New trains that were due to be introduced on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) from the end of the year have been delayed indefinitely.
Great! Can this wretched company get nothing right?
Transport for London said that signalling problems that meant the existing fleet of DLR trains had been going “too fast” made it impossible to keep to timetable for the phased introduction of the new fleet of trains, which boast air conditioning and walk-through carriages.
The country that once built railroads in Africa and India can't run one properly in its own capital....
No new date has been set for the arrival of the new trains, which Mayor Sadiq Khan saw when he visited the DLR’s Beckton depot in February 2023. The Standard revealed in June that the £880m new fleet of trains, which is being built in Spain, had run over budget by £61m and was facing delays.
'No date',,? Sounds familiar.
4 comments:
London's public sector is a mess. The Hammersmith Bridge repairs are still not finished, yet the councils have spent more on them than India did to land a spacecraft on the Moon. It's not a bug, it's a feature. All public spending is in Milton Friedman's fourth category - "other people's money spent on other people" so waste, poor quality and delays are inevitable. Yet still voters keep asking the stupidest, most corrupt and laziest people in the nation to take on more tasks!
I’ve always thought the Island Gardens incident in 1987 was a bad omen…
https://islandhistory.wordpress.com/2019/09/07/docklands-light-railway-accident/
Anyway, we now know that building all those railways in foreign parts was a brutally oppressive act by an evil empire, which makes competence in that department highly suspect these days (see also education, administration, healthcare etc).
I did the London Marathon in 2019. I rode on the DLR quite a lot and thought that it was excellent. I thought that it was really cool that it was totally automatic. Has it got worse since then?
I think that one of the many problems with the public sector is that it is insulated from the rather Darwinian process that hones the organisations in the private sector. A private company that doesn't perform either gets its shit together or goes out of business, leaving only the good performers behind. A publicly owned organisation lacks any checks and balances whatsoever so just continues to get worse and worse at doing its job.
"London's public sector is a mess."
Indeed it is.
"I’ve always thought the Island Gardens incident in 1987 was a bad omen…"
Ooh, I hadn't heard of this before!
"Has it got worse since then?"
The service still seems OK to me.
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