Transport for London has delayed the next round of public consultation on the Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf Bridge as it tries to trim the cost of the scheme, a City Hall committee has been told.
TfL has allocated £330 million to the walking and cycling scheme in its business plan.
Public consultation was due to open last month but has been delayed whilst TfL tries to tweak the scheme to try to keep the cost of the bridge within £330 million.
David Hughes, TfL’s investment delivery planning director, told the London Assembly budget & performance committee: “We’ve deferred the start of the consultation to allow further work on value engineering aspects of the scheme, going back looking at certain of the requirements around alignment [and] the navigation requirements of the Port of London to see if we can take out part of the cost before going to consultation.”
Alex Williams, TfL’s director of city planning, added: “We will seek contributions from the private sector to help deliver it” – but he warned that the amounts to be extracted from Canada Water developers British Land and Canary Wharf Group “are not going to be huge”.
Mr Hughes was unable to give Assembly members a new timetable for the next public consultation on the bridge.
Restaurants & other businesses should be asked to contribute; obviously, they’ll benefit from the greater pedestrian passage.
The £330 million is on top of the £11 million already spent so far by the TfL bridge delivery team
This is the 2nd time the consultation has been delayed, was supposed to be last October, then this April, now?
In 2016 the Mayor said it could be delivered by 2020
No local politician on either side of the bridge in Southwark (as far as I know) nor Tower Hamlets have suggested they will help pay for it using their own developers contributions, which maybe a guide to how popular this really is?
But if anything close to £300 million this will badly fail the Benefit Cost Ratio calculation which means that the Department of Transport will fail it. Given competition for scarce transport resources why would the DoT allow that much money to be spent when you could spend it on other projects which deliver a higher benefit?
Ferry cost by contrast TfL estimated at £30 million cost to build. Annual running costs thereafter the same as a bridge. Even if ferries have shorter lives then the bridge structure, the bridge lift machinery will also need replacement at some point.
Since 2016 I have been asking TfL as a 1st step to make the Hilton hotel ferry to use to see what impact that has on pedestrian demand, they keep refusing to do this, even though cost is a fraction of the £11 million already spent
I have also been pushing for an improved ferry option – much cheaper, much quicker to deliver then what would be the largest pedestrian and cycling bridge in the world + largest vertical lift bridge in the world. And if the electric roll on roll off ferries (up to 3 of them) are packed every morning with commuters then you have a clear signal to then build a bridge, the ferries can be moved to another part of London or sold off.
‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’