No air conditioning on the Tube? Blame Sadiq Khan
You could be riding in new, air conditioned trains on the Piccadilly Line and DLR but City Hall has botched their introduction. James Ford is getting hot under the collar...
Do you find the tube to be oppressively hot in the summer and unbearable in a heatwave? Ever found yourself sweating on the Central Line? Or perspiring on the Piccadilly line? Are you usually melting at Morden? Ever wished you had a fan at Farringdon, a bottle of water at Bank or were shirtless at St Paul’s?
Chances are you have replied yes to one or more of these questions, especially in the past few weeks. Currently just 40 per cent of the tube network have airconditioned trains (192 out of 620 trains in fact), and none of them are on the deeper lines which suffer the most from the heat. That means there is no aircon on the Central, Jubilee, Bakerloo, Piccadilly, Northern, Victoria, and Waterloo & City lines. The Central Line is officially the hottest, reaching 39.4℃ during the peak of the recent heatwave. The peak heatwave temperature recorded in the capital was 35.1℃ during the past few weeks, which means that it was hotter on the tube than above ground not just on the Central line but also on the Jubilee (37.2℃) and Bakerloo (36.4℃) lines. No wonder then that one passenger told the Evening Standard that riding the escalator at Bank station is akin to “descending into hell”.
And, if you think that it is ok that the trains don’t have aircon because, surely, the stations have air-conditioning (right?), I have further bad news for you. The station cooling systems at Oxford Street and Green Park broke down in 2017 and haven’t been repaired.
A lot of very expensive, gleaming new trains are currently sitting idle in their depots while passengers sweat
Of course, it didn’t need to be like this. New Piccadilly line trains fitted with air conditioning – no fewer than 94 of them – had been expected to enter service late last year. They would have been the first air-conditioned rolling stock to operate on the deeper tube lines, but their introduction is now not due to begin until sometime between December and next June. The rollout of a further 54 new air-conditioned DLR trains began last autumn but this £1bn project was subsequently halted over safety concerns. This means that it is now nine years – almost as long as Sadiq Khan has been resident at City Hall – since new trains with aircon were introduced on the tube. A lot of very expensive, gleaming new trains are currently sitting idle in their depots while passengers sweat.
And I am not alone in blaming Sadiq for the parlous state of tube cooling. Uma Kumaran, the Labour MP for Stratford and Bow, issued a video on X appealing to the mayor to sort out air con on the DLR. The Lib Dems, Greens and Conservative have all urged the Mayor to do much more.
Going in reverse
It is an understatement to say that City Hall is making slow progress on cooling the tube. Most of the existing aircon-equipped trains were introduced when Boris ran City Hall. If anything, with the station cooling systems at Oxford Street and Green Park broken for nearly a decade, things are arguably going in reverse under the current Mayor.
Transport for London (TfL) says it intends to order new air-conditioned trains for the Bakerloo line (where the current trains date back to 1972), as well as the Central and Waterloo & City lines (which both have trains dating back to 1992) but no timeline has been set for doing so. TfL began trials of an ‘innovative’ station cooling system for deep-level tube platforms – which can lower temperatures by between 10℃ and 15℃ – in 2022 at five stations on the Piccadilly line. But both of these projects would require significant central government funding to progress. And that doesn’t seem to be a conversation that the Mayor has even started to have.
When facing increasingly frequent heatwaves, failing to rollout new trains with aircon on one tube line might be considered careless. But to fail to rollout new trains with aircon on two lines smacks of incompetence. The public deserves more than patronising advice to avoid rush hour or to be told to carry a bottle of water. Certainly, Londoners deserve better than ‘Heat Ready London’, the Mayor’s 37-page ‘heat plan’ that was rushed out last week. Ironically, given its intent, it is full of hot air and warm words but few concrete pledges. City Hall and TfL urgently need to get a grip on this. Action, not words, are what is needed.
James Ford was an advisor to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson