I’ve always wondered how useful the line will be. OK, not everyone from south London wants to go to Cricklewood or Bedford, but it does link south London straight to Kings Cross and Luton airport, and north London to Gatwick. This new line will link west London to the City and Docklands and east London to the West End, but other lines already exist that do that, although this one does it in fewer stops. Thameslink caused nothing like the huge level of disruption that Crossrail is doing; whole areas of central London, such as around Tottenham Court Road station (and, I’m told, Whitechapel as well), have been turned into building sites, with huge numbers of businesses having been forced to close.

The exhibition featured a scale model of London with its railways highlighted (Crossrail less prominently so, for some reason). There was a tube model of Tottenham Court Road station, which you could look into and just about make out signs and people standing on the platform. The station designs don’t seem to be too flashy — this isn’t going to be a repeat of the “Star Trek sets” on the Waterloo-North Greenwich stretch of the Jubilee line. But I can’t help wonder if it will be money well spent. It took ages to get the thing rolling, even during the “boom”, so why is it a priority now that the boom’s over?

I suspect that the real reason is to provide a faster link between the Docklands and Heathrow — the Docklands as we know them are, of course, a Thatcherite product and the people in power now think she did not go far enough. Besides Heathrow, other end points include Shenfield, where trains to Southend and East Anglia stop, but also Abbey Wood (an obscure south-east London suburban station) and Maidenhead (rather than the more obvious Reading). The Heathrow link uses the Heathrow Express branch, which makes it look likely that you will not be able to use a Travelcard to get there. Perhaps it’s a way of injecting money into the economy, but public works projects for their own sake sound a bit old-fashioned and Keynesian for this government.

I’ve written about the Doncaster tweet before. In both cases, it’s arguable that the content did not justify the authors being arrested, since terrorist attacks on airports (let alone aeroplanes) do not generally come from dissatisfied customers but from politically-motivated terrorists, and a single person cannot stone someone to death: it takes a crowd to do that. Still, if a dissatisfied customer threatened to burn a restaurant down, that would be taken every bit as seriously as this, if not more so. It is only to be expected that threats to bomb airports are taken extremely seriously, because there have been attacks, and attempted attacks, on planes in the very recent past, and unlike in a train or car accident, if one blows up in mid-air, you have no chance. People are just that much more nervous about threats to air safety.

This is only the latest in a long line of incidents in which there is outrage at a law which, supposedly, should be getting used to keep “others”, be they Muslims, young Black men or “chavs”, in line being applied to middle-class white people. A few years ago, a commenter noted on the blog Samizdata that there was a tendency for well-to-do white women to run to the media with tales of outrage because they were arrested and put in a cell overnight for knowingly breaking the law, as if the law only applied to lesser mortals. The same was true of the outrage about the white British man who could not bring his 19-year-old white Canadian wife into this country, a law clamoured for by the anti-immigration lobby as a way of eliminating the Asian practice of bringing in young wives from “the village back home”; if the bride had come from a poorer country and had not been white, there would have been no such outrage even if she and the husband were well-educated.

A similar attitude can be found in some of the protests against intrusive airport security, such as the “naked body scanners”. I recently saw an article on the right-wing news website WorldNet Daily complaining about the scans in the USA, and two of those who complained mentioned that they were white or “as American looking as apple-pie”, as if that should excuse them from the same level of security as everyone else. What isn’t said is that it’s quite OK for this kind of harassment to take place when those travelling are Muslims, or have names that look like Muslim names (because of terrorism), or Hispanic or Black (because of drugs etc.), but perish the thought that someone who looks like an American goes through the same thing. Of course, Timothy McVeigh did not look or sound like a Muslim, nor did the Unabomber.

The article does mention that staff operating scanners in Nigeria had been reported as using them for what is essentially sexual harassment of passengers (who are mostly black, obviously), but the article clearly is not objecting to the sexual harassment of passengers in general, only when it’s white people, because white people are obviously not criminals or terrorists, an assumption that history does not bear out. They should accept that the law applies to everyone and exists to protect everyone and assumes nothing about what the threat looks like or where it comes from (that’s the theory, anyway), and if they do not like it, they should campaign to make it fair for everyone, not just exempt themselves by saying that it should apply only to everyone but them.

It has a long history — until recently it was called the 726, and has run at various points from Slough to Gravesend, Heathrow to Dartford, Heathrow to Bromley, and as the X26 it runs only from Heathrow to Croydon. It has always been a limited-stop bus, but it now runs basically from town to town. It was historically about hourly; now it’s half-hourly.

The problem is, at peak hours it’s almost always packed, the reason being its abject lack of capacity. It’s usually a single-deck bus, and the space taken up by several of the seats is taken up by luggage racks or “backside rests” mounted on the walls, because the route seems to be run on the basis that it is primarily an airport link, rather than a link between three large towns used by commuters and schoolkids in the absence of a direct rail link (except between Croydon and Sutton). Some of the buses have one entrance/exit at the front, and others have a separate exit in the middle, and as you might expect, this reduces the capacity, and they use both types of vehicles at all times of day, when you need more capacity at peak times. As with many modern buses, the legroom varies wildly from ample (like the groups of seats that face each other), to just about adequate (most of the seats), to just about zero (some of the seats on the bench at the back, crammed in between the back of the bus and the two seats in front).

I’ve noticed that other buses I’ve taken this week have not been full, even at peak times, so perhaps that reflects the slowdown in the economy, but the 213 route (from Kingston to Sutton, also via New Malden) is much more frequent, and uses double-deck buses, and is not always utterly packed. There should surely be a lesson here for the running of the X26 route.

A lot of this has to do with the opening-up of the route — it used to be a Green Line route and the vehicles were coaches, with more comfortable seats than on a normal bus, with limited stops and special fares. Nowadays you pay the same as you do on the stopping buses, which is a good thing, but if more people are to use it, they need to increase the capacity and not reduce it. Surely the regular users should take this up with Transport for London or the operator (Metrobus).

To start with, there is currently not one station in the West End which is wheelchair accessible. Green Park is admittedly on the fringes of the West End, but it’s within reasonable distance of Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street, and serves three lines, so it is a strategic location. Anyone coming from south London can take a bus (and nearly all London buses are accessible now, when the space set aside for wheelchairs is not taken up by a pushchair) to Brixton station and get off at Green Park. It extends the accessible part of the Jubilee Line to the West End and also fills a gap for the Piccadilly Line, on which there are several accessible stations on the open west London section, including Earl’s Court, Hammersmith, Acton Town, Sudbury Town, Hillingdon, Uxbridge, Hounslow East and West and all the Heathrow stations.

One reason why he thinks the whole idea of “step-free access” is pointless is that, to get onto the tubes, you have to go up “a step — insurmountable to wheelchairs”. Well, perhaps, unless the wheelchair user is in a group, or can find any helpful member of the public to give him or her a hand, or unless staff have been trained to get wheelchairs onto the trains. But some wheelchair users can actually tip their chairs back and move them forward, so as to mount kerbs and small steps. You can see it demonstrated in this video. Whether this woman could get on a Tube with that technique I’m not sure.

Another reason is that only 3,500 disabled people supposedly live in the City of Westminster, the borough in which Green Park sits. Well, hello Andrew, Green Park is actually in central London, and people want to go to the centre of town for reasons other than living there. Most of the City of Westminster is served by Tube stations other than Green Park (the borough also includes a large chunk of suburbia), and besides Westminster (a long walk from Green Park, although convenient for Trafalgar Square) no other station in the City of Westminster is accessible. It would probably be cheaper to provide all the disabled people in inner and outer Westminster with cars (and by the way, many of the more severely disabled will require vans, not cars) than to make all the stations accessible, but it would certainly not be cheaper to do this for all the disabled people in London who might want to visit the West End than to make one strategic station accessible.

On the second page of the article, he makes what might be a valid point about the state of the Dial-a-Ride scheme, which is underfunded and bound by allegedly stupid rules, such as a six-mile limit (which would preclude any journey from an outer suburban location to central London) and which has been known to prohibit passengers’ spouses from travelling with them. Well, perhaps Transport for London might provide transport for people who can’t use the buses to get from their houses to the nearest commercial centre, which might not be central London but, say, Enfield or Kingston, but providing a chauffer-driven van to take every wheelchair user who ever wants to go from New Malden or Orpington to the West End is not economical. Making buses, and some strategic stations and all new lines, accessible is. Besides, vans can only take so many people, particularly if they have had seats removed to make way for lifts, ramps or multiple wheelchairs, and if a wheelchair user wants to join a large party on a trip to the theatre, it makes more sense for them to take the same mode of transport as everyone else rather than get separated from them, even if they all have to take a slightly longer way round.

On page 3, he argues that the Tube is in any case “a service which, even for the able-bodied, is an exercise in low-level misery”. However, that’s only when it breaks down, which is often but not on most journeys. Yes, getting stuck in the tunnel is frustrating, but so is getting stuck in a jam on a bus whose driver won’t open the door even when there’s no prospect of any movement and the stop is within sight. Even so, a person in a wheelchair might prefer to get stuck in a tunnel with his or her friends than get separated from them. He cites Richard Parry, “acting head of the Underground”, as saying that it’s an “Olympic” commitment but ultimately admitting that Green Park’s value is symbolic. However, it’s not. It’s an important route into the West End for people with disabilities. That’s real value.

Andrew Gilligan writes for the Evening Standard, a paper which was notorious for its attacks on the Livingstone administration on the Greater London Council in the 1980s. It used to be said that you couldn’t get money out of the GLC unless you ticked the right ‘minority’ boxes. The Spectator these days is the unabashed voice of privilege — white privilege, class privilege, whatever — and one can almost hear the Tory gents scoffing over this article in their gentlemen’s clubs about how this scheme will make it so much easier for all the one-legged, blind, quadriplegic black lesbians to get around, particularly when the next accessible stop on the Victoria Line south of Green Park happens to be Brixton.

Of course, any able-bodied person can make a supremely rational case about how making Green Park accessible will do nothing for the disabled, much as many a white man has argued that affirmative action harms black people, but they don’t do their argument any favours when they display this kind of ignorance about the skills disabled people have, besides the misrepresentation of the geography of the area. Does he still live in London, or has he done a Richard Littlejohn and relocated to Florida? We should be told.

This shouldn’t really be any surprise since the First group operates bus services around the UK and Greyhound is just another of its brands, but they don’t have the reputation for being fast in the USA but for being cheap and cheerful (or not so cheerful; they are also known as the preferred mode of transport for lone and recently-released prisoners). But if they really wanted to offer a scenic experience on the London to Portsmouth route, one wonders why they didn’t do it several years ago, as the most scenic bit of that route is just about to get taken away when the Hindhead tunnel is opened and the old road through the Devil’s Punch Bowl is closed. Such a shame as the A3 is how most people know that this feature exists.

I couldn’t help but notice how many black faces were in these adverts from the early 1980s, both as customers and as staff (and in one case, a lady telling us to go visit Mama; we have no excuse given Greyhound’s cheap fares). Is this perhaps because many black Americans couldn’t afford any other mode of transport then?

Clearly, the government is not exactly warm to the whole idea of train franchises anyway; it opposed the John Major government’s highly unpopular and expensive scheme and forced the former Railtrack back into public ownership when it could. Given that the New Labour government has a history of running a virtual welfare state for companies which run hospitals and schools, the fact that it doesn’t indulge National Express suggests that they don’t much like the whole franchise arrangement anyway, so why don’t they abolish it? It makes a joke of the whole system, with operators and sectors changing every few years, often regardless of whether passengers in the area served are happy with the service or not. (Certainly, this seemed to be the case with the old Anglia Railways when its franchise was merged into the former ‘one’ — meaning ‘operated by National Express’ — area along with the Liverpool Street commuter lines.)

National Express bid for the franchise, and was sold what turned out to be a less lucrative set of train operating rights than they had previously thought, largely because of the economic downturn. However, there is another issue here, which might be called the elephant in the carriage, or perhaps, on the line. This is that despite the fact that the ECML has the fastest trains on the whole network other than on the Channel Tunnel link, it serves several of the poorest parts of England: many of the biggest towns and cities on or near it (Doncaster, Darlington and the Teesside conurbation it serves, Newcastle/Gateshead) are economically depressed former mining centres already hard-hit by Thatcherism and pretty much every recession this century and last. Apart from London and Glasgow, both also served by the West Coast line, there is also not a single urban centre approaching the size of Manchester, Birmingham or Liverpool.

So, the ECML is a high-speed, high-tech line mostly serving small, poor cities. Its profitability is always going to be in doubt. The idea that it can be sustained by a public paying its operator’s franchise fees is doubtful; it should be run as a public service.

Am I the only person to fail to see the point of this service? The whole point of high speed lines is to make longer distances possible to travel more quickly by not stopping at every small town. No part of Kent is more than 80 miles from London (Ashford is much less). No town has a population approaching 100,000. Instead, it consists of a collection of small to medium-size towns dotted over what is actually not a very wide area. Some of the bigger towns are further west, like Maidstone and Tonbridge, and therefore do not get a look-in although it might be possible to improve the service to those places along the old lines.

The line was built to run trains to Paris and Brussels, both several hundred miles from London, and the Eurostar train has a top speed of 186mph. Running commuter trains with a top speed of 140mph, which will not be travelling even that fast because they will be slowing down to stop at Stratford and Ebbsfleet, will degrade that service somewhat. Clearly, this was intended as a sweetener for commuters in Kent, but Kent has one of the densest rail networks in the whole country already, with trains running to all of the south London terminals (there are six). When Eurostar customers start complaining of delays because of lines being blocked by commuter trains from small towns in Kent, the ‘investment’ in these trains will start to look like more of a waste of money.

The Guardian today had a feature, on the front of its technology supplement, on the recent introduction in London of announcements on buses, telling us where the next stop is and where the bus is going. The announcements have appeared on the buses near where I live, particularly the Transdev (London United) buses. This is all done with the aid of a GPS unit and a Windows-based computer unit in a £117million upgrade.

The bus tracking system being fitted in Helsinki is much more advanced than ours: each bus will be visible on a Google map, the system being open so that anyone can write programs to use the information, like a desktop widget of the sort which are found on recent versions of Windows and Mac OS X. The stops themselves will be fitted with “near field information” tags which can be photographed, if you have a Nokia mobile, allowing you to retrieve information (presumably, this means information as to when the next bus or tram will arrive). Helsinki’s in-bus units use Linux, which is free, unlike Windows - one wonders how much money they saved by doing that. And the buses and trams will be wireless network hotspots.

No such system is proposed for London: it seems all we will get are robotically spoken announcements. They did a feature on these announcements on the BBC London breakfast show today, and what they picked up on was the fact that some of the landmarks after which the stops are named no longer exist: notably, pubs which closed, or buildings which were demolished, several years ago. Some of these places are well-known: Croydon’s airport, which closed in 1959, was still used as a destination for bus routes 194 and 119 for years afterwards (I think the Colonnades development is used now). Near my home there is a junction called Shannon Corner, nowadays best known for the site of the UK’s first drive-thru Krispy Kreme, which is named after a company whose building was on that junction, but which closed years ago. The name has not always been on signs, but it was the popular name for it for decades.

However, other bus stop names are simply stupid - named after nearby, obscure side roads. I’ve got used to the progression of little-known side road names called out on the bus down Worple Road on the way into Wimbledon, but the first stop in Wimbledon town centre is called Francis Grove, which goes no indication that this is on the entrance to Wimbledon town centre. The stop on the easterly entrance to the New Malden Fountain roundabout, where there is not only a pub called the Fountain but also an actual fountain, is called Walton Avenue, a road I had never heard of until I heard the announcement. It should be called New Malden Fountain (East). The stop actually called “New Malden, the Fountain” should be called New Malden Fountain (South). But get this: the 265 bus, which goes from Putney through Roehampton, down the A3 to Shannon Corner, through New Malden and then back on the A3 to Tolworth, leaves New Malden by way of Malden Road. The last stop before it hits the A3 again is called “St James’s Church / Kingston By-pass”; the next stop is called Malden Road, and it’s not on Malden Road but on the slip-road to the by-pass. The junction is called Malden Junction, and the stops should be called Malden Junction North and West (with or without a reference to the church). They really do need to get some sane names for the stops now that they are being announced, rather than just being on the stops.

The other annoying thing about the announcements is the way they are delivered. On the 131, for example, it goes “131 … to … Tooting Broadway”, with the “to” sounding like a number 2, which is confusing, but it also sounds unnatural. Given that the Croydon Tramlink has had decent-sounding announcements (each one purpose-recorded for each stop) since it first opened, why could they not have done the same on the buses, or at least better than they’ve done? I appreciate that these announcements are useful to blind people, who no longer have to rely on a driver who might forget that they were there and wanted to get off at a stated stop, but for the money, I’m sure they could have done better.

Well, two things stick out about this. The first is that it’s not been the first time that someone has been cleared of a criminal act and smeared by the authorities afterwards. Bob Woffinden, a well-known campaigner on miscarriages of justice in the UK, noted that the police came up with a load of smears against Stephen Downing, who spent well over 25 years in jail after confessing under duress to a murder he didn’t commit, in order to justify their actions and clear their criminal officers of any wrongdoing.

The second is that the supposed comments were made while working as a supply teacher. What schoolchildren ever like supply teachers? They’re the nasty strict teachers who make you sit and do some stock worksheet, and have a load of rules you aren’t familiar with. And the evidence was discounted because of the age of the children involved.

So, it’s inadmissible in court. But not in the newspapers, of course. And like the words in the email, the words are ambiguous. A lot of Muslims did not believe Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11 and some still don’t. Many saw him as a courageous fighter against Soviet oppression, against Northern Alliance thuggery and later against American imperialism. If someone said then that they were “on his team”, it is no evidence that they were involved in terrorism.

The fact remains that it does not prove that she was guilty of this particular offence.

This weekend I made an arrangement to meet a friend (and a friend’s friend) in a Moroccan restaurant in Golborne Road, London W10. Golborne Road is not itself a bus route, but it is close to Ladbroke Grove along which a number of buses from central London run (the 52 from Victoria, the 7 and 23 from Edgware Road). My visitors had come down from Edinburgh and didn’t know London that well; they had been visiting Oxford Street and asked the driver to drop them at Golborne Road. Several drivers told them that the bus didn’t go there; then one did, and ended up dropping them at Queensway.

When I got the call saying that’s where they’d been dropped off, it was 7.30pm - half an hour after the arranged time. I was furious; a bus driver had clearly given them the wrong information, whether deliberately or just because he was plain stupid I can’t tell. I mean, if you don’t know, why give people the wrong information? I had to have a friend drive me to Queensway to pick them up, and it was 8pm by the time we got down to dinner.

One thing I find frustrating about London is that people who deal with the public often have little knowledge of where they are working. Of course, not everyone can be a walking map book, but bus drivers should know of tourist attractions and other landmarks along their route. Golborne Road happens to be a major destination for Moroccans in London. It also happens to lie at the northern end of Portobello Road, a famous street market. And the number 23 goes past both ends of it! In fact, it goes along a short stretch at the end, on its way to its terminus at Westbourne Park tube station.

It’s not just bus drivers. Even some corner shop owners don’t bother to find out about what lies around their shop. A few weeks ago, I had to go to a new job in a road quite near to Old Street, on the edge of the City of London. I walked up City Road, having seen on a map that the road I was looking for (Lever Street) started somewhere near it. Problem is, Lever Street doesn’t quite reach City Road, so you won’t find it just by looking at signs on roads off City Road. You’d think local shopkeepers would know these things, but they don’t. (These particular shopkeepers were Indian, as I recall, and didn’t know English that well either.)

The Indian corner shop is a British institution, but I really do think that people who serve the public should need to demonstrate some local knowledge. They are often the first port of call for anyone who wants to know something about the local area. In the case of bus drivers, while there’s no need for them to do “the knowledge” as black cab drivers do, they should need to learn about where their route goes and what lies a few streets off it. Having lived here all my life, I found it difficult to understand how someone could fail to find Golborne Road, W10 - there is, after all, only one W10 and one Golborne Road in it. But not everyone knows that you can walk into a bookshop and look it up in a street atlas without buying the atlas. My Moroccan friend, who actually lives in Slough, said that London is actually a big city and not easy to find one’s way around. These bus companies should start training their drivers to be public servants, rather than the reckless jobsworths the public sometimes encounter.