Don't dig up roads - just get cars off them

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A friend recently back from America gazed across Holborn and asked: "Which city got bombed?" The pavement was on its 32nd resurfacing in as many weeks. The street was littered with plastic barriers and piles of rubble. Debris blew in the wind. Empty sites were barricaded and buildings shuttered and scaffolded. The area looked awful.

We could as well have gone to Horse Guards Parade. The justification might be different, terrorism, but the effect is the same. This splendid space is closed with tank traps. Grosvenor Square has been shut to circulating traffic. The rear of Downing Street is shielded with screens. The BBC is installing equipment apparently designed to protect itself from booby- trapped suicide bombers. I assume that David Blunkett's police will soon use his new powers to seize darkskinned people from Oxford Street and bundle them into unmarked Corsairs.

The security industry is in league with terror-friendly public authorities to scare us witless. Under the cloak of eternal vigilance, they do not mind if they drive people out of town and wreck London's Christmas economy. They have scanners, locks, armour and consultancies to sell. They have alarmist speeches to make. These are good times for those who can exploit bad times. They play the terror card for all it is worth.

Let us trump their ace. If they want to exploit terror to make the city less comfortable, let us at least use it to make it more comfortable. Never forget who was responsible for drastically improving the streets in the City of London over the past decade, with new paving, smart seating, bollards and pedestrianisation. Planners who had refused point blank to close streets because "where would the traffic go?" were miraculously converted by two large IRA car bombs. Where reason had failed, violence worked. The City banned most cars, closed streets, policed them properly on foot and allowed City workers to perambulate freely. The traffic mysteriously disappeared. The City did not die.

Looking at the West End, I am forced to conclude that the City of Westminster has never had a big enough trauma. Traffic volume is no problem, having fallen slightly over the past two years due to the soaring cost of parking, much the simplest "congestion charge". Yet the streets are pandemonium. The chief reason is the everlasting-cause of traffic jams, uncertainty, in this case that of roadworks.

Constitution Hill is now being dug up for the second time in two years. There is chaos in Northumberland Avenue. Tottenham Court Road has broken the London record, I am told, with 92 separate diggings in one year. Soho is closed to traffic then opened. Ken Livingstone puts in bus "blisters" to slow down traffic yet his transport chief, Bob Kiley, rips them up because they slow down buses. Entire traffic lanes are closed for bicycles which never use them, except occasionally to run down pedestrians. (It has taken two years to install 400 yards of unused cycle lane in Grafton Way.)

To cap everything, we hear that the long-delayed pedestrianisation of Trafalgar Square is to take two years of disruption and mess starting in January. Why do a few traffic islands, crossings, lights, steps and bollards take two years to install? I am tempted to suggest that with an astonishing £25 million being spent on a scheme that involves not a single building, many pockets are being lined with gold. Two years is simply incredible for this job. Someone is being ripped off, and it is probably the public. This job needs two months of hard work. If London cannot do it and at a reasonable price, get a foreigner.

The redesign of Trafalgar Square and Whitehall by Lord Foster and his team is an admirable scheme, long overdue. It was fought by an antediluvian Westminster Council for five years, even to the extent of threatening to reopen Leicester Square to traffic if it goes ahead. Yet the scheme is being implemented in so costly and unpopular a fashion that nobody will want to try such a thing again. This is urban sabotage.

London's feuding local and central governments have done nothing noticeable to stop their own contractors and the utilities from closing streets to traffic. Westminster has introduced a modest "fine" system for overdue work, but firms such as Transco, THUS, BT and Thames Water can still dig up roads at will. This area of government is completely "unjoined-up". Bus lanes and loading controls are unenforced. The streets of the capital are more battered and scruffy than anywhere outside the Third World.

The fashionable answer to what should be done is to ask what New York ' s tough mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, would do. The answer is that this anarchic nonsense would stop. Mr Giuliani would tell the police to handcuff every white-van driver to his vehicle if found parking on a double-yellow line. His cameras would automatically add a penalty point to the licence of any driver caught in a bus lane. He would summon every statutory utility and tell them they could all dig up any London street for precisely four weeks in any year, provided it was August. At any other time of the year, if he found so much as a hut or a pneumatic drill in one of his streets he would summon the Press, put the offending objects in a crusher and ban the firm concerned from any future London contract. If they chose to sue, let them.

As for West End pedestrianisation, it is absurd that every year it proceeds by dribs and drabs, postponed, hesitated and then half-tried. The City of London's streets were galvanised by an IRA bomb. The rest of the capital should not have to wait for that. There should be a plan for closing and refashioning public spaces that have no need of through traffic. End the uncertainty. Do it once, do it now and do it all.

And if such draconian government needs an excuse, that is easy. Just say terrorism. It works a dream.

Where is the mayor?

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