London transport network 2016: Ken's wish list

Will London's tube map look like this in 2016? (PDF file). Putting Transport on the Map is Ken Livingstone's vision of the London tube/rail map if every planned project goes ahead. 11 new tube/rail/tram projects in West, South, central and mostly East London: extensions to the Metropolitan, Piccadilly, Thameslink, East London and DLR lines and the Croydon Tramlink. The new Cross Rail line and Cross River Transit (tram), East London Transit (bus), Greenwich Waterfront Transit (bus), and West London Transit (tram) schemes.

And as a map, it's a bit of a mess. They've run out of colours, stations like Farringdon and Liverpool Street have spawned enough nodes that they now look like networks themselves, and they've squished the bottle into a car so that the Cross Rail line can run horizontally through town. But let's not fret about the design because it's clearly not a proposal for a real map for the travelling public.

More importantly, it probably won't look like that in 2016 anyway - several (or most) of these changes are unlikely to happen. It's just TfL's sales deck, just their shopping list: Mayor bids to reshape London's transport network along new lines: "Mr Livingstone yesterday published a revised London transport map which included every project on the drawing board, in a last-ditch attempt to extract funds from the Treasury in Monday's comprehensive spending review."

It's interesting to compare this to the adapted Journey Planner map of 1994 (from the excellent Ken Garland book), which incorporated all known projected extensions and new lines at that time: proposed Chelsea-Hackney and Cross Rail lines, and extensions to the Metropolitan, East London, DLR and Jubilee lines. The Jubilee Line and DLR extensions are complete (and a further DLR extension, not on the 1994 map, is under way to London City Airport). The rest haven't happened, or have been replanned.

Related:

• Diamond Geezer and Going Underground on the 2016 map
• TfL's Putting Transport on the Map press release
• TfL's current transport initiatives and current transit schemes (not completely clear how these are different. "Transit" may mean "not train or tube".)
• The incredibly useful Always Touch Out tracks the status of transport projects in London
• New Statesman's transport supplement A to B: Will London's transport get us there? (PDF file)

Comments

[Richard Trendall]

I'm disgusted that the tube network is closed on Boxing Day - and Ken wants us to use public transport more!