The long and winding road

Yesterday afternoon's tube from Edgware Road to Waterloo was a minute late, but this did not cause me to miss my connection to Hersham, which ran on time.

Train was two minutes late coming into Waterloo this morning, which made me miss my connecting tube.  The tube I ended up taking was also a minute late by the time it arrived at Edgware Road, making me four minutes late overall: £12.

At Kensington Olympia, a rare show of TfL listening to common sense: TfL has backed down form plans to put up ticket gates to block a public right of way used by residents of the area as a shortcut to their homes.  See, the bridge can apparently also be used as an entrance to the tube station, and 10% of people dodge fares here as opposed to the average 2% elsewhere.  I don't know who gave TfL the right to arbitrarily block paths that are public rights of way if it feels like it, but he or she wants his or her head examined: this was always bound to be abused.  Still, crisis averted for those of you who even know what I'm talking about.  And for those who don't, this is an important victory: if they get away with it there, they could get away with it near you too.  I'm reasonably confident without seeing any evidence whatsoever that TfL's eventual plan is to put up ticket barriers at your front door so you can't even use their streets and pavements without paying. 

Somehow, George Harrison's song 'Taxman' springs to mind:

"If you drive a car I'll tax the street, and if you take a walk I'll tax your feet"

Wasn't about TfL originally, of course, but I'm also relatively certain that's what George really meant.

Elsewhere, conservatives in City Hall have called for a ban on strikes by tube staff, something Signal Failure wholeheartedly supports.  Presumably this renewal of calls to crush the trade unions comes as a tribute to Margaret Thatcher's death.  Instead, the Tories say, strikes should be replaced by 'compulsory independent meditation' - which I assume is a typo (read it now before it's corrected or else don't bother telling me later I can't read).

That's it for this morning, really: the rest of the TfL-related news is more about travel around Thatcher's funeral, and another article from the HuffPo which doesn't credit me as its source (which I'm pretty sure I am, at least in the same way I'm sure of George Harrison's mind and TfL's plans for personal house arrest).