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Sadiq Khan’s greatest direct influence as Mayor of London is over transport. It touches everyone who lives in and visits the capital’s streets, its stations and bus stops. It determines where the city will grow and how quickly we will tackle air quality, climate change, obesity and physical inactivity. And it is Sadiq’s biggest budget: £10bn of the mayor’s £16bn budget this year. In a few weeks this draft strategy should be released, so what should we expect?

Tough times ahead

First off, the transport strategy is no simple declaration. At 361 pages, Boris’s strategy came two years after his election in 2008. After one year Sadiq’s first draft is good progress in developing policies to cover off a vast range of services: the Underground, Overground, TfL run railways, DLR, trams, buses, cycle hire, taxis, London’s main roads and funding to London’s boroughs to spend on their streets, for instance.

Sometimes it’s easy when you’re an operations person to get lost in the technical details of a project. To become so focused on the process, that you forget that not everyone understands either the issue or the aim.

Some 20 years ago, when I was writing my first environmental management plan for The Australian National University – a strategy to make our campus infrastructure more sustainable – I was approached by John Reid an artist and academic from the school of art, with (what seemed to me) an odd suggestion.