The £16bn rail line will start near the upper reaches of the River Thames at Maidenhead, and run via Heathrow to underground stations in central London, the City and Canary Wharf, before continuing on to Essex. Business travellers will be able to get from Britain’s busiest airport – Heathrow – to its fastest-growing business district – Canary Wharf – in less than three-quarters of an hour, cutting 20 minutes and no end of hassle from the journey.
The bad news is that the project won’t be finished until 2017 – five years after the London Olympics – but at least, after endless political wrangling, the government has thrown its weight behind the kind of public infrastructure project that other cities have taken for granted for decades. Paris, for example, opened its first RER station in 1969; by the time London finally gets Crossrail almost half a century will have passed since then.
It is thought that the decision by the Corporation of London to stump up around £300m – after earlier funding pledges from the government, BAA and Canary Wharf – has finally made up a shortfall in funding that will allow Crossrail to become a reality.
Crossrail will still need parliamentary support but, although the Tories have remarked that if the government had acted sooner the cost of the project would have been a lot lower, this is unlikely to be a problem for such an obvious vote-winning scheme.
But the green light for Crossrail is only the latest in a line of transport changes that will affect business travellers in London and the south of England over the coming years and months.
First, the test runs of Eurostar trains from Paris to London St Pancras on High Speed 1 – Britain’s first dedicated high-speed railway – attracted much press coverage over the past quarter. But it is not only Eurostar services, which start from St Pancras in November, that will benefit from the high-speed line: Southeastern took delivery of its ‘Javelin’ trains which are set to run from St Pancras to the Olympic site in Stratford in just seven minutes, after which they will continue on to Kent.
London commuters were also celebrating after train companies agreed to extend the contactless Oyster Card system – by which Londoners can pay for Tube and bus journeys – to overground train services by 2009, under pressure from Transport for London (TfL). Under the existing rules, travellers who use the Oyster pay-as-you-go service, on which fares are capped to a daily limit, must pay separately to use a local train, making London’s public transport system a lot less integrated than it looks.
But there was uncertainty as Metronet, the company that was responsible for modernising and maintaining much of the London Underground network, went into administration in July amid a bitter dispute with Transport for London over cost overruns. At the heart of the issue is a dispute over whether Transport for London should compensate the company for overruns to the tune of almost £1bn. A preliminary ruling by the Tube arbiter Chris Bolt, disputed by TfL, suggests it does indeed owe Metronet between £370m and £1bn, or up to half its overspend.
Elsewhere on the trains, East Midlands Trains – owned by Stagecoach, which also runs South West Trains – takes over the Midland Mainline and Central Trains franchises in November; while National Express has won the battle to take over the east-coast mainline currently operated by GNER, from December.
‘The new tax is expected to hit more-polluting aircraft and those that fly further, rather than newer aircraft that fly short-haul routes; which explains why easyJet has been lobbying for the move’
Finally, it seems that European rail companies are taking a leaf out of airlines’ books, by launching ‘alliances’ that aim to make booking a one-stop shop. Railteam, an alliance of nine high-speed train companies, will link the booking systems of Eurostar, SNCF in France, Deutsche Bahn in Germany and main rail operators in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria, which may be just far enough to take you on an overland jolly to Euro 2008 next summer.
Up in the air
How will air transport develop over the next few years for business travellers? On the one hand, we are seeing more business-class-only services, more expansion of budget airlines and more regional routes; but on the other, the debate over the dirty, little secret of air travel – its environmental cost – is intensifying.
In October the chancellor Alistair Darling, in the spirit of the prevailing mood, announced a fundamental reform of green taxes on aviation as part of his pre-Budget report. From November 2009, the existing tax on air passengers will be replaced with a tax on aircraft; the idea being to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The new tax is expected to hit more-polluting aircraft and those that fly further, rather than newer aircraft that fly short-haul routes; which explains why easyJet has been lobbying for the move. The new tax is also expected to apply to private jets and cargo planes for the first time.
In the meantime, air passenger duty rates will stay exactly as they are, except that customers of business-class-only airlines such as Eos, Maxjet and Silverjet have had their tax loophole closed. From November 2008 they will pay the business-class rate of £80, rather than the economy rate of £40 that they have been paying up until now.
The past quarter has nevertheless seen more activity in the business-class-only market. Lufthansa, the German flag carrier, says it is launching a new business-class-only route from Frankfurt to Newark, and will look at introducing further routes. Silverjet, meanwhile, is introducing another Luton-to-Newark flight for the winter, and is also set to go to Dubai; while Maxjet is increasing frequency on its LA and Las Vegas routes from Stansted. Virgin Atlantic, meanwhile, is set to increase capacity on its highly popular premium economy class.
But while the transatlantic airline arena might look like a hotbed (if not a flatbed) of competition, the Office of Fair Trading has imposed a fine of £121.5m to British Airways after it admitted colluding with its rival Virgin Atlantic over the price of long-haul fuel surcharges. Less seriously, in the same week, 13 airlines fell into the OFT’s net for failing to include the complete cost of flights – such as taxes and surcharges – in advertisements and on their websites. The airlines have been forced to comply with the ruling from now on.
If you’re the sort of person who’s wowed by the kind of plane you fly on, it’s worth knowing that Boeing has admitted that the first flight of its new 787 Dreamliner – which launched in a blaze of publicity over the summer – will not take place until November or December, two months later than it originally hoped. British Airways has ordered 24 of the aircraft but also 12 of the brand new Airbus airliner, the A380 superjumbo. The first ever commercial flight of the A380 was due to be a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Sydney on October 25.
Finally, in a sign of the times, the International Air Transport Association has placed its very last order for paper airline tickets. Travellers will only be able to use electronic tickets from June of next year.
Road collision
The divisions over what to do about the congestion and carbon emissions on Britain’s roads look as wide as ever. Environmental group The Campaign for Better Transport has warned that Britain will descend into “traffic hell” over the next 20 years, with an estimated 6m more cars expected on the roads, and said we needed more money for buses and trains and more incentives to stay out of our cars. “The government must stop catering for all this traffic and instead give people and businesses good alternatives to driving,” said Stephen Joseph, executive director of the campaign.
Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation, disagrees. “The car will continue to be the workhouse of the economy. Cycling and walking have a part to play in tackling congestion, but they are only ever going to be a realistic prospect for a small percentage of business journeys,” he said. “With or without road pricing, it is clear that the UK can only avoid gridlock by investing in additional road capacity.”
A recent survey by the RAC Foundation published this autumn showed that 50% of the UK population had never used a bus. Looks like he might have a point.
