have the continuing saga of Hammersmith Bridge, which still affects traffic across multiple boroughs. We have major sporting venues – Twickenham – that have a wide-ranging impact. We have a public transport network oriented towards central London rather than towards local connectivity.
TfL measures local access to public transport on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 6 (excellent), to find a Public Transport Accessibility Level (PTAL) rating. This considers walking access time and service availability. It is essentially a way of measuring the density of the public transport network at any location in London.
My constituency has seen several proposed new developments with low PTAL ratings and insufficient improvement plans. These include proposals for 2,150 homes on the Tesco and Homebase sites in Osterley, which has a PTAL rating of 2, and 2,170 homes on the Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston, with a PTAL rating of 1a – almost as low as possible.
A unified yet flexible local transport strategy that clearly lays out the transport improvements necessary to make developments viable (without bringing an area to a constant standstill) would be an asset to residents, councils, and developers alike.
South West London, like all outer London constituencies, looks out beyond the city as well as inwards towards the centre. Residents are just as likely to orient their lives to friends and family in Esher, Epsom, or Staines as to Wimbledon, Putney, or Sutton. Life does not end at the zonal boundary or because the London border says so.
Local transport strategies should reflect this reality and help shape the sweep of change. By looking at what local transport should look like in 5, 10 or 20-years’ time, it becomes possible to take a judgement on how specific improvements fit into an overall plan. Instead of changes being piecemeal, they can be contextualised, so that when they seek to solve a problem – such as excess traffic in Richmond Town centre – the impact of any changes is properly considered, across an area that’s bigger than a borough but smaller than the construct of ‘outer London’.
In my report, Spaghetti South Western: Unravelling South West London Transport, I call for a South West London Transport Strategy to cover the three boroughs I represent: Hounslow, Kingston, and Richmond. I hope this will pave the way for Sadiq Khan to agree that, instead of producing a single outer London strategy, he should work with outer London boroughs and residents to produce a series of strategies, so that the unique challenges and local foibles of London’s intricate mosaic of communities are properly addressed – both now and for the future.
