Cash-strapped TFL wastes £207,000 of taxpayers' cash by changing name of one route

SADIQ Khan's cash-strapped Transport for London has wasted £207,000 of taxpayers' money and changed the name of a single bus route, The Sun can reveal.

The mayor's The team spent the huge amount of money converting the X26 shuttle service to SL7 last year.

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It included £132,000 of new paint and packaging work for 24 double-decker buses, and £51,000 of marketing of the route, between Croydon And Heathrow Airport.

A further £7,000 went to information leaflets, £13,000 to “shelter roundel toppers”, £3,000 to replacing bus stop signs and £1,000 to new timetables.

The route is part of the cross-London “Superloop” bus service launched by TfL to boost struggling passenger numbers.

There will be ten Superloop routes, meaning costly rebranding Work mayor could total more than £2 million.

TfL's total debt stands at £15.2 billion – an increase of £3.5 billion since the start of the pandemic.

We also told yesterday how the left-wing politician was accused of turning the London Overground into 'virtue signaling nonsense' by renaming six train routes.

The £6 million 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 royal houses or iconic sights in London.

Former minister Lord Frost said: “The London tradition is so public transport lines are given a name with a royal connection or a name related to the geography of the line.

“Giving them political names, whether you agree with the politics or not, is a break with that tradition.”

And last night, history buffs criticized Mr Khan after his social media accounts used a statue of Millicent Fawcett to announce the Suffragette Line.

Mrs Fawcett – a suffragist – used non-violent methods to campaign for women to have the right to vote.

She was not involved in efforts led by suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst, who oversaw more than 300 arsons and bombings in 1913 and 1914.

His post announcing the name was humiliatingly slapped with a community fact check, which stated: “The photo contains the statue of Millicent Fawcett, who was a suffragist, not a suffragette.
“These are two different groups with different goals.”

TfL said: “Since the launch of the SL7, the number of customers using it has increased by 62 percent.”