(no subject)

[juliet]

London has got the Olympics!

Edit: And the Red Arrows just did a fly-past over my building - central London now has red, white & blue smoke drifting over it. Cor.

Comments

[ajva.livejournal.com]

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

[juliet]

Indeed! I must start saving for tickets...

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Is that a good thing?

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Ooo I just heard them too!

[juliet]

I think so. It'll involve some fairly heavy investment in London's infrastructure, & in the regeneration areas around E London; as well as other bits of the UK which will be hosting other bits of the Games.

And, less pragmatically, it's the *Olympics*, which I have loved since I was a little girl :-)

[juliet]

I got to the (very large) window in time to see them - spectacular!

[flick.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's what thet noise was....

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Is there any infrastructure investment that could be started now and yield results in time for the Olympics?

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

It'll also involve forcibly relocating lots of poorer people out of central London, shutting down Tube lines for months at a time beforehand to get them ready for the Olympics, and suspensions of civil liberties and the privatisation of public space during the event itself (i.e., if you live in the Olympic zone, forget about wearing anything with a political slogan outside of your house; or, for that matter, anything with the logo of a rival to an Olympic sponsor).

[juliet]

That was certainly what the bid was predicated on. Whether or not you believe it is another matter - & there's no way of telling before it actually happens, or fails to. I am optimistic; other people apparently less so.

[weatherpixie.livejournal.com]

Thats the 2nd time the arrows have buzzed my building, they were round last week for the WW2 thing...

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

From scratch, no. But there are some things that have been planned to the last rivet and are just waiting for the bid to win to be put into effect. For example, the Stratford International - Woolwich DLR extension will definitely happen, as will the track improvements to increase the capacity of the NLL.

Saying that, I will be astounded if Crossrail/link happens in seven years.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

Not to mention making town an insufferable place to live from the start of the ramp-up to the end of the closing ceremony. And the infrastructure investment was being made *anyway* (this being one of the reasons they lost previous bids).

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

This will force the infrastructure improvements to actually happen, tho. We have a terrible history of even well planned transport schemes going off half-cocked in this country until some big event happens to give the work some impetus. See Jubilee line extension, which took the bloody Millenium to actually make it happen.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

Oh, and this says nothing of (one of) my favourite rant(s), that being that 90% of people in the UK don't live in London, and quite a few of them (I'd argue the majority) live in places in far greater need of investment that London. I'd have happily seen it go to Manchester (for example), but their bidding for the Olympics got kyboshed when London started their M3 T00!1! thing.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Crossrail won't - the bid didn't include it - but a lot of the track renovation and updated signalling that Crossrail would require will be done.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

The IOC had made it clear that only London would have a chance, despite the success of the Commenwealth Games in Manchester.

And half the population of the UK do live in the Southeast, and east London is in dire need of regeration. Not saying that other places don't also need that, but the Olympics couldn't help there.

[juliet]

And there will be knock-on impacts on other parts of the UK - the sailing, for example, will be down at Portsmouth or Southampton (read something about this recently, cannot remember details) & there's some other things that will also be elsewhere.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Ah! Thanks - this is good news (though AFAICT the NLL becoming part of the DLR was a done deal anyway)

[juliet]

Ah - I was under the impression that Crossrail actually *did* have funding etc now, but just looked at their webpage & discovered that the Bill ran out of time last session & has just been reintroduced. Ah well.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Done deals have a way of becoming undone in the murky world of public transport planning.

[daneel-olivaw.livejournal.com]

I thought that statement was only made in the sense of, "If given a choice between Manchester and London, of course we'd go for London". BICBW.

I'd be happy if Governmental investment (and winning the Olympics will grab the attention of the investment bodies for a while) was biassed according to where people live (the concept of it being biassed towards *where it's needed* being something of a pipe-dream), but even that is somewhat distant from the reality. The point is, London winning the Olympics will further skew the investment into London (East London in particular) and the South East in general (Crossrail being a good example here). It's good for London, bad for the UK. Booo.

[flick.livejournal.com]

if you live in the Olympic zone, forget about wearing anything with a political slogan outside of your house; or, for that matter, anything with the logo of a rival to an Olympic sponsor

Really? How can they enforce that? How big is the zone?

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Crossrail has been on again and off again more times than a $5 whore's knickers. Mention "Crossrail" to any longterm LUL employee and they'll laugh.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Look at Athens 2004 - "Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games." See here for further examples of how draconian the measures were for the Greek Olympics.