Delivering London 2012: Transport legacy Available to Purchase

Legacy was embedded across all of the UK Olympic Delivery Authority's capital projects – 75 pence out of every pound spent went towards long-term regeneration. The around £500 million invested in long-term transport improvements was designed with this legacy in mind to leave a positive impact across all venues wherever they were across the UK. The great majority of these permanent legacy benefits were delivered by the end of 2010, nearly two years before actually needed for games time capacity and operational needs. From the very start of London's bid for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games there was a determination to host a ‘public transport' event. There were two main ways to meet this aim: create new public transport systems but risk them becoming redundant after the 2012 games; or invest in and enhance the existing network. In a purely practical sense, the latter course was the obvious choice because it was deliverable in the six-year timescale and because of the lack of physical space and high capital costs associated with inserting new systems in existing cities. But by far the major influence in the decision to invest in existing systems was the opportunity to use the significant investment in transport to deliver benefits that were felt by passengers long after the 2012 games. This paper explores the legacy of the UK Olympic Delivery Authority transport programme and its place in the great tradition of transformational transport investment in the capital over the past 150 years.