Did Boris have a favourite lilo he used to float around on when he was young? After his ‘Olympic legacy’ floating park on the Thames ‘sank’ into oblivion it seems he has been using bath time to dream up some more lilo type developments for the river and the Royal docks. Boris’ original idea was criticised by objectors as ‘an unwelcome intrusion’ into the river. The Port of London Authority was also unhappy and considered his watery park would be a ‘navigation hazard’. His new plan for homes floating in the Docks has been panned as a ‘Titanic mistake’ by London City Airport campaigner Alan Haughton who says ‘The Royal Docks contains the London City Airport Public Safety Zone - also called a crash zone. The Department for Transport strictly forbids development in a Crash Zone’.

London Tube boss Howard Collins has got a job running railways Down Under. The Standard describes him as the 'Tube boss credited with making the trains run on time during the Olympics'. If they expect Mr Collins to repeat the miracle of making the trains run on time in Sydney then they can look forward to apocalyptic warnings about how the system is about to crack up and they'd all be better off walking, getting on their bikes, staying at home, anything but travelling by train!

The Olympics is that dream event, even when something goes wrong it goes right. Another accidental cycling legacy was discovered a while back by the hard legacy hunting British media. TfL told them that more people in London, 19 percent during the Olympics and 32 percent during the Paralympics, took to their bikes. Why? According to the Standard it was 'to escape packed Tubes and buses'. Of course, what is even more remarkable is that Londoners and out of town commuters had stayed at home or out of London for precisely the same reason, following the dire warnings from the very same TfL, and of course blond bomber Boris, of over-crowded public transport, leaving the Tube and Central London deserted during the first week of the Games. This had, of course, created the Miracle on the Underground when the system did not go into massive overload.

On 1st August a cyclist, Dan Harris, was killed by a bus coming from the Olympic Park at a spot near where TfL had made alterations to the road markings for cyclists on account of the Olympics. Not only had London 2012 failed to provide simple safe routes for cyclists to enter or circumnavigate the Olympic Park during the Olympics, it closed key cycle routes like the Greenway and, just before the Olympics began, the critical towpath on the west side of the Park which was shut without warning for reasons of security forcing cyclists onto busy roads. Local protests were, of course, simply ignored.

Dave Ward, Network Rail's Olympic delivery director, told the Greater London Assembly's transport committee that a helicopter was sent 380,000 miles out of Southend Airport during the Games to inspect infrastructure.

We've had the Olympics saving the economy, putting people back to work, being saved by the sponsors. Now it's the turn of Transport for London to describe the miracle on the Underground!

Vigil for Dan Harris 10 Aug 2012. Lea Interchange. Photo David Arditti

A12 morning traffic jam