Back in 2006, The Building Centre in Bloomsbury held an exhibition called London's Moving. Subtitled How Transport is Changing, it sought to shine a light on proposed improvements to transport in the capital. In particular it tried to suggest how likely each project was to be realised.
Each of the schemes featured in the exhibition has been given a special 'rating' by specialist consultancy LCA. The rating aims to give a 'score' for each scheme's overall likelihood of success, where 100% represents the highest guarantee of success, 50% is where things might be said to hang in the balance, and anything lower than 50% means the scheme faces such challenges that overall deliverability must be questioned, to a varying degree. The scoring is based on three factors - logistics, economics and politics.
I thought it'd be interesting to revisit three dozen of the projects then in the pipeline, and see how those probabilities turned out. How long ago 2006 now seems. At the time Ken Livingstone was well into his second mayoral term, Boris Johnson hadn't expressed any interest in taking over, and nobody was expecting the imminent economic slump. So, how did the experts do in the face of sheer unpredictability? (n.b. a lot of the coloured text is clickable)
A few thoughts.
» The experts did quite well, with a lot of green at the top and most of the red at the bottom.
» It's amazing how many projects still aren't complete, eleven years after they were on the drawing board.
» Very few projects completed between 2012 and 2016.
» Some real biggies are scheduled for 2018.
» Some projects we now think of as dead certs were looking questionable in 2006 (e.g. Crossrail).
» Some projects that looked like dead certs in 2006 just vanished (e.g. Tramlink to Crystal Palace, DLR to Dagenham Dock).
» That Croxley Rail Link percentage (53%) still looks quite prophetic.
» Imagine how wrong a list of planned transport projects from 2017 will look in 2028.
» A few other projects happened instead...
