Wednesday's problems with the Jubilee line don't mean the capital can't benefit from having to re-think its travel habits during "games time"It turns out that Darryl Chamberlain and I were thwarted in our attempts to join the Jubilee Line at Stratford at almost exactly the same time on Wednesday evening. "Police had shut the platform entrances, yet the departure boards appeared to show business as usual," Darryl writes. I'd arrived from Hackney Central with my ten year-old daughter just a little earlier, seeking a Tube connection to Canary Wharf. An announcement declared that the Jubilee was out of action only between London Bridge and Finchley Road, but then we ran into that thin blue barrier. The latest "transport chaos" headlines were about to be written - and with the Olympics only nine weeks away.My daughter and I were among the lucky ones: as the DLR carried us to our destination instead, hundreds of Jubilee Line passengers were being walked down tunnels from a train stranded between Baker Street and St Johns Wood after being stuck in it for hours. What's followed has had a familiar ring, almost a ritual quality: TfL and LU top brass have apologised while pointing out that the general performance trend is good; the RMT has blamed "the cuts"; Mayor Johnson has got his name in the paper for demanding a "full report." Even so, Wednesday's problems were severe and not confined to one Underground line. The DLR ground to a (mercifully brief) halt on our convoluted return journey to Clapton due to an unspecified problem at Bank, and we made our escape at Shadwell onto the East London Line overground before catching a bus from Dalston Junction (It was a "Boris Bus" on route 38, giving my daughter her first experience of boarding a bus via an open platform. She thought this brilliant, then proceeded to enthuse about the Thomas Heatherwick interior design. The mayor would have been delighted. If he's lucky, maybe he'll meet her some day).Should Londoners be consumed with foreboding about the coming Olympian visitor influx with all the demands on the transport system - not only the Underground - this will bring? Yes, up to a point. There's little doubt that lots of us will feel the strain of exceptional busy-ness. Yet I'm inclined towards a cautious "no". True, a big problems like Wednesday's would be very bad news, as would a further week of smaller glitches. But the statistics suggest that such horrors are unlikely to occur in the heart of "games time.". As for the wider transport picture, encompassing the roads, we're all in the realm of conjecture. Who can predict what will happen when many Londoners and commuters from elsewhere probably haven't even thought about if and how their usual travel habits are going to change.In keeping with my stance as a determined Olympics optimist, I'm hoping we'll emerge from the "transport chaos" that is sure to occur to some degree with a new appreciation of alternative ways of getting from A to B, and even a recognition that simply staying at A a bit more often is no bad thing. Inspire. Believe. And so on...TransportLondonTransport policyLondonDave Hillguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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