Red Ken wants to fleece and track LT users

The problem with Ken Livingstone is that he has been wallowing in the job too long, yet astonishingly wants another decade.

Nonetheless, he has been absolutely right with his stance on some things and things he has said, but for everything he gets right he gets a load of other stuff badly badly wrong. Sometimes you can't help thinking Ken / Blair = good cop / bad cop; both pushing essentially the same prescriptive socialist doctrine.

Ken's latest crack-pot scheme to push regular ticket prices up (yet again and by huge amounts) to force yet more people into paying for their own surveillance with Oyster cards shows he has lost the plot badly.

Oct. 4 (Bloomberg) -- London Mayor Ken Livingstone said he will raise some fares on the capital's transport network as he seeks to halve the number of passengers paying in cash and ease peak-time congestion at ticket offices.

Livingstone raise will raise fares for those paying in cash and cut fares for customers using so-called Oyster pre-paid cards, the mayor said at his weekly press conference. Fares for travel in the central zone 1 will be cut to 1.50 ($2.64) from 1.70 for Oyster users, while the cash fare will be raised to 3 pounds from 2 pounds currently.

"This may very well be the most expensive one-way fare in the world, but the objective is to move people away from paying cash,'' Livingstone said.

Ken unfortunately, has gone way too far this time.

The Independent says:

Roger Evans, Conservative chairman of the London Assembly Transport Committee, said: "How can the Mayor expect people to leave their cars at home when bus and Tube tickets are spiralling out of control?

Spokeswoman Victoria Carson accused the Mayor of undermining business confidence with this latest move, coming just days after the westwards extension of the Congestion Charge was announced.

"This is the worse possible news at the worst possible time. We cannot escape the reality that since the bombings and the 60% hike in the C-Charge in July, we saw the number of passengers on the tube plummet by 300,000 a day, and we have witnessed retail sales in central London falling significantly.

"The Mayor seems determined to kill off London business by putting up the cost of visiting the capital by tube, bus or car."