please empty your brain below
Londoners, take note: this is what happens when you vote for Boris Johnson. Short-term gimmicks, electioneering and tourist attractions, as opposed to vision, long-term strategy and real benefits.
Surprised that TfL or ArabFly haven't asked you to stop using your name for the cablecar gimmick thingy. It seems to be catching on elsewhere...
"part suspended" - love it!
On the other hand - if you've ever taken a cable car in the Alps, you'll realise that these fares are astonishingly cheap in comparison. I'm going for a ride as soon as I can to see the view!
Congrats on 5000th post - still amazed at all the stuff you find.
A huge achievement to get it done in time for the Olympics. Shows what *can* be done.
I'm glad to see I was only one day out on my guess that it would open on the 29th.
Well I'm going on it, it'll be a new way of seeing London.
Congratulations on your 5000th post and please keep them coming as I enjoy them very much.
If one wants an area to be sustainable in the long term, one needs to bring people to it. Bringing people with money to spend is essential in order for facilities in an area to develop. Who has most money to spend? Tourists.
With the transport options available until now, tourists haven't come to this area (other than for very specific purposes). If this brings tourists, from abroad and from the wider UK (and it will), great. It's adding to the future for this area. Already half the new jobs are stafffed by local people (so the blurb says).
The London Eye started off as British Airways London Eye. Then it became the Merlin Entertainments London Eye. It's now sponsored by EDF. Who calls it anything but The Eye or The london Eye now? DG likes the Lodnon Eye.
Plus, elsewhere in the blurb I read that commuters making 5 or more Oyster-paid journeys per week will have their Oyster adjusted so they only pay £1.60 per journey. If I were a commuter to this area, a ride on this would be a high-spot in my day (provided that it can cope with the traffic). Having peak hour quick journeys, and off-peak slower journeys would seem to be exceptionally forward-thinking, to meet the needs of the predicted two different sets of customers.
The amount of tax-payers money that have been spent on this is a pittance compared with what the Olympics will/have cost. I know which I think will be better value in the long term.
so, what i want to see is the passenger numbers over a year, how they are high at first when its a novelty and then slowly drops away.
"part suspended" is fantasically groan-worthy!
It's quite cheap for a cable car, it links two big venues and I don't think it's evil to build something that will attact millions of tourists to the East end.
Personally I'm wondering how long before it's sold off or shut down. Will any future mayor want this on their books? I still hold that A New Bus For London will be ceremonially dumped once the next non-Tory mayor gets in. And I don't hold much hope for this white elephant.
More substantively: have you reviewed the equivalent cost of Cable Cars in other major cities? Think you'll find how relatively cheap this London journeys will be.
Finally: your "ArabFly Dangleway" is moving quickly from parody to potentially racist. I'd watch your step before someone takes great offence.
Obviously depends on the speed of operation which can be varied. Watching during testing, I observed that cabins were passing a fixed point every 15 seconds, which does provide the required throughput.
I might ask if there's a special discount for only doing a "90 degree tour" i.e. travelling halfway across and then jumping out to plunge into the river below.
In terms of costs it's not bad compared to other gondalas - people have mentioned those in the Alps, but what about the utterly pointless one in Lisbon - there is goes along the river rather than across it and costs pretty much exactly the same as the new London one.
I was rather sad about the bitter tone of this article. Every criticism you make is valid, of course. But would this little piece of Boris-buffing be better addressed by a more relaxed, ironic, shoulder-shruggingly doleful response. Yes, a bit of "our" transport budget has gone on a tourist attraction. But hey, tories have done worse things than that in their time - still are probably. Full scale indignation would be better saved for these.
As for the nickname, I expect that the reason no "official" action has (I assume) been taken is of course that any such action would immediately give the nickname enormous publicity. I must admit that even if not technically racist, the use of the epithet "Arab" as part of a negative-facing appelation does make me feel a little queasy. The dangleway bit is fine - I would like that to catch on.
I agree with other commenters that the fare is a bit much for transport, but seen as a tourist attraction it is almost too cheap! It is not clear to me who gets any resulting profits - whether it is the London transport budget or the sponsoring airline.
But thanks again for yet another interesting post.
I was also amused by the vague opening date of 'summer 2012' - when the project would have been doomed to fail from the outset if it hadn't opened for then. I expect more people will use this in the next 2 months than will use it in the following 2 years.
For a tourist coming to London outside Olympics time it'll be a curiousity but not an essential visit - sure its cheaper than other cable cars, but at least most other cable cars give you panoramic views of mountains rather than an industrial part of East London.
@ Blue Witch - the problem with the Dangleway is that it is being portrayed as a viable public transport facility which it really is not. If this had been fully funded and built by the private sector, like the Eye, no one would care. They'd use it as a tourist attraction and be done with it. Tourists only go to North Greenwich for concerts and the odd one might go to Excel for exhibitions. There really is no other reason for them to go there much as there is rarely any reason for tourists to end up in Creteil in Paris or Pankow in Berlin.
£60m (and counting) could fund a whole load of worthwhile improvements or could have stopped bus fares going up. That would be a genuine help to public transport users in hard economic times. Instead we have a Mayoral trinket masquerading as "real" public transport.
Emirates is the airline of the United *Arab* Emirates. Unless the name of the country is itself racist I struggle to see how 'Arabfly Dangleway' is racist, unless you see 'Arab' as a pejorative, in which case you should probably seek some sensitivity training.
I've got no problem with the Dangleway as a tourist concept. What I dislike is using TfL's money to pay for it - this could have been spent electrifying the Barking line, on rebuilding the Elephant and Castle junction, on a foot and cycle bridge to Canary Wharf or any of the many better, cost effective, less showy alternatives.
As a tourist attraction connecting two large and profitable private venues, should they think this necessary they would have built it. As the Jubilee/DLR does the job very well, quickly and cheaply, they understandably didn't bother.
The amount of public money that has been sloshed around the royal docks on transport infrastructure is remarkable - if they had spent half of it BUILDING SOME HOUSES FOR PEOPLE TO LIVE IN the area would be vastly improved and some people would be actually benefiting from the spending beyond me and other urban wasteland enthusiasts.
The 60m represents about three weeks revenue if running at full capacity (96 hour week, 25000 pax per hour each way, average fare somewhere between £3 and £4)
Assuming the thing runs at a profit at all, you would need to multiply that payback time by the revenue/operating cost ratio.
But I wold not be ata ll suprised if operating costs spiral, like the Boris Bike scheme has: It is being swamped by sub-30 minute (and therefore free) hires, and the costs of an increasing army of redistribution staff needed to cope with the insatiable peak demand (there was a queue of over twenty at Waterloo last night waiting for a van to turn up to create some space - by the time the van had arrived and been loaded with fifteen of the bikes, another twenty had arrived, so the queue had actually grown to twenty five!)
Travelling from Buckingham Palace to the London Eye by means of this new link is surely not something that would ever e suggested by TfL's journey planner, or have the sponsors even more influence than I thought
- The London Eye was not built with millions of pounds of public money. The Arabfly Dangleway was.
- The London Eye is virtually opposite the Houses of Parliament. The Arabfly Dangleway is virtually opposite a disused dock.
- The London Eye is not marketed as being of any use for public transport. The supposedly commuter-friendly Arabfly Dangleway sells "360 degree trips" to the extensive market sector of people who don't want to go anywhere.
- The London Eye was neither conceived or exploited as part of a Mayoral election campaign. The Arabfly Dangleway featured heavily on Boris Johnson's "Every journey matters" political campaign at public expense.
- The London Eye did not bring millions of tourists to the West End, but rather hoovered up the substantial traffic which was there anyway. The Arabfly Dangleway, in the arse of the East End, will, no doubt after an initial novelty-value traffic spike, carry only tumbleweed.
"If one wants an area to be sustainable in the long term, one needs to bring people to it. Bringing people with money to spend is essential in order for facilities in an area to develop. Who has most money to spend? Tourists."
Wrong. It's bankers. Funnily enough, that's exactly what the Docklands Light Railway successfully achieved. You know, that thing which is supposed to be providing the "excellent transport links" on the north side of the river? Everyone thought the LDDC was mad to build that, too, but the crucial difference was that it did actually improve the connectivity of the area, and was designed for people to use it, not have "travel experiences" on it.
The wasteland which used to be docks was never redeveloped as a tourist attraction, because it would have been a commercial failure. It's like launching a website and calling it "social" and magically expecting it to be the next Facebook, as Google recently discovered to their cost. Nobody's going to go to the Greenwich peninsula just to ride a cable car and see the views of nothing much, any more than any bank would spontaneously up sticks and open a new head office in Shaftesbury Avenue.
The purpose of the cable car is hiedously mismatched with the local demographic. Sure, there's the Dome and ExCel, but how many people would want to travel just between those, and be willing to pay a surcharge (and a longer walk) over the existing transport option? Even during the Olympics, that's got to be a fringe market at best.
Maybe all new PT projects in London should be like this. For the price of the proposed Northern Line extension (£750 million) you could have twelve cable car routes.
Victoria or Vauxhall to Battersea Power Station is a similar distance to the AFDW.
And we could save even more money - for example the Shard and the Gherkin would make great pylons!
http://www.arabflydangleway.co.uk/assets/downloads/pricing.pdf
I've added a new bit in the middle of the post about the half-price "Multi Journey Oyster Arrangement".
I also note that, if you choose to buy the £16 'frequent flyer' boarding pass, it's a paper ticket which has to be presented at the barrier and manually cancelled by staff.
The dangleway name is catching - my dad now uses it without realising!
Cxx
The reason why people see a potentially racist problem with the nickname is that Arab is clearly a racial description. The sponsor is Emirates airlines, the people living there are Emirates. Arabs describes people living from Morroco to Yemen.
It is the same as describing British as Anglos (the politest version).
It is how 'Arab' is being used to what is clearly intended to be a derogatory phrase. It is clear that ArabFly Dangleway implies that this is an inferior method of transportation and by association somehow this means Arabs are inferior too.
There is no way any of you can say ArabFly Dangleway is a positive word.
I'm not saying the malice was intended, as clearly the vitriol was direccted at the transport system, but a use of ethnic type in the descriptor should give people pause for thought.
America stretches from Nanavut to Tierra del Fuego.
Is it racist to call a citizen of the USA "American"?
im lookin but i still cant see no friggin WINGS
therefore it must be a RIDE
not pretentious in the slightest is it!
F.
M.
L.
Also, congrats DG on your 5000th post.
Yes, "Arab Spring" has such a negative connotation, doesn't it?
The Dangleway isn't inferior transportation-it's attractive, it has cute chubby cabins but it has used public funds which could have been better spent elsewhere.
I look forward to confused tourists searching Royal North Greenwich looking for the Royal Albert Hall et al.
Boris's next vanity project looks like being the ill conceived 'hub' Thames Estuary airport, in an area air traffic controllers say would be the worst ever choice.
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