The Overground

An interesting Sustainable Development select committee meeting this Tuesday evening. Darren Johnson (given his other hat as a GLA member) obviously knows his transport stuff, and we're getting into the weighty business of trying to understand the needs and options for rail transport to serve Lewisham. This meeting was mainly a briefing from the Council's Head of Transport, Darien Goodwin, before we hear from witnesses from rail companies and TfL.

The biggest two problems with railways (IMHO) are the enormous lead times (meaning you have to predict demand about 20 years ahead, gambling on all sorts of unpredictables like whether everyone will be tele-working by 2025); and the fact that London's so crowded with railway tracks, roads, hills and everything else, that to create any new routes you have to use complex and expensive engineering to tunnel or bridge to where you want to go. Oh, for the simplicity of India or Arizona, where they just move further out into some empty desert to expand!

An important and relatively short-term improvement for Perry Vale will be the arrival of TfL-operated tube train services at Forest Hill station by 2010. Their press release on Tuesday shows they've been commendably frugal (or just boringly unimaginative?) with the cosmetics of branding it, and are going to use all the same signs as on the tube Londoners know and love(?), but with "UNDER..." rubbed-out and replaced by "OVER..." (image above (c) Transport for London 2005).

The report from the last Sustainable Development investigation, into waste recycling, went to Mayor and Cabinet last night (Wednesday), and all our recommendations were accepted. I'll be looking out for a photo-illustrated article in Lewisham Life real soon - although I'm told the operators of the MRF (the machinery that magically separates paper from glass from plastic from cans, etc) are a bit 'shy' about pictures of it giving away their trade secrets to competitors. Hmmm...