a cable car system shamelessly named after your airline company (the Emirates Air Line)
the station at one end cumbersomely named after your airline company (Emirates Greenwich Peninsula)
the station at the other end clumsily named after your airline company (Emirates Royal Docks)
the cable car system, and its sponsored name, and the two stations, and their sponsored names, plastered all over millions of copies of the tube map until 2022
a red line on the tube map, in your official corporate colour, joining one sponsored station to the other sponsored station (in a garish, extremely distracting way)
a new roundel, wider than usual, in corporate red, slapped on the gondolas and the stations and the maps and any other promotional material you can get away with
enough money to fund the construction of the cable car out of private funds (which leaves umpteen millions to be paid by the public out of TfL's rail budget)
If it's ready for the Olympics (big if), the cablecar will be a convenient additional transport option between two major Games venues. Even if it's not ready for the Olympics, the cablecar will be a popular tourist attraction. Whether it's ready for the Olympics or not, the cablecar will provide additional cross-river resilience if ever the Jubilee line or Blackwall Tunnel are closed. Whenever it's ready, the cablecar will be bugger all use for commuters, saving incredibly few of them very little time.
Two million passengers a year? That isn't much. It's only 5500 passengers a day - the equivalent of two hours peak-time capacity. It seems that nobody expects this cablecar to be packed, nor even busy. That'll be because it goes from not-quite The O2 to not-quite the Excel exhibition centre, which isn't a journey 99.99% of London's population ever needs to make. For comparison, the Woolwich Ferry carries two and a half million passengers a year, in three clapped-out ferries running not terribly often.
No, the Emirates Air Line is an unnecessary shiny thing, conjured up by a Mayor who likes building unnecessary shiny things because they make it look like he's doing something. A big red tower by the Olympic Stadium - unnecessary, shiny, ticketed. A new red bus with a rear platform - unnecessary, shiny, expensive. Barclay-blue cycle lanes across the city - unnecessary, shiny, sponsored. A floating airport in the Thames estuary - unnecessary, shiny, dead. And now a suspended advert for a foreign airline as a tourist's plaything linking nowhere useful - unnecessary, shiny, irrelevant. Of all the things £60m could have been spent on, why this?
No, this is a vanity project, a social irrelevance, pimping transport infrastructure to the highest bidder, on the the day Boris prostituted the tube map. Four more years, anyone?
