Lessons for all from the Tube (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Lessons for all from the Tube

1:41pm Friday 27th January 2012 in Readers' letters

I READ that drivers on London Underground are heading for a mind-boggling salary of £52,000.

And this is for trains which effectively drive themselves – some are already automatic and the whole network will run as such within a few years.

Yet do we hear Transport for London pleading poverty, claiming the unions are holding them and the city to ransom with their pay claims and strike threats?

No, they’re too busy getting on with the myriad projects with which the underground (and over-ground) systems are awash: Northern Line extension to Battersea, revamped East London line, Heathrow-Canary Wharf ‘Crossrail’, not to mention upgrading lines and rolling stock at a rate that puts us in the shires to shame.

Meanwhile, this cycle of investment and reward means passenger numbers have risen from two million in the 1980s to nearly five million today.

And as fare-dodging is virtually impossible thanks to the automatic ticket barriers, all that revenue can simply be ploughed back into the system ready for the next project – or salary increase.

There is much we can learn from how they do business in the capital.

Traveller, Blackburn.