Well, there's a surprise! After all the fears and horror stories about the inevitable transport chaos that would blight the London Olympics and embarrass the city in front of the world, the trains and Tubes are coping quite well. Even the expected mayhem on the roads has failed to materialise, to such a degree that some of the hated "Zil lanes" set aside for the "Olympic family" are being reopened to regular drivers.
How come? Well, in a development that will have shocked nobody who has looked at recent Olympiads around the world, the combined threat of chaos and ripoff prices has deterred non-Olympic visitors from coming to London, and Londoners themselves are staying the hell out of the way. The overall number of tourists in the city is way down on normal midsummer levels. Theatres are half-full, hotels are slashing their rates, and some restaurants have seen trade fall by as much as three-quarters.
It must be really embarrassing for all the "essential workers" who demanded (and got) bonus payments to compensate them for the added burden they would be shouldering to keep the city moving. Tube and train operators, bus drivers, even the people who run the "Boris bike" hire scheme -- they all used the threat of strike action to extract payments of £500 or more just for showing up, in addition to all the lovely overtime they were going to get paid anyway. Think they'll be lining up to hand it back, now it turns out they got it under false pretences?
So much for the boost to GDP that the Games were supposed to provide. Still, if that doesn't materialise, at least we won't have the "triple dip" recession that the media were starting to salivate over. We'll just have an even longer double dip.
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