Transport in London is shit

*maybe not if you use the northern line

And the Hammersmith&Shittyline.

It's surely more balanced to compare London with Tokyo, New York, Paris etc rather than Basildon, Letchworth, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Transport in London is LOTS better than transport in New York.

Basically, transport in London is far from shit.

*maybe not if you use the northern line

That's been my primary line for about 4 years now and I'm not complaining, it's fine.

International competitiveness studies highlight the expense of transport, crumbling infrastructure, and historic lack of investment as a negative factor in London's economic position.

Not, of course, that it's the government's responsibility nowadays.

That said, anyone who lives in London who DOESN'T buy a monthly travel card is either an asylum seeker or mad.

Public public public money money money is what is needs.

but i only really use buses and not even daily -- i reckon so far i am up on the deal by some way though given the fierceness w.which they are policin the bendies now this will probbly have to change :(

I still have trouble understanding why/how Virgin charge £75 return to Manchester (with other return options reaching over £400) when you can fly several times the distance for half the price. And why does it take twice as long coming back? Can trains not tilt southbound?

we all know you arrived here just a few days ago from Kabul. the game's up, sonny chief.

I don't know about the tube, but the rail companies apparently make over £100m profit a year in London, and the cost for providing staff is estimated to be between £2m to £4m a year.

I don't find them comfortable in the slightest. They seem much harder than the seats on most other buses * and, into the bargain, the poor suspension on those vehicles gives a very bumpy ride in my experience.

* the notable exceptions to this that I've found are a few of the buses used on the 341 route which have purple seats with ridiculously thin upholstery; but these are not to be confused with some others on the same route which also have purple seats but which are wonderfully comfortable.

Very true. Resolving as I did about 4 years ago not to travel on it any more was one of the best decisions I have ever made, in a number of ways.

Is this actually true? I'd always thought received wisdom said the exact opposite.

Public transport in London is good, but wasn't really designed to serve a city that's growing this fast - seems to be where all the problems stem from.

Oak - are you the person I think you are? Something rings familiar here.

*maybe not if you use the northern line

kings cross - south wimbledon, last thursday, circa midnight = 100 minutes

but yeah, mostly its good. 24 hour tubes would be nice.

outside london you can, you know, walk or cycle places.

you can do those things inside london too, you know.

Eh? How many people do you reckon they employ?

i cant see train travel getting much cheaper as a result of competition from air travel. maybe we should read my friends dissertation about rail/air competition for business travel between leeds and london. isnt the problem partly that franchising to an extent creates kinda flabby uncompetitive practice, where profits can be made in relative safety from predatory activity, if there isnt strong enough contractual arrnagements or tight enough regulation on the performance of the franchisee?

eg "we award you this contract but will continue to allow you to increase fares/reduce penalties for poor performance, and you can do this for the next 10 years" as opposed to "you have a guaranteed revenue stream for the next 10 years but oyu must ensure to do X Y Z and not do P Q and S"?

i dont really know anything about this anyways.

i guess in a sense i dont really compare london to other cities in europe so that gives me a warped sense of how good transport is in comparison to other UK CITIES (dear sirz, outside of london there are population sizes larger than Basildon, Letchworth, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy). but then again what other european cities are comparable? how does paris do? it might be hyperbole but what euro cities are comparable in terms of geograpohic spread, density of developemnt, population etc etc?

moscow was pretty awesome but they run everything on vodka there, or something. actually it was sort of shit outside the metro, but it depends what your criteria for "good public transport" are

When it comes to the 'after midnight' bit, in London that usually means walking through the rain then freezing at a bus stop for half an hour then sitting on a very slow nightbus full of nutters, or paying twenty-five quid to a random ex-convict with a 'taxi' who'll drive you home (eventually, after getting lost) while spouting reactionary nonsense at you the whole way. In New York there seem to be five yellow taxis waiting for you immediately at any time, they don't cost much, and with the grid system they don't get lost.

again, its hard not to laugh when you are subject to the whims of a properly deregulated market outside of london. First Groups bus fares went up 4 times in a year in s yorks, now its 1.50 a single on first buses. still 1.20/30 in london?

as for tube fares, what is expensive about a 2.50 tube fare? in comparison to previous prices? or are you assessing the cost of labour, infrastructure, distance travelled etc etc and concluding that it is overpriced?

-- ambrose (ambrosewhit...), February 14th, 2006.

what's expensive is, it's expensive! let someone else do the math. but yes 'distance travelled' being about 2-3 miles, it does seem out of proportion.

still 1.20/30 in london?

It's now £1.50. Considering that, what 4 years ago(?), local journeys were 70p, I'd say that is somewhat above the rate of inflation.

another factor to consider might be the *vast fucking profits* made by the operator too?

Transport in London is still quite good though. Got the rare "seat on both trains on the commute" achievement today. Work from home stuff has made travelling on Mondays and Fridays way nicer if you have any say over it

― hiroyoshi tins in (Sgt. Biscuits), Friday, 31 January 2025 10:35 (fifty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ms Imago has worked out that you often get a seat on the one that's come one stop from Crystal Palace rather than the Stygian ordeal that's the West Croydon branch

100%. 8:21 for life. I don't care if the 8:14 makes me more likely to be on time for work, it can go to hell

big fan of cuntery and western

Yorkshire, aka God's own cuntery.

you often get a seat on the one that's come one stop from Crystal Palace rather than

The real unsung hero is the London Bridge train, which has a wide selection of seats without fail... the challenge is whether its provincial half hourly schedule lines up with your own

Here's a novelty: a guy on the bus this morning setting fire to newspapers. I"m assuming the free copies of the Metro helpfully provided by TFL.

These rejected Overground line names are all cooler than the ones we ended up with

https://www.londoncentric.media/p/the-rejected-london-overground-line

man how cool would it to be to travel on the lover's rock line

Polari Line might have been an interesting journey.

Disco Line!

I mourn the loss of the Fanny line

Can we talk about how Lime bikes are just left willy nilly all over pavements? It's becoming ridiculous where I live. Leaving for work this morning and there were four outside my flat - one of them was actually in the road! Again, this could be down to where you actually live in London but, every morning, on the bus to work I see dozens of them just dumped wherever, in the middle of pavements, at bus stops etc.

They should be parked in their proper place, in a river or canal.

No, they're everywhere, even in the middle of the fields where I walk my dog. Pavements outside my office completely blocked. Does anyone use the officially-sanctioned TfL bikes anymore?

It's enraging. Often they're left right in the middle of a bike line, often just dumped on their side. They are HUGE and heavy to lift up and get out of the way. One day I was so pissed I stopped, got off my bike, walked over to the beached Lime bike blocking both directions of the bike lane, and did like a rage-fuelled deadlift of it, HURLING it onto the pavement a few feet away where it clanged and banged to the ground. It sounded like somebody had just dropped a small Nissan from a height of like 20 feet. People stared and quickly went back to what they were doing because I was clearly in a fucking fugue state

I came out of Finsbury Park tube one evening and there was about half a dozen of them blocking the exit, I kicked the nearest one over and the whole lot of them fell over, which didn't really help matters but made me feel better.

Also, the men who ride on them are ARSEHOLES.

Was walking Widget across the road at the crossing in front of the big Holborn police station and with a green signal, when a Lime bike wanker came through without stopping. Widget baulked in the middle of the crossing and I gave the rider a stern look, only to be admonished: ‘you could have just kept walking!’

Seriously, that guy deserved to fall under a lorry. The next set of lights is amongst the most dangerous for cyclists in London and not obeying basic traffic signals is a good way to wind up amongst the casualties.

I'm a big use of Forest bikes, rarely Lime, but where I work it does seem like Lime do really overload parking areas with their own bikes to block their rival's capacity for using the same space.

it is weird how it's just okay for this private bike business to have people dump the bikes basically anywhere. like this just happened and we're all supposed to think it's fine.

The Forest ones are as bad on terms of being dumped everywhere, it's just that there's not as many of them and they aren't a screaming nightmarish psychedelic green colour so they don't register as easily.

(xp) They must employ the same lobbyists as the gambling and fast food industries.

the noise of the stolen ones is annoyingly the soundtrack of summer in london now also

it is weird how it's just okay for this private bike business to have people dump the bikes basically anywhere. like this just happened and we're all supposed to think it's fine.

it’s parasitic and completely objectionable. they’re left lying in hideous hazardous piles all over the place in australia and new zealand as well. i hate them.

just a sign of how nobody gaf what private businesses do or about public space for pedestrians

they’re making a mockery of us all

> They are HUGE and heavy to lift up and get out of the way.

some you can lift by the saddle and wheel out of the way using the front wheel, some lock the front wheel in an annoying way so you're left to shuffle them along an inch at a time.

> it is weird how it's just okay for this private bike business to have people dump the bikes basically anywhere. like this just happened and we're all supposed to think it's fine.

hammersmith council had a phase of collecting all the badly parked bikes and storing them in a compound under the flyover. there were probably 300 there at one point.

wasn't there some thing where they'd told Westminster Council they'd increased the automatic fines for dumping them to some actually meaningfully deterrent level, but they'd actually just done nothing at all

anyway yeah the fly-tipped ones should all be gathered up and trebucheted through their CEO's living room window at 3am

Under Westminster’s deal with Lime, users are charged £10, after an initial warning, for bad parking, rather than £2. But she thinks this doesn’t even touch the sides. “Ten pounds – for goodness sake. That’s nothing. That’s a pint. It should be £50 or £100, and it should go up every time you get caught.” Lime’s standard scale currently sees users fined £10 only for the fourth offence (by the fifth they get a £20 fine and are banned).

Yet when I contacted Lime to confirm how this worked in Westminster – did it keep going up from £10? What did it go up to? – it refused to say. A week of incredibly dull emails later, it emerged it was not following the agreement. It was charging users £2, as it was everywhere else – and this only went up to £10 on the third offence. Lime later put this down to a “misunderstanding” and said it would “align with Westminster’s expectations” from now on.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2024/jan/14/lime-bikes-london-pavements-wayne-ting-ebikes-scooters

There were always lots of nice cyclists in London who owned their own bikes and knew how to not be aggressive toward pedestrians. There has been quite a shift where these are now more in the minority, with bikes in London are either this lime mess or middle class people in all this gear cycling as if they were on The Tour de France stage on a weekend.

Corbyn's new party should get on the case with this one

Overtime many of us will need to get away from cars which means more use of public transport or bikes, but there's a real fucked relationship to them here.

The piece linked above seem to be putting the blame of bikes dumped in the river to kids who hack into them but ppl who dump them across the pavement are paying for them. Its cunt behaviour.

I love Limes. They're super useful and make commutes and school pickups considerably less annoying. I would happily use another bike service but none are available near me.

It is easy not being an arsehole on a Lime, if you try -- drive slowly on a street with lots of pedestrians, don't drive in parks or on pavements, apologise if you mess up, park somewhere that doesn't block pedestrians (including disabled pedestrians who need more space), and DON'T PARK IT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING ROAD. These things are not hard! Also: accept that everyone hates you and that's fair enough.

...and cars are still worse.

Getting people out of cars and onto bikes is a great idea obviously and I'm sure most people use these bikes responsibly but ... Anyway you're on a hiding to nothing in London, the City of Fools.

Lime bikes and others are really really useful. Whenever I land in a new city it’s an absolute blessing to be able to get around quickly and efficiently. I’ve lost touch with how people get their days done on transit let alone cars. I even use them a bit in Melbourne when the right bike in the stable isn’t available.

However people are dickheads and there’s some real tragedy of the commons shit with the making and the breaking of bikes and I get infuriated with the traffic rule violations. We need rules and respect for vulnerable road users (and respect from the lunatics in Two tonne murder boxes as well).

Although the minimum age is 18 I see mostly children on our rental e-bikes. The vast majority riding dangerously, running red lights, riding on sidewalks. Injuries have happened, of course.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a child on a rental e-bike over here, strangely enough.

The idiots over her are all adults.

I've seen teens on them, usually stolen. My only moment of contentment whenever I see one.

Yeah I'll be furious if they clamp down on rental bikes now beyond the obvious need to expand designated parking areas and heftier fines for violating that without due cause (battery dying etc.).

I actually have to call Forest support often to lock the bike because on their app/according to gps it's ONE METRE out of bounds when it isn't. But the pros will aleays outweigh the cons for me.

Has some at the Guardian been reading this thread, this has been posted in the last half hour:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/aug/22/hire-ebikes-accumulate-london-border-rival-firms

I'd maybe make these free to use for under-18s too, even just to hardly ever hear that bleep again :)

They’re the worst thing to happen to London in fucking ages. Massive swathes of pavement randomly made inaccessible to wheelchair users, parents having to push their buggies in the road, make the whole city look like a dump. Also there was an article a while ago about how many of them are dangerously broken, faulty brakes etc. Whoever is making money off them should die painfully.

Definitely these companies get away with a lot or are struggling with maintenance. I've had a pedal completely come loose and drop off while riding.

xp yeah its a privatized scam. There should be docking stations all over the city where you have to lock them otherwise you should get a fine/penalty/ban, but you know this would entail building an infrastructure which is not something anyone is ever going to bother with anymore.

If you find a faulty bike, you can register it on the app, but the bike still gets listed as available.

Per London Centric, apparently if you specify the bike has brake problem (even if that's not the problem), it gets serviced more quickly.

A few months ago I picked up a nice pink-sprayed Limebike, drove it home, and my neighbour said "is there a pink swastika on your limebike?" And there was. I used my daughter's poster paints to cover it over.

xp yeah its a privatized scam. There should be docking stations all over the city where you have to lock them otherwise you should get a fine/penalty/ban, but you know this would entail building an infrastructure which is not something anyone is ever going to bother with anymore.

But wasn't this done ten years ago at massive expense, and now it's all been thrown away? That's the bit I don't really understand.

The docking stations are for the TfL bikes.

and the docking stations never made it to Southwark, so Lime made a huge difference for getting about Peckham.

iirc TfL's own bike hire expansion halted many years ago bc TfL expected councils to start paying some or all of the costs of installing docking stations, something like £200k apiece. Few local authorities are willing and/or able to prioritise that.

i feel like some docking stations have been removed even since then? think there was one on my street and it's gone now.

Southwark council has been shockingly bad on accommodating TfL bikes.

The Hounslow situation is interesting as Lime have otherwise dominated the outer boroughs going further and further out. I used one a lot to get from South London all the way to Harrow visiting my Dad in hospital last year.