please empty your brain below

Yet nationally we can allocate over £50,000,000,000 for the grand folly of HS2. Something has gone seriously wrong in the way this country operates.
Interesting article. Thanks.
I live in Herts.. and say "stuff Watford" way too often.
Spend a tiny amount of this money on extending the Oyster/contactless into Herts we say!
Transport for London.

The clue is in the name really.

Why should Londoners pick up the tab?

As another example, us Southeastern train folk have to help pay for the creation of express services into town from Kent that we can't get on!
It was a rubbish project anyway, let it die. The benefits proposed were far too small to justify the expense, it was just another one of those 'here is a disused line we must do something with it' crayonista ideas. Kill it, and then cut the Met back to Northwood and leave the rest to Chiltern.
Wouldn't we all really rather have a pretty bridge covered in trees with locked gates at each end? Stop moaning! And where can I send my cheque to help build a new Royal Yacht?
Ironic that its the Metropolitan Line, the one that mixed property development with building a railway.

If there had been a similar arrangement today, then the railway could have taken a cut of the rates, or a percentage of property sales or rent, paying for/contributing to the cost.
Projected cost (2013) £118m, spent so far, £130m. Sad.
2008, the expected cost of the extension was £170m
By cutting frills they got the cost down to £115m
By 2013 the total had crept up to £118m
2014 suggested the overall cost would be £234m
(2017) The £284million project

Total uplift is thus (284 - 115 =) £173m

A budget should always allow contingency sums for inflation and the "unknown unknowns" - neither of which has occurred yet and so cannot be the reason for a 100% increase over the original "grand plan".

What has gone wrong? Scope increase? Incompetence? Naivety? Inexperience?
I suspect that Mayor Khan butting heads with the DfT over the issues on Southern haven't helped matters, either.
Not in London, not TFL's problem. Precedents include Epping-Ongar.

The Mayor, Sadiq Khan, prioritised a 'fares freeze' that benefits mainly tourists but gave him a good (if wholly misleading) slogan over investment projects - especially ones that double in price and will just funnel more people into already-overcrowded Zone 1!

It's over.
Waterhouse - Make your cheque payable to the Telegraph Media Group who are at 111 Buckingham Palace Road -- in London, not Watford.

Why should Londoners pay for schemes that boost councils outside London?
How can a project can be priced at £118m one year, and at £234m the following year? One of those numbers must be seriously wrong.

Still, we can afford refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament - perhaps £4 billion, so assume maybe double that eventually - and Buckingham Palace - £370 million.
Well, if you are asking why should Londoners pay for it, you are assuming that TfL is funded ENTIRELY by Londoners, which it most definitely isn't.
40% of TfL funding comes from fares, and fares are paid by Londoners and non-Londoners like.
Another 23% comes from grants, mostly from the DfT, which is from the national pot, and some is from business rate retention, collected by the GLA. And they get some more for Crossrail, funded by various sources, and from borrowing.

So the questions are, will the fare revenue cover the cost, will WBC and TRDC pay into the GLA pot, and can TfL hope to recoup costs?
The original project trimming was required to bring the CBR into the realms of worth-while-doing. Costs are now way more than they were, the benefits are presumably as much guesswork as ever, but are likely to be around the same. The projected passenger frequency, even allowing for interchanges at Watford Junction, still had the trains at only 1/8th occupancy over the new metals AT PEAK.
There are plans for a 23/25 storey high rise block of flats near the Cassiobridge / Ascot Road / Croxley Green / Two Bridges station, that is going to have to rely on that transport link because of the lack of parking and the impact of extra vehicles on an already overcrowded piece of road. Can the developers of THAT be screwed for £50m of Section 106 money? Will they try to squeeze more housing into the Riverwell development? DG, please note the moniker "Health Campus" has finally been dropped, and replaced with "Riverwell". Presumably the need for a lie has now passed given that the Mare and her cronies have persuaded the SoS to declassify the allotments and allow them to build a car park on them. There's no money for a new hospital, there's no space for a new hospital and there will, most likely, be no new hospital or even any new hospital buildings.

Watch this space!
The scheme is dead. It can't possibly be justfied with another £50m cost and no obvious extra upside on the benefit side of the equation. My local area has just had nearly all of its planned bus improvements axed by TfL. I'll be damned if we should shove another £50m at Watford. Just bash the "parrot" very hard on the head to ensure it is dead and leave Herts and Watford to sort themselves out or go and rob £50m out of the Chancellor's vaults.
IMO this is just the facts that an mayor who's base is the inner city, cutting funds for the leafy suburbs. It's how politics have always gone.
Short-termism. The way most public transport projects in the U.K. are decided.

#Brexidiots are always pointing their fingers at the poor state of the French economy. But Londoners can only dream of the same investment in their public transport systems as in Paris. How do the French do it? Perhaps by not having a royal family and all it's hangers on, oops, I mean relatives & employees..

Also renaming lines after Royals/events like the Jubilee (Fleet) line and now the Elizabeth Line (yuk!) causes/caused unnecessary cost and for what?
It's dead, Jim.

To revive, cast spell of granting Southern Urban Routes to TfL.
£300M really ain't that much in TfL budget terms and nothing at all in the budget for the capital and/or Herts. Obviously a much better use of money than the preposterous HS2. Unfortunately this expensively stillborn project is the perfect example of how HS2 can never come to fruition. Too many fingers in too many tills attached to too many soulless exploiters sucking money out of the system to no benefit other than themselves. If Sadiq wants to elevate himself from Boris type sleaze he should greenlight the project as a matter or urgency and rise above the shameless pocket lining and ego massaging hitherto perpetrated.
Perhaps this is a ploy to allow the mayor to annex Watford. Make it part of London and then he'll pay for it!
One bit of good news for Metropolitan Line passengers - since Monday there has been an OSI between Euston Square and Warren Street (for the Charing + branch), you are allowed 20 minutes.

http://www.oyster-rail.org.uk/osi-list/
@Still anon re OSI - well there's some good news anyway....
@Chris

We Southeastern folk have twice had the benefits of a TfL service snatched away from us. The first time was when KCC had a silly personal spat over Boris Island; by now we would have been enjoying the improvements that Brentwood and Shenfield now have.

KCC eventually saw sense and did a U-turn, so everyone was then supporting rail devolution. Better late than never, it seemed.

But then Grayling had a silly party political spat and blocked TfL from 'falling into the clutches of a Labour Mayor', and his chums at KCC obligingly performed their second U-turn.

Only one thing is certain - politicians don't care about passengers.
@Chris: 'why should Londoners pay for something that boosts councils outside London?' Simple answer: they benefit indirectly eg 1) more residents of Watford travel to London and spend money, 2) if neighbouring areas benefit, then the sainted London does not have to contribute so much tax overall. Perhaps Chris can answer this: Do not all Thames Water customers contribute to the Thames Water Ring Main that benefits Londoners, including those like me that now live in Berkshire? How much of CrossRail is funded nationally? Etc, etc.
Might be worth pointing out that compared to HS2, this project is quite a lot more expensive per km. £300m may not sound that much compared to £50b, but for that price, you are only getting 3km of new track and a pair of stations in the suburbs of Watford.
@EMFUT,

1. As I don't own a shop in London nor do I work for a business which creates products that can be sold to Watford residents, I don't benefit from extra people on my trains preventing me from getting a seat.

2. Thames Water has no customers; it merely has rate payers. This may change in the next few years if I have heard correctly that we may be able to choose amongst water suppliers.
Killing a project for "lack of money" / "cost increases" is just a convenience before the truth breaks out.
The requirements of the Electricity at Work Regulations and pressure from the Office of Rail and Road mean that there can be no more third-rail electrification in this country.

See Modern Railways current and recent editions for further explanation.
I think Kent Railman is correct that there will be no more whole lines electrified with a third (or third-and-fourth) rail. But this is not a whole line, it's a fiddly little extension and diversion of an existing line. As such it will not be and has not been killed off on safety grounds.

All the same, I agree with DG that it does seem to be extremely dead.
If the scheme does not go ahead it will show that TFL can't be trusted to keep it's promises to people outside the London boundary.

That was what was wrong in it tone deaf submission over SE rail. going on about benefits to Londoners only and not specifying how people out of London were going to benefit.
John: It seems that Thames Water, like my employer (in the same industry), is quite happy to think of people as customers, whether or not they have a choice of supplier. Then again, we're quite happy to see everyone who uses the water and sewers as customers, whether or not they personally pay the bills.

Presumably whoever continues to be actually responsibly for the services when customers are able to choose a retailer will still also think of you as customers, even if their income comes from the retailers.
Uncle Audrey - worth noting that TfL gets a grant from the DfT now. But that will be going soon. TfL will have to live - and die - on its own. It will become the only major city not to get any government money for its public transport.

That's probably going to make TfL even more focused on the London boundary than before.
@ A Bowden - sorry to be pedantic but TfL will lose *revenue* grant in 2018, two years earlier than previously agreed with government. This means TfL has to raise enough from fares and charges *overall* to cover the running costs of its services. This means pushing all the rail modes into financial surplus. Some other "services" also generate surplusses. All the surplus is then pooled to cover the losses on the bus network, cycle hire scheme and those things that will never "wash their face" financially.

Government will still fund some aspects of investment like Crossrail and other nominated schemes. However it looks like a lot of investment spend will be from the business rate allocation (soon to lose its hypothecation to TfL spend) and borrowing.

Whether this is a remotely sustainable position remains to be seen. I doubt it is because we must have a crunch coming on borrowing costs at some point especially as borrowing will rise by 2020 and reserves are being reduced.
Its not that there's no money. Its that this project is costing so much its no longer value for money. Why on earth is it so expensive?
@ A Bowden.
I was aware of that, but TfL still recoups money from revenue from people travelling into London from the badlands outside the border. And by Badlands, I also include Moor Park, which is rolling in it.










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