London

I've just got back from London, after an absence of about a year in which time I bought a New York City apartment. I don't know if that's why, but this time was my first visit ever where I didn't feel in some sense that London was home. It's a great city, and I still love it – but after almost 9 years' absence, I feel more like a visitor than a Londoner when I'm there.

When I left, London didn't even have a mayor – now he's been re-elected, by a reasonably comfortable margin. I think he's done a great job: the congestion charge was sheer genius, backed up with a Giuliani-like determination to push it through in the face of enormous inertia. And Ken's not resting on his laurels: he's upped the charge to £8 from £5, and is likely both to raise it again and to extend the congestion area to include a large chunk of Kensington and Chelsea.

At these sort of levels (£8 is $14 at today's exchange rate), people only drive in to central London when they really need to. Ken also seems to have tweaked the timings on London traffic lights so that they stay on red for longer than they used to, with more time given over for pedestrians instead. At the same time, he's invested heavily in the bus system, which is clean, cheap and efficient. When I lived in London, I almost never took buses; now, when I visit, I take them the whole time.

The upshot is that the number of cars in central London is down dramatically, while the number of people taking buses is increasing impressively. Bus mileage is at its highest point since 1957, and ridership grew more than 38 per cent between 2000 and 2005. Last year there were 1.8 billion passenger trips on buses – by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that equates to easily tens of millions of car journeys through central London which Ken has stopped from happening. In the process, he's made life much nicer for anybody wanting to get around the capital.

Traffic is even lighter, it feels, at the weekends, when the congestion charge is not in force: it really seems as though Ken has changed Londoners' habits, and helped them to move away from a reliance on their cars.

Of course, the vast majority of people not taking a car are taking public transport instead, which is why the attacks of July 7 were so particularly nasty. In nearly every way, however, the bombings didn't really change anything, which is wonderful. I was in London for the rally afterwards, and for the very touching 2-minute silence the following Thursday – Londoners were certainly hit hard by what happened. But to their eternal credit, they didn't react by lashing out at anybody, and they bore the disruption with stoicism and general good humour. I simply can't imagine New Yorkers reacting the same way. If 50 people were killed by suicide bombers in the subway here, all manner of chaos would probably ensue, and I daresay underground ridership would fall noticeably for many months before a lot of people felt safe getting on a subway train again.

Londoners even coped well with what to me was an extremely worrying turn of events: the attempt at a second suite of bombings, two weeks after the first. Go back to those buses: on average, the amount of time one should expect to wait for a bus to arrive is equal to the amount of time one has already been waiting. Terrorist attacks are the same. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we all feared that another attack was imminent. Today, almost four years later, we – quite rationally – feel safer. London, similarly, had gone a long time without any terrorist incident, and I very much hoped that July 7 would be the last attack for many years. The fact that the peace lasted only two weeks is very bad news: it implies that similar attacks might well come sooner rather than later.

Clearly, the Metropolitan Police got even more worried than I did, since the following day they ended up pumping eight bullets into the head of a perfectly innocent Brazilian chap whose main mistake was living in the same block of flats as – well, we don't know, but in any case it was a block of flats which the police were interested in.

I do understand that if you're pointing a gun at (a) a suicide bomber who is (b) armed and (c) capable of exploding himself and killing any number of people around him, it makes sense to kill him. I also understand that in the heat of a chase and in a situation requiring split-second decisions, no one can make the right decision every time. But. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police says that there have been seven incidents like the one on July 21 just since July 7: that's one every 65 hours on average. No shoot-to-kill policy should come into play every 65 hours: that's a guarantee that it won't be very long until a tragic mistake like this one is made.

I was horrified at the news that the executed man was innocent: the idea of shooting someone in cold blood like that seemed very unBritish. My father said that the police kill innocent people all the time in places like New York, but I don't think that's true. I can't think of any case here since Bloomberg was elected and appointed Ray Kelly as police commissioner – I'd be very interested to hear if there has been one. In fact, I'd love to see numbers on how many people were killed by NYPD cops altogether during the Bloomberg administration. In any case, shooting suspects repeatedly in the head without any intelligence as to their identity is a desperate act of a police force which does not seem to be in control of the situation, and I suspect, after reading William Finnegan's article about the NYPD in last week's New Yorker, that it wouldn't happen here. Not that I want to find out.

But there was a big difference between 9/11 and 7/7, and not simply that of scale. 9/11 was an attack on America, and on New York, and, I suppose, on the Free World. "We are all Americans now" and all that. 7/7, by contrast, felt much more like an attack on Londoners than on London. London itself got back to relatively normal relatively quickly: the carnage and horror was mostly hidden away underground. The long-term effects of 7/7 will be felt mostly in the lives of hundreds of people which have been ruined; the long-term effects of 9/11 are, by contrast, global.

I feel that now New York is less at risk from a terrorist attack than London is. Say what you like about the silliness of randomly inspecting bags on the New York subway: for terrorists planning an attack on a major city, where any major city will do, New York must now be pretty far down their list. New Yorkers might hit New York, but I just don't think New York has militant Islamist youth in the way that England does. For a militant Islamist Englishman, London is the obvious target – and the events of the past few weeks are proof that there is a significant number of such men, willing to explode both themselves and their compatriots.

Yet at the same time London still felt friendlier and more vibrant, in many ways, than New York. It's certainly not as convenient a place to live: I spent £30 on one cab ride from Waterloo to Dulwich, and London's low-rise nature means that you're always a longer walk from any urban amenity than you're likely to be in NYC. But Brixton feels wonderfully alive – more so than ever, really – and is even yuppifying in a very multiethnic way, with an incredibly good new modern Caribbean restaurant called Moca which I would heartily recommend to everyone. Just down the road, in Brockwell Park, is the fabulous lido – a hugely enjoyable and varied day could easily be spent soaking up reggae performances in the park, swimming in the pool, occasionally retreating to the calm of the walled garden at the top of the hill, and never even leaving the confines of one park in a relatively forgotten corner of south London.

London's one of those rarities: a city which is at its best in the summer. The festivals, the bank holidays, the Proms, the Carnival, the precious days of wonderful weather – no wonder plane tickets are so expensive. I went there at a fraught and trying time, and still left loving the city, admiring its inhabitants, and grinning inwardly every time I saw an ad for the Toyota Prius saying that Ken Livingstone had decided to waive the congestion charge for electric cars. Once, on a bus going through Knightsbridge, a fellow passenger and I exchanged glances as a very large and extremely loud American family "joked" around on the upper deck of the bus, annoying everyone but themselves. "Those Americans, what can you do" was the unspoken message we were sending each other: "we Londoners just have to grin and bear it". But I felt like a bit of a fraud: I'm not a Londoner any more, and in fact I'm a New Yorker, which almost (but not quite) qualifies me as being an American myself.

So I come back from wonderful homestyle food on Rivington Street to wonderful homestyle food on Rivington Street, and I'm happy with the place I've ended up. I'll miss London, especially in the summer, but I still think that the corner of Avenue B and 3rd Street is the best possible place in the world to live.

Posted by Felix at 19:26 EST

Comments

We now know that tube use did go down. 15% in a week, I think. That's a bit surprising, because Londoners did seem to be acting like Londoners and rising above it.

Posted by: john massengale at 17:55 EST, August 06, 2005

Not surprising: the Picadilly line wasn't working at all, the Circle line was completely down, and large chunks of the Northern line weren't working either -- plus there were other repairs and snafus to the system. I'd guess that much more than 15% of the normal trains weren't running, so if tube use only went down 15%, that's a good sign that Londoners were rising above it.

Posted by: Felix at 10:16 EST, August 07, 2005

I know how you feel about returning to an adopted home city. I like leaving New York as much as I like going there; the sense of relaxation upon arriving in Hong Kong's Chep Lap Kok is very different from, say, the stress of showing up in Manhattan or Philly and wondering why the hell there's no one around to change money for me.

Although it's a little different for me being so obviously a foreigner, not speaking Chinese, etc. At least an Englishman in New York can sort of blend in. (Hell, who can't blend into New York?) It's more like Hong Kong is a lifestyle than a geography that I call home, although now that I'm married to a Hong Kong lady, it is actually becoming a home in a more physical, tangible way, whether I want it to be so or not. How queer.

Posted by: Jame at 5:44 EST, August 09, 2005

good point, felix

Posted by: john massengale at 10:51 EST, August 17, 2005

having a thought just after pushing the button is the virtual equivalent of the response you think of after leaving the room

i wonder what people did? take buses? walk farther?

i was staying in Holborn when the red line was down. before the congestion zone i would walk a little farther but still take the tube -- my use was down 0% unless I was going to oxford street.

after the congestion zone, i took more buses. my tube use went down, but i bought an unlimited pass and my public transport use went way up. it's a shame they're getting rid of the old doubledeckers where it's so easy to hop on and off. they contribute to the ease of using the bus: when the ride is "free" you want to be able to jump on and off. the advantage of those buses over tubes is not only that bus stops are closer than tube stops, but that on the old double deckers you're not confined to the stops -- anytime the bus stops or even slows down enough you can get on or off.

Posted by: john massengale at 10:59 EST, August 17, 2005