Cash-strapped TFL splashes £207K of taxpayers’ cash changing name of one route
SADIQ Khan’s cash-strapped Transport for London splashed £207,000 of taxpayers’ money changing the name of a single bus route.
The mayor’s team spent the huge amount rebadging the X26 commuter service to SL7 last year.
It included £132,000 on new paint and wrap jobs for 24 double-deckers, and £51,000 on marketing the route, between Croydon and Heathrow Airport.
Another £7,000 went on information leaflets, £13,000 on “shelter roundel toppers”, £3,000 on replacing bus stop signs and £1,000 on new timetables.
The route is part of the cross-London “Superloop” bus service launched by TfL to boost ailing passenger numbers.
There will be ten Superloop routes, so costly rebrands under the Labour mayor could stretch to more than £2million in total.
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TfL’s total debt is £15.2billion — rising by £3.5billion since the pandemic started.
We also told yesterday how the leftie politician was accused of turning the London Overground into “virtue signalling nonsense” by renaming six train routes.
The £6million rebrand includes Liberty, Windrush, and Suffragette lines.
But opponents said the move was politically motivated and broke with a decades-old tradition of naming new lines after royals or iconic London landmarks.
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Former cabinet minister Lord Frost said: “The London tradition is that public transport lines are given a name either with a royal connection or one related to the line’s geography.
“Giving them political names is, whether one agrees with the politics or not, a break with that tradition.”
And last night history buffs lambasted Mr Khan after his social media accounts used a statue of Millicent Fawcett to announce the Suffragette line.
Ms Fawcett – a suffragist – used non-violent methods to campaign for women to be given the vote.
She was not related to efforts led by suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst, who oversaw more than 300 arson and bombing attacks in 1913 and 1914.
His post announcing the name was humiliatingly slapped with a community note fact-check, which read: “The picture contains the statue of Millicent Fawcett who was a suffragist, not a suffragette.
“These are two different groups who had different aims.”
TfL said: “Since the SL7 launched, there has been a 62 per cent increase in customers using it.”