Mayor dangles prospect of Thames cable car

30 May 2008

London mayor, Boris Johnson, has agreed to give serious consideration to alternatives to the Thames Gateway Bridge, including a cable car.

The London Assembly’s Green party members have presented Johnson with a recommendation that Transport for London examine the ‘realistic and deliverable possibility’ of building a cable car.

This follows a £15,000 study by consultants, funded by former mayor Ken Livingstone. Johnson last week pledged to consider alternatives to the Thames Gateway bridge, which, he said, is ‘the wrong proposal’.

TfL’s scheme was due to be considered by a reopened public inquiry next year. A cable car could carry up to 5,000 people an hour in each direction, thereby improving local links across the Thames, without encouraging long-term traffic trips through east London, according to the report’s authors, Professor John Whitelegg and Phil Goodwin.

Peak traffic on the Thames Gateway bridge was expected to reach 5,500 vehicles an hour by 2016, 4,600 of which were cars, generating 55,000t of extra carbon emissions in 2016. A planning inspector recommended that permission for the six-lane Thames Gateway bridge be refused, declaring that the economic benefit was ‘suspect’.

The London Borough of Bexley welcomed Johnson’s withdrawal of support for the TfL proposal. The authority, while not opposed to a new crossing, had raised concerns about the likely traffic generation and inadequacy of measures to mitigate this.

Martin Able, transport planning and development manager, said: ‘We had major concerns about the traffic modelling, and these were shared by the secretary of state.’ His initial reaction to the Green party report was that it was right that all alternatives for improving local links were considered.

‘Cable cars are a recognised form of public transport around the world, including as river crossings.’ But the borough’s officers and politicians would need to ‘properly consider’ the proposal before coming to a firm view, Able stressed.

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Mayor dangles prospect of Thames cable car

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