Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

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Brilliant! I'd vote for him :D

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

My goodness - um, erm, well.

We're all doomed!

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Rather Boris than Ken! :disturbd:

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Not wrong with Ken, or his newts. :)

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

That's no way to talk about the Labour party ;)

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

So we have a choice of someone who seems to have no grasp on reallity and someone who seems to have no grasp on reallity..... Good to see the Conservatives putting up a strong candidate..... not.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Boris for mayor classic but then i don't live in london but it would sure be worth it for the humour value :D.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Boris would be great ! And even if not, I don't live there anyway !!

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Boris and the UKIP candidate, presumably. Boris is a lovely fellow and all that, partly because when he screws up, he owns up like a gentleman, but he has plenty of practice, and I'm not sure a man with no experience of actually running anything more complicated than a conservative magazine (he's always been in opposition as a politician) is necessarily better than the man who's spent his life in London politics. The Tories are clearly having trouble finding a London man suitable for the job - personally I think David Davis would be a fine candidate for them, but as one of the few non-Etonians in the Cabinet his talents are needed there.

Ken may be many things, but a man divorced from reality wouldn't have got the congestion charge working, improved the bus network so much and told the greedy private contractors Gordon Brown foisted on the tube to get stuffed when they came round with the begging bowl. He's also, of course, anti-Iraq War, which makes him the mainstream candidate these days.

Incidentally, London bus fares are going down 10% this year, to 90p a journey.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Yes, but hang on a second...

Cash Tube fares for a single Zone 1 journey went up by 33% in January this year, and bus fares did the same - which forces people who don't necessarily need an Oyster Card (like visitors to the Capital) to pay a massive amount more.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

That's part of the problem. Ken's solution to traffic problems has been to buy more buses. All very well and good, but all it's achieved in my area is to ensure that the traffic jams have a greater percentage of buses in them. It hasn't actually improved the reliability or punctuality of those buses. Indeed, on at least one route, it has got noticably worse.
What were they when Ken came in? 70p cash IIRC. The oyster card is all well and good (I have my travel card on one, much more convienant than paper tickets), but what is the minimum you can put on it? I bet it's more than 90p. So, you end up wasting money if you don't use public transport often.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

And of course Ken does love those pesky terrorists in the middle east, well, the ones that blow up Israeli women and children anyway.
I hear he's running for Mr Anti-semetic 2007.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

They're free now so I don't ahve an issue living in Leicester but having a n Oyster card in my wallet for travel in London :tu:

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Boris for mayor, bloody hell Boris for president :D He would get my vote :tu:

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

£5 is the minimum I believe if you do it online, not sure what the minimum is if you do it via a shop outlet.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

UKIP is also having trouble finding a suitable candidate. I don't live in London, but if I did I certainly consider voting for Boris as a vote against Livingstone, but I wouldn't ever for David Davis. I just don't think he's trustworthy at all, and as for his "talents" ... what talents?

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

I suspect that's the general idea - to make Londoners use public transport more often, and to give them a better deal if they do ... and to make us pesky visitors (not that I've been for a while) subsidise it for you.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

I understand that, but a casual visitor to the Capital would have to apply weeks in advance to get one.

Over 15m overseas visitors came to London last year, boosting the economy to the tune of £2.3bn a year. That's the same population as the whole of Greater London area plus a bit!

And that's not including the people from this country to like a day out in London every now and then. And there was nearly 11m of those last year too.

So 26m people for whom an Oyster card is pretty useless and being penalised for spending monday in London. Good old Ken!

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Other way round - my council tax subsidises the tubes and buses for you, sweet visitor. Say thank you, now. ;)

Last time I looked Oyster is available before you travel and there was an offer on recently making it free to obtain one instead of the usual £3 deposit (now ended, it's £3 again).

I'm not sure if they're available at airports, but they should be (they'll be available at Heathrow, of course, since it has a tube station, and at Waterloo International, so that's two of the main ways in covered). You can even order a Travelcard on Oyster in advance for a particular time period, should you want to which and works on the main line trains in the correct zone, too. As usual, planning your trip properly has its rewards - don't complain if you don't do your research before travelling - you wouldn't be surprised by having to speak French to a French taxi driver or pay in euros in Rome. Anyway, for anyone fancying a trip to London, here you are:

https://sales.oystercard.com/oyster/...method=display

Bus fares - from memory they were
* 70p outside central London and a pound inside central London back around 2000,
* then a pound everywhere,
* then Oyster 80p off-peak/£1 peak,
* then Oyster £1 all day,
* now going back to 90p all day

So the maximum rise in the last 7 years is 20p (29%), and if your journey takes you into the centre it's a fall of 10p (10%). As a comparison, here are a few other areas:
* Birmingham (TWM) - £1 for short, £1.40 for long journeys
* Glasgow (First) - 75p to £1.35
* Edinburgh (Lothian) - £1 flat

I also looked at Newcastle, Manchester, Bristol and Liverpool, but there isn't an obvious place to look for fare information in those areas. Well, they've got the fragmented Thatcher-inspired deregulation, of course, which fortunately never happened in London (the services are run by private companies as concessions, where the fares and service quality are set centrally - this seems to be about the best model for public private partnership, and the new Overground rail concession is on a similar model, part run by the world-class Hong Kong metro operator MTR using brand-new air-conditioned trains, fully integrated into Oyster etc. Can't be bad).

So the 'expensive London buses' theory doesn't hold water, particularly if you travel by bus outside London and pay more for a substantially worse service (dirty, old bus, exact change only, complicated fare structure etc., in my experience in Birmingham). The ridership figures tend to bear this out, since the main factor in recent increases in UK bus ridership is London - the rest of the country went down. Finally, since average wages in London are rather higher than elsewhere, so if you don't live in London you're being screwed twice by your local bus bandits - a £1 fare here is a lot less out of your wage packet than in Glasgow, say.

I really don't get people complaining about Livingstone's transport policy - surely getting more people on public transport by improving it, making it more convenient and offering low fares is a *good* thing? Or am I missing something? Is this the standard British knocking of success, even when it's the rare example of a politician who actually delivers what he said?

BS, Xacc - what evidence is there that he's anti-Semitic (note spelling)? I certainly don't think he is, and as you know I'm of Jewish origin. I'd be a lot less polite if doorstepped by an Evening Standard hack, or perhaps someone trying to convince me that Israeli women and children are somehow more deserving of life and limb than, say, Lebanese or Palestinian ones. That would really get up my nose.

Anyway, Boris is 'Very Strongly For the Iraq War', by his voting record, although he's since come out and criticised the US (his birthplace, by the way) on his blog for human rights abuses, and is anti-ID cards and for an investigation into Iraq, but then so's Livingstone. Boris has also promised to publish the leaked documents about Bush's threat to bomb al-Jazeera:

http://www.boris-johnson.com/archive..._aljazeera.php

which must presumably make him a terrorist-loving anti-American liberal PC do-gooder, by the rules of right-wing wingnuttery. Actually, it's because he has a decent British sense of fair play and distaste for cover-up and hypocrisy, but they're easily confused in some quarters.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

You're right, it is BS, he isn't really standing for Mr Anti-semitic 2007, though if he was he'd get my vote.
His support of "palestinian" groups who spend a large amount of their time plotting the deaths of Israelis is known.
His refusal to apologise for insulting another member of the public who he knew was Jewish, was attrocious, or do you believe that public servants shouldn't have manners?
Is it ok for the Mayor to insult members of the public, or just jewish journalists?

Never seen anyone suggest that, perhaps you can state who it is that's been trying to suggest that Israeli women and children are more deserving of life and limb than Lebanese or "Palestinian" ones?
Go on.
Do tell if you can.
Although I did find it interesting that despite how vocal you were when Israel were attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, when Lebanese forces start killing Lebanese civilians, you're strangely silent.
Is it ok because there wasn't that many dying, or was it ok because Jews weren't doing the killing?
Or was it just too hard to condemn the Lebanese goverment of which Hezbollah are part of?
Oh wait, Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers which prevoked the attack, I also don't remember you condeming them for doing that.

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

Are you really saying that their actions were justified because two soldiers were kidnapped, hundreds of dead women and children, I wonder what actions you feel Canada, Finland and the other countries should have been 'allowed' to get away with in response to Israel murdering their soldiers?

Re: Boris Johnson considered for London mayor
 

I'm saying I don't recall BBKing condemning Hezbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers.
Can you?

Interesting as he's been quite vocal against the US for doing the same to citizens of other nations, or is that only bad because the US are doing it?