London Mayor Ken Livingstone unveiled plans on Tuesday to spend 10-billion pounds ($17,8-billion) over five years to improve commuting and travel on the city’s crumbling road and rail networks.
”This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reverse decades of under-investment,” Livingstone said.
”The programme will deliver the real improvements in the services and capacity needed to keep London on the move.”
The proposals include an extension of the docklands light railway system, the metropolitan line on the London Underground rail subway and a tram network, as well as construction of a new road bridge over the River Thames.
Other projects include traffic congestion-easing measures, new air-cooled subway trains and extension of the East London line, part of the Underground network, to suburbs previously badly served by public transport.
London’s public transport system, notably the cramped and often unreliable Underground — the oldest such metropolitan railway in the world — is consistently named by both locals and visitors as the city’s least appealing feature.
Livingstone, the capital’s first directly elected mayor, has pledged to improve both public transport and traffic congestion, and in 2003 introduced a controversial toll on all vehicle drivers entering the city centre.
The new five-year project also includes completing the switch of London’s buses to low-floor handicap-accessible vehicles by 2006, and an accelerated programme to make more London Underground stations step-free.
Other schemes across London will make pavements safer, improve street lighting and add new road crossings and cycle paths.
”Whether you walk, cycle or travel by bus or Tube [underground], over the next five years, your journey should become safer, more reliable and more comfortable,” Livingstone said. – Sapa-AFP