Is this the shape of things to come?

I have had to keep myself calm and composed as I was at City Hall yesterday and I made a comment on Facebook which could have been expressed in a more 'formal' way. I got a stern telling from my wife :-(

Yesterday the Mayor of London announced an above inflation fare increase starting 2010.

I'm not going to go into detail about the proposals but one thing I recognise is that there has been falling numbers on the Tube due the recession. That's about it.

His justifications doesn't make sense; one minute he blames Ken Livingstone for creating a £80 million shortfall in the TfL budget by freezing fares in the run-up to mayoral election of 2008, the next he talks about the monies being invested into 'London's future'.

I didn't have time for Ken when he decided to sign the fuel deal with the Venezuala 'dictator' Hugo Chavez ( he isn't one technically has he was 'elected', but sure as hell acts like one), but aside from that, the majority of his transport decsisions were good ones and I will say when he did raise fares, while I slightly disappointed I believed him that they would be invested into improvement programmes.

His CO2 charge on the most polluting cars was a brilliant idea, that would have raised between £30 - 50 million and, while I acknowledge the process could have been handled better, especially with businesses in the area, the Western Extension of the C-charge was necessary to ease congestion in the Central London area, improve the air quality and most importantly encourage people to use transport.

Both these programmes have been/about to be scraped by the current Mayor in keeping with his manifesto commitments. That leaves a £100million shortfall in funding and along with lower numbers on the tube, costs in replacing the bendy buses which is going to be a lot he has to find the money somewhere. Yes its us! So all this talk about future investment and plugging a previous administration's hole doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Its HIS hole that he has created and we are paying for it.

This is going to have a major impact on those people in Lewisham who are not in receipt of any benefits, who work part time and have to rely heavily on transport to get them from A -to-B.