London votes for Mayor today

Well it's finally arrived. The day of reckoning. The day that Londoners can choose who is going to become their Mayor for the next four years. Obviously, I've been following the mayoral campaign for quite some time as London's Transport and the London Underground is a key part of the Mayor's responsibility and also as three million people use the Tube in London every single day it's bound to be of importance.


Most of you, who've been reading this blog for some time, know who I'm going to vote for as Mayor. I'm not going to try to influence your vote with this post. Even though I'm apparently influential & popular now (it's official Reuters say I am - thanks guys & Jane). It's not fair, I'm not a politician, I'm not going to use the Reuter's traffic to say vote for X. You're hopefully grown up enough to realise the importance of your vote. You are sensible enough to know that voting for who is going to run London isn't about who might make the funniest Mayor. It's not necessarily about change for change's sake. It's not about who's more "right on than thou". However you vote today will influence your travel and life in London for the next four years. That's quite some time, so think carefully.

I've shown the ad above because voting is not a joke. As much as I joke about stuff on the Tube and can see the funny side to things, I take my power as a voter seriously and I urge you to do the same too.

What am going to do is show you what two people of very different ages have been saying or seeing about the Mayoral campaign. Peter is in his sixties, Kate is 25.

At Tuesday's London Blogger's meet up I was talking to Peter Marshall who was telling me that he had blogged very recently about seeing Ken Livingstone on the Tube:


"My photographs of London owe a great deal to Ken Livingstone and his transport policies at the GLC in the 1980s that made a quantum change in transport across the capital. It's hard now to imagine the difficulties and of getting around the city before the Travelcard - assuming you aren't in the class that always travels by taxi.

As Ken left, I decided it was time for me to go as well, and I wasn't at all surprised to find myself following Ken into Aldgate East underground station. I sat down on the train next to him, and after talking briefly asked if he would mind if I photographed him on the tube.

During the few stations to Embankment, where we both changed, he sat there catching up with reading a few documents. Several groups of people - including some Norwegian tourists - came up and talked to him and some took photographs too. As always, Ken had a smile and a few words that made them all feel welcome."

Kate wrote a piece that the Londonpaper chose to feature about the importance of 2nd voting. She used the votematch service that I also used last week.


She wrote: "I have found various tools on the internet to help me decide who to vote for. The best by far has been VoteMatch (www.votematch.co.uk) The website is set up to tell you which candidate you agree with most. I was surprised by the result it gave me. All of the mayoral candidates have answered a set of questions (yes, there are more than two candidates). The questions are designed to bring out the differences in their policies (again, yes, Ken and Boris have policies). The website then tells you, in a very helpful graph, which of the candidates you should support".

Like Kate I'm still undecided on who gets my 2nd vote for Mayor, even though votematch helped. I certainly know who's not getting it. With the London Assembly vote I'll probably take Ken Livingstone's advice and vote LibDem.


Polls open at 7am and close at 10pm. From a weather front in London, it's going to be dry & sunny in the morning and really wet again in the afternoon. Please don't forget to vote and don't assume your vote doesn't matter. As usual look forward to comments whether you are from the UK or overseas. Thanks.

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Thursday, May 01, 2008 Permalink COMMENT HERE
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