People will flock to travel on Crossrail

The opening of Crossrail is a rare reason to be cheerful in these tough times.

As I have said many times previously, the delays and overspend will soon be forgotten once passengers start to use the line.

Transport for London has been very cautious about starting the service while there remained any possibility that it would not be reliable. The last thing that Andy Byford, Commissioner of Transport for London, wanted to see was a repeat of the kind of chaos that occurred on the opening day of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

The predictions about usage have been reined in. Originally, it was expected there would be around 700,000 passengers daily by 2025. But now the expectation is that in the first year this will be just under half a million initially, increasing to 550,000 over the next three years. Mystic Wolmar reckons this will be an underestimate.

This pessimism about the passenger numbers on Crossrail ignores the transformational nature of this megaproject. People will flock to the line just to see it or to say they have been on it, in the same way that in 1863 passenger numbers on the Metropolitan Railway soared well beyond expectations because the world’s first underground was a novelty.

Again, as I have said many times before, Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) is not a modest addition to the London Underground. It is a main line railway built under the heart of the capital to high standards that have never been seen before in London - or indeed anywhere else. You read it here first: people will travel across the world to travel on Crossrail.

I was shown round the Crossrail station at Canary Wharf in early May, and the chief executive of the Canary Wharf group, Shobi Khan, was in a very confident mood.

He said that numbers coming into the office were beginning to reach prepandemic levels in midweek, and that Crossrail would give an enormous boost by making it easier for people to travel there.

He told me: “People will return to offices where there are good amenities. Providers like us will have to ensure that offices become places where people want to come to.”

This is an important point. The offices that will remain unused will be those which are poorly located and have few amenities. And the provision of good public transport is crucial for that.