Astonishing.

Have to be a bit careful here, since many bus journeys use bus passes or travelcards on Oyster. Latest (December) figures I have here are:

1.5% cash
20.0% Oyster PAYG

The rest will be concessions and travelcards.

“an alternative method of financing is described (”the Skyride is brilliantly financed by Sky. Hence its name Skyride”).”

Skyride and STS are completely different things though, one’s a single day cycling specific event where you can sell lots of places to put the brandname, the second is a multi-year multi-strand project across an entire Borough designed to change people’s behaviour from instinctively getting in the car to considering cycling, walking or public transport. Given that it’s clear that Boris is changing the subject and ducking the question.

“bus ridership is now at an all time high”

It isn’t, though, Boris is doing what he normally does, assert things and hope no one contradicts what he’s saying until it’s too late. Part of the justification for raising the fares is that ridership has *fallen* due to the recession (in actual fact the most recent TfL report states *at the top* that ridership has fallen 0.4% compared to the same quarter the previous year). In any case Boris’s business plan is fairly explicit about cutting the mileage done by buses, cutting the subsidy and whacking the fares up, all of which is going to continue to reduce ridership. Jenny’s right, in other words, Boris is driving people off the buses with fare rises while ridership is reducing due to recession.

Smarter Travel is a difficult one for Boris for four reasons:
a) it’s a Lib Dem council working with a Labour Mayor spending public money
b) it shows that Ken was actually perfectly capable of working with the boroughs and didn’t always ignore outer London
c) it’ll be terribly hard to get any of the Tory outer boroughs interested in it, since they’re still car-crazy and averse to spending public money on Ken’s ideas and
d) it worked, thus giving an unpleasant comparator to his own pathetic efforts in the field. One of the startling results was the increase in health from people driving less.

“Q: Why, uniquely among the advanced economies, does the UK have an inflation rate well above target and rising very sharply, when our output is so very flat?

A: If we took the right hon. Gentleman’s advice there would be massive cuts in public expenditure. He is the one who says that there should be even more cuts than are being proposed by the Leader of the Opposition. We would lose jobs and businesses, and our economy would go deep into recession again. That is not a policy that the people of this country want. The Conservatives have dozens of policies on this, and the right hon. Gentleman’s is the most extreme-but we will follow none of their advice.”

I wonder why she didn’t want to hear what the Mayor had to say about the 12 boroughs interested in Skyride. She interrupted him three times on that point, which is odd because surely the point is about getting people on bikes, not who pays for it.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by libcon: Astonishing transcript of Boris evading questions http://bit.ly/c3Qp8t...

What I keep reading in Cameron’s presidential election campaign, is that he says that the Tories will be “accountable”, but nowhere in their policies do I see how they intend to do that. (For example, read Osborne’s Eight Benchmarks and try to find how he will be “accountable” and what penalties there will be if he misses the “benchmark” – the accountability is totally missing.) So why doesn’t call-me-Dave show that he is serious about accountability and get Boris to implement his promises or resign?

She then interrupts Boris every second sentence, ignoring the fact that her actual question (why does your budget only give a minimum amount of financing?) is answered (“we’re in very tight financial times…”) and an alternative method of financing is described (“the Skyride is brilliantly financed by Sky. Hence its name Skyride”).

Having ignored the answer she got to that question, she proceeds to not ask a question (“it seems to me lunacy to actually raise bus fares and drive people off the buses”). This is met by the response that “bus ridership is now at an all time high”, which would seem neatly to rebut the charge of driving people off the buses.

She then says “I want to put on record my dissatisfaction with the Mayor’s lack of answers to my questions. This is not being accountable to the London Assembly when you repeat yourself endlessly and don’t answer questions” even though she got an answer to her first question, and didn’t ask a second question.

Overall, in the course of complaining how Boris isn’t responding to her, she talks far, far more than Boris does. Christ, standards are low in the Assembly aren’t they?

No doubt Boris means that the basic cash fare has stayed at £2. The Oyster fare went up 20%, though. What proportion of bus journeys use Oyster cards? I’m guessing more than pay cash.