Every time a London Tory calls for new laws to restrict strikes on the Tube, I wonder why London Tories don't behave like Tories. ASLEF's decision to ballot members on strike action in a dispute with London Underground over Boxing Day pay has prompted the London Assembly's Richard Tracey to issue a demand for new anti-strike laws that has become as seasonal as Boxing Day withdrawals of labour themselves - both have occurred for the past two years.
But although Tube strikes are a maddening drag, the harm they do to London's economy is tiny compared with a problem London's Tories seem far less keen to solve - the huge cost to business and quality of life of road traffic congestion. The merest murmur that the capital would be improved by having more road pricing rather than less has the blue side of City Hall growling in defence of the freedoms of motorists, unconcerned or unaware that free market logic argues the opposite approach.
One of the deeper ironies of mayoral politics is that Ken Livingstone was far more receptive to such thinking than Boris Johnson has been. When introducing London's congestion charge "Red Ken" named, with a certain glee, Chicago School guru Milton Friedman as his inspiration.
These days, prominent London Tories cite Harvard professor Edward Glaeser as a guiding Big Brain. The mayor has even pinched a line from Glaeser's book Triumph of the City about Gandhi, villages and the future and used it in speeches. Yet the professor has long favoured market forces regulating the problem of over-use of the scarce resource that is road space.
In 2006 he called for the introduction of congestion charging in New York:
There are only two ways to make real headway against congestion in Manhattan: build more streets or get fewer people to drive. Knocking down high-rises to expand Third Avenue seems pretty stupid, so to fix congestion we have to reduce the amount of driving.
There is plenty of scope for improving public transportation, but the most reliable means of reducing traffic is to charge people for the social costs of their driving. When anyone drives in a crowded street, they create an externality: one person's driving slows down everybody else.
The best way to handle this externality is to charge drivers a congestion charge that reflects the social costs of the congestion they create. New York should follow London and charge drivers for driving in the city during peak hours.
It never happened and, as Glaeser acknowledges these days, the politics of changing this have got harder. Even so he still maintains that:
The sensible approach is to follow the lead of London and Singapore and charge drivers for the costs of traffic congestion.
Less traffic congestion means less cost to London business from having people sitting in traffic jams. It can boost a city's income too. Cautious estimates suggest London could gain a billion a year from an extended, more sophisticated charging system.
On Sunday Johnson's highly-respected transport adviser Isabel Dedring, defending the latest fares hikes and the suddenly-doubled price of hiring a "Boris bike," gamely explained to the London section of the Sunday Politics that all such decisions have to be taken with a view to the need to deliver promised investment.
Fair enough. So wouldn't an extra billion a year would come in handy in these straitened times, not least in mitigating the £55m a year Transport for London no longer receives thanks to Johnson halving Livingstone's charging area? Yet Livingstone himself ruled out restoring the WEZ during the election campaign. Only the Greens spoke up for it. Unless and until the issue returns to the agenda, London transport policy is likely to remain a snarl-up zone.
