Gridlock The Route Masters: Running London's Roads

-RADIO:

-The A13 westbound is moving slowly between Marsh Way...

Hold on tight!

London is full up.

HORNS BLARE

Are you going to allow them to jump on the back of your bus?

I'm afraid I won't be able to take more passengers.

Thanks to a million more people arriving in the last ten years,

Transport For London now has more than 30,000 workers

battling day and night...

MAN WHISTLES

Wake up!

..to stop the city grinding to a halt.

-Three people been shot up there.

-War! It's war.

All right, I'll get the police and ambulance straight down there.

In the first week I was here, I thought, "What have I done?"

With unique access to the nerve centre of the capital's transport system,

this is the inside story of the people who keep London moving.

You're not only a bus driver,

you become a psychotherapist and psychiatrist.

Yeah, the people that like to talk to you.

Some of them even flirt with you.

I said, "Mate, sit down quietly.

"We're not going to hell, we're going to Ilford.

It's the lifeblood of London. Well, the buses are red, aren't they?

HE LAUGHS

There's my certificate, look. I'm a bus driver.

Thank you very much. You are so nice.

Don't worry. No problem at all.

London's changed a lot. But yeah, I love it. It's London.

This programme contains some strong language

-RADIO:

-The A13 westbound is moving slowly between Marsh Way

and the Ripple Road junction because of an earlier accident.

On the M4, there's a lane blocked westbound

because of a multi-vehicle accident between junctions 6 and 7.

The A2, New Cross Road, is closed.

Just madness, absolute madness.

It's now taken us - what? - five or six minutes to go about 200 yards.

Grow a beard in this traffic, wouldn't you?

In the last ten years, the number of journeys on London's roads

has increased by more than 20%...

HORN BLARES

..whilst the amount of actual road space remains virtually the same.

They're just pushing more and more traffic into less and less space

and it doesn't work.

This city relies on the movement of its people.

London cabbie Howard Taylor

has been doing battle with rush hour congestion for 25 years.

All of these trucks that are delivering during the day,

the streets were never built for this.

The houses weren't built for the parking outside.

There's not enough parking spaces in London.

There's not enough road space in London

and more and more people flood in.

Anyone who drives through London has got to be off their rocker.

They really have.

Something has to give. Otherwise, London will grind to a standstill.

I'm afraid I won't be able to take more passengers.

I will need to close the door.

Another 55 will be here within a few moments. I'm sorry.

(She's not happy. Oops.)

In Holborn, the number 55 is also struggling through the rush hour traffic.

Traffic lights, they're endless.

They last for ever.

The passenger can get frustrated.

I get frustrated.

HORN BLARES

Everybody wants to push,

so now I need to be Italian!

I need to be a little bit Italian and shout, "Get out of my way."

In London, the roads are very narrow, especially in the city

which is Roman, so there was just enough for a chariot

and maybe two chariots

but definitely it wasn't designed for a large vehicle

or for the combustion of the 2010.

Congestion has been a problem on the capital's streets

ever since the first motor vehicle joined horses and carriages

fighting for space in the 1890s.

Throughout the 20th century, new roads were built

and existing ones widened where possible

to try and accommodate the ever-increasing number of vehicles.

But with only a finite amount of space available,

there's only been one major new road built in London since 1989.

RADIO: 'Shoreditch High Street, there was a lane blocked southbound

'on Great Eastern Street after a van broke down.

'Also in Stamford Hill at the Stamford Hill-Amhurst Park junction...'

The average speed of rush hour traffic in London today

is just nine miles an hour,

virtually the same as in 1890.

In the east of the city, the latest EU diktat on tunnel safety

has meant a strictly enforced width restriction

at the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

You won't get through there, friend.

At six foot six, you will not get through there now.

You've got Tower Bridge, right, or Blackwall Tunnel, OK?

No, you don't. You're too big. No.

Move.

It's causing chaos for miles around.

Look at the traffic. It's crazy.

I'm trying to get to work and it's just outrageous.

It's caused untold problems and delays in traffic.

Obviously a non-driver who's designed this. It's ridiculous.

Though it might not always be apparent on the ground...

He's hit that, look. Ooh.

..London's traffic is actually amongst the most monitored,

controlled and carefully managed in the world.

This is the approaches to that width restriction, going all the way up.

Anything up to 60-minute delays or possibly more.

Just had an incident at Queens Road in Peckham.

Someone's fallen underneath a train.

They're closing the road so the helicopter can land.

That's going to cause quite a few problems around there.

On a road network, people just assume it's an uncontrolled space

and they don't have an appreciation

that, actually, it takes an awful lot of effort from an awful lot of people

to keep it moving on a daily basis.

And if that effort didn't go in,

you would be looking at gridlock situations across the city.

Ten years ago,

with a prospect of total gridlock looking ever more likely,

Transport for London invested £30 million in a state-of-the-art traffic control centre.

We have some of the most advanced traffic signal systems in the world.

I think our systems, you know,

make something like a quarter of a million decisions every hour

to alter the phasing of signals on a second-by-second basis.

We have image recognition equipment

that allows our cameras to detect when traffic stops moving.

The key to it is to find out about it quickly

to get people on site quickly, because we know when things go wrong,

if we don't act, that's when we get significant problems.

The most crucial mile of road in the entire London road network

is here - the Blackwall Tunnel.

Opened in 1897, it was a radical solution to growing congestion

on the bridges across the River Thames.

In the 1960s, to try and meet growing demand,

a second tunnel was added to carry the southbound traffic.

But over 100 years after it was originally built for horses and carriages,

the Victorian tunnel is still the main way to cross the Thames

for traffic heading into north London

from all over the south-east of England.

We're down at the tunnel bore now. You can hear the traffic.

MUFFLED ROAR

And here we go, so we'll slide it back through.

And there we go - 50,000 vehicles a day.

And look at some of these big boys that go past.

Transport for London is responsible

for trying to keep all 13 London road tunnels running smoothly.

Here we are in the southbound tunnel,

two metres away from the live traffic

and you can understand why it is the most important mile in London.

If there was a crash or a broken-down or an incident here,

traffic cannot bypass it. It stops.

On the south side, within 45 minutes we're actually stopping the M25

and because there's very few alternatives

and traffic generally is gridlocked, they're stuck.

They have to wait until we deal with the incident.

It's even more personal for me

because I only live about five miles away from the tunnel

so most times when I'm coming for meetings

or coming up, like, just to do work here,

I can be and I often do sit in my own traffic jams

which is very frustrating and very annoying.

With the ramifications of any delay at the Blackwall Tunnel

being felt so quickly across all of London,

it has its own on-site control room

with a team of staff watching over the traffic around the clock.

Oh, we've got one. He's gone on through.

He's gone down to the tunnel.

Idiot. I'll open up this one.

Never intended to accommodate 21st-century juggernauts,

there's a strict height restriction

well signposted on all approaches to the tunnel.

Good afternoon. This is the Blackwall Tunnel control room.

This message is for the driver of the Trotter white lorry.

-THROUGH TANNOY:

-Your vehicle is too tall to enter the Blackwall Tunnel.

You need to reverse and go left

onto the over-height ramp and pick up the telephone.

What nationality is that? Romanian.

-Romanian, yeah.

-So I stand no chance of speaking to him.

I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen.

Until the driver of the white artic gets the idea

that he has to reverse, I will not be able to reopen the tunnel.

That's helpful.

There's someone going to have a word with the driver.

Thank you very much to the gentlemen who helped with repositioning that lorry.

Once you're back in your vehicles, we will reopen the tunnel.

SIREN WHOOPS

To try and keep London's traffic moving,

Transport for London fund a 350-strong Roads Policing Unit.

-Hello, driver.

-Hi.

I'm young driver. It's too difficult for me.

OK, let me explain what's happened.

Just let me explain, just let me explain, OK?

-The reason why they forced you through this way, yes?

-Yes.

-The vehicle is too tall.

-Too tall?

-More than four metres.

I have two GPS. One say left, the second one right.

-I'm crazy. Help me, please.

-I'll tell you what.

-I drive after you.

-GPS...

I never go here to London. I be around away always.

It's catastrophe.

And I want to go to Bedford.

Why are you trying to go through central London for Bedford?

-GPS said.

-GPS - throw it away.

-Oh, my God.

-No good, throw it away. Get a map.

-All right? So keep going here all the way round.

-Is this my road?

-M25.

-M25, OK.

-Good man.

Thank you very much. You are so nice.

Don't worry, no problem at all. Jump in.

That's one very confused lorry driver trying to get to, er, Bedford

who's now going to go the M25 and the M1.

If you can raise the barrier,

hopefully you won't see him again today.

'All received. Thank you very much. Raise the barrier.'

ALARM BEEPS

I suppose it was closed for about five minutes in total

and in that time we got a tailback of approximately two miles

which will probably take half an hour to clear.

So we've got all this traffic

and then further up...

..there's all this traffic and it goes back beyond that.

I would not want to be sitting in this traffic every day.

It would drive me nuts.

I take my hat off to these people who sit in this traffic

every single day, day in, day out and don't go crazy.

They've got more patience than I've got.

But that's London, isn't it?

You know, these people have to get in, they have to get to work,

they have to go to the businesses

and this is as good as it gets.

HORNS BLARE

So we're about a mile and a quarter or so from the tunnel,

so we've got another, I'd guess, 15 minutes at least

of sitting in traffic until we get to the tunnel.

Travel agent Dennis Walmark has been subjecting himself

to the misery of the Blackwall Tunnel commute for over 40 years.

I started driving through the Blackwall Tunnel in 1971

when I passed my driving test.

I decided at that time I didn't like British Rail or London Transport

and as I tell my friends, I got a divorce from them

and the traffic over the years has got progressively worse.

When I first used to drive to the tunnel,

you'd have probably got caught up in about half a mile of traffic or so.

Now it's regularly two miles or longer

and it can take you up to an hour just to get those two miles.

It does make you angry, it does make you frustrated

and, erm, as I say, sometimes you get to the office

and you feel like you've done a day's work just struggling across.

Something's just happened ahead of us.

They've just switched on the signs to close lane three

and they're showing 50 mile an hour speeds in lanes one and two.

We'd be lucky doing five miles an hour

so I guess in lane three there's now a broken-down vehicle.

Just to inform you, we've got a broken-down,

camera 424 heading northbound.

Broken-down vehicles are the most common cause of delays

at the Blackwall Tunnel.

Let's go.

To minimise delays for motorists,

Transport for London provides a round-the-clock recovery service.

-RADIO:

-Along the Blackwall Tunnel, approaches still queuing northbound

from just after the Woolwich Road flyover towards the tunnel entrance.

You all right? A paramedic? You OK?

Yeah, I'm OK. I felt so light-headed for a minute there.

Just be me and you through the tunnel, yeah? OK?

It's a medical, this one. She's got a panic attack going into the tunnel,

so we're going to drive through under closed conditions

once we're all clear.

She's eight months pregnant, so she's a little bit funny.

Shaun Carter, a Blackwall recovery truck driver for 11 years,

leads the way through the tunnel.

We get a couple of them a month where they see the tunnel

and they panic, they're scared of driving in the tunnel.

Being that she's eight months pregnant,

we was a bit concerned with her, so we've shut the tunnel.

We're in a sterile condition. There's only the two of us in here now.

The majority of them won't be able to see there was a vehicle stopped there.

All they'll know is that there's severe congestion,

they're caught in it and it's delayed their journey

by 10, 20 minutes, maybe half an hour in some cases.

David, I'm taking her through the Bus - No Entry.

Need to get her off the road.

But as long as you're OK, yeah?

They've asked us do you need any more... Do you need assistance

-like medical or anything like that?

-I just felt so light-headed.

Take your belt off and just have five minutes.

Have a breather for five minutes.

Thank God he came because obviously I couldn't turn around at that point

so yeah, I'm quite heavily pregnant, wasn't feeling too well

and they was very helpful.

I don't know what to say. Thank you so much!

With that job there, you get all the first lot of people at the barrier

and once the barrier closes in front of them,

they don't understand what's going on so you get everyone on their horns.

It's like the culture now of London to use your horns.

Nothing you can do, you know, the barrier's got to be shut

but that's the culture we're in, everyone's on the hurry-up at the moment.

And there's quite a few breakdowns, more so when the fuel went up.

Everyone was running out of fuel and it just causes chaos

but we're just hanging about waiting for it, waiting for it all to happen.

Just got to wait for the phone to ring now. Let's hope it don't

and we can drink loads of tea.

Shaun and a colleague each spend six months of their year living on site

directly above the tunnel.

In-between jobs - that's if we get time, that is -

we do a bit of cooking.

Pancakes are on the menu today.

I'm self-contained, me.

Got to be, ain't you? Modern man and all that. Yeah.

These pancakes are going to be the nuts

and I'm going to go and relax in the Portakabin.

Colour TV.

And chill out till the next job.

Whilst on duty, Shaun's home is this Portakabin.

Just over the wall, that's where the tunnel is

so you can hear straightaway if there's an accident.

You can hear, like, the breaking of glass, screeching of tyres

so straightaway, you know.

You might be getting a little bit of shut-eye sitting on the chaise longue

and then you hear all the pandemonium kick off.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it's, er...

You know, you sort of get used to it.

HORNS BLARE

-RADIO:

-BBC London 94.9. Let's get the latest travel news now.

Unusual delays beginning to build. All sorts of problems. Long queues.

The North Circular and the A40 a bit slow on all approaches.

It's Friday evening rush hour

and half a million extra people

have joined the nightly fight to leave London.

HORN BLARES

CAD1398, which is the broken-down HGV on the A4,

is there any news on recovery yet?

In Transport for London central traffic control centre,

staff monitor 5,000 cameras and must troubleshoot incidents

across the entire 9,000 miles of the London road network.

-What's this?

-Er, hold on, hold on.

In North London, there's an unexpected backlog of traffic

in the Archway area, and plumes of black smoke can be seen.

From what we could see, it does appear to be a car.

Whether he's just filled up, I don't know

cos there's quite a lot of flames going on in the area

and that's ended up blocking both north and southbound carriageways.

Due to the size of the fire, it might take quite a while

for it to actually cool down as well

so we're looking at a closure for at least an hour or so.

-RADIO DISPATCHER:

-'An eastbound closure

'to prevent any traffic coming onto the A406 eastbound from Hall Lane.'

8821. Send it to the box.

SIREN WAILS

In a bid to minimise congestion, the control room

immediately dispatches officers from the Roads Policing Unit

to divert traffic away from the scene of the fire.

This is going to be it.

Basically, we're going to put some cones out now

so we can get this traffic here moved over earlier

so that not everyone's stacking up trying to get up to the Archway Road.

Fella, road's closed.

-How far up?

-All the way up.

All up to the next main junction.

It's Friday afternoon, everyone was going home.

At the moment, no-one's going anywhere

and everyone's being forced back round the one-way system

to find another way round. With the amount of traffic you get,

if you close one road, there is a knock-on effect.

It will affect another place, then it starts to affect somewhere else

and all of a sudden it goes in a great big circle somewhere in London

and it just gridlocks, literally comes to a standstill.

The normal diversion route, if there's an accident along there,

is to divert them sort of along here.

For every new incident,

shift manager Chris Huckstep must devise a bespoke diversion

to try and route traffic around the problem.

You know, the best bet might be

take the closure back to the one-way system

and send them up, send them down Junction Road

or send them down St John's Way.

A lot of cities across the world run on grid systems

so things are very easy for them.

If there's a big accident somewhere, you can just open up another grid

and push the traffic along in that direction

and all the roads are pretty much, they look pretty much the same.

London, on the other hand, is a bit mad.

It's over 1,000 years of sort of roads that have been built

ever since the Roman roads were originally built.

So you've got winding passageways where you can barely get a bus down

that is only one-way just for one lane of traffic.

And then you've got massive sort of four or five-lane carriageways

running almost next to it sometimes.

It doesn't really make sense half the time.

With a traffic diversion in place,

the next job is to deal with what's left of the burnt-out car.

Trying to think, if I can drag it further back,

we'll get it away from that junction. Does it steer?

Erm, I think there's a steering wheel in it.

I was just driving back from paintballing with my two ten...

well, my ten-year-old son and his ten-year-old friend.

My car started to lose power, then I saw a flame come out the back.

So I just stopped, obviously got the kids out of the car and ran.

Then I heard a big firework display going on, so yeah, outrageous.

These look like our contractors have literally just turned up as we speak

just to have a look at the road surface, and from that,

we'll get a lot more of an understanding of what needs to be done.

In order to be able to respond the moment a problem occurs,

Transport for London has teams of emergency response road workers

on stand-by 24 hours a day.

It's actually damaged some of the tarmac, the fire,

so it could be a resurface job for this little bit of road here.

So it could be a fair old time that this road will be dug up, resurfaced

and then there'll be more commotion and more congestion caused by it.

Traffic is quite busy, as you can see. I do feel for them.

People looking, "Why don't you move it out of the way?"

Well, we would. If we could pick it up and put it in our pocket

and take it away, we would, but we can't.

The average person will slow down

and think, "That could be me sitting beside the road."

Other people just, "Get out my way,

"It's Friday, I'm going home, I don't care who you are."

What the hell's going on there? Is this that...?

-It's just... The motorbike?

-Six-car RTC, is it?

Which one? The one on the red bridge?

We're probably going to have to go severe on that Kenning Hall.

It's back to Mill House. It's back to Ilford.

The burning car has delayed thousands of people by well over an hour,

but it's just one tiny issue of many across the capital.

That's still the bloody tailback from that.

That's worse than it was before, to be honest.

We're in the middle of rush hour

and I've got accidents left, right and centre all over London,

so it's slowly grinding to a halt.

The A4 right by the Natural History Museum, we have a house on fire.

A woman's been hit by a bus on Seven Sisters Road.

About half a mile south of there,

we had another accident about an hour ago.

There, someone was hit on a motorcycle.

That's just a few of the things going on.

Probably at this range, actually.

There's another camera.

Ever since I started work here,

I'm very careful even about crossing the road.

You don't think about it. You just think, "All right,

"there's a green man there, I can cross the road now."

But I look three times before I go across a road.

You don't want to be underneath that bus or what have you

if somebody just jumped a red light.

The number of horrific accidents we see, it's just...

it's kind of put me off a bit.

At the Blackwall Tunnel,

it's not just vehicles that are causing them problems.

The male pedestrian in the southbound tunnel,

turn round and go back now.

Failure to do so, police will be called

and you'll be dealt with accordingly. Turn round now, please,

and make your way back out the tunnel, where you can get the bus.

On the weekend, drunk pedestrians looking for a shortcut home

are a regular sight.

Most of the time, the public are very helpful

and behave just like you or I would do, yet there's always one or two.

He must have had a really good night. He didn't know which way was up.

Eventually the police came along and just dragged him off immediately.

There was one occasion when we spotted a cyclist in the tunnel.

He was complaining that he wanted the AA to come out and sort out his bike.

I think he noticed that one of the CCTV cameras was moving on its mount

and following him, and that got him really wild.

There's always one or two people who just seem to have slight problems.

It's not really frustrating for us cos it's part of our job. In fact,

if anything, it's light relief

watching people behave like sort of...idiots at times.

But it must be very frustrating for motorists trying to get home.

Once a month, the northbound Victorian tunnel must be closed

for essential maintenance.

003FT and Brunswick slips closed.

To minimise disruption, the maintenance team do their work

in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Contractors, the tunnel is now closed.

You're clear to enter the tunnel.

I'll put them up on stage two. That'll clear it.

We can get it clean, tidy

and nice for the public to go in.

Check all the fans, check all the gullies, check all the sump pumps,

clean the light fittings - 101 jobs to do.

It's stood the test of time. It's a good old tunnel

and we've all got a love and affection for it. We look after it.

The original design concept was for 1,000 horse and carts a day

and the lighting level is such

that a gentleman can read his copy of The Times mid-river.

Victorian workmen dug the 800-metre-long tunnel by hand.

It took them five years to complete

and cost £1.4 million

and seven workmen's lives.

It takes some of the region of between 50 and 60,000 vehicles

a day now, so Victorians didn't get it all wrong, did they?

Danny, I was wondering if you could do me a favour, please?

I've got the guys here cleaning up the tar by shaft three.

One of the key challenges the maintenance face each closure

is the ongoing battle against tar.

This is quite a big problem. It's just ingress from the earth

so it just comes from...well, from the tunnel itself, from the ground.

It's always present, and it's...

We have got a situation with the tar that we're trying to manage.

Tar, originally from a nearby gasworks

that was bombed during the Blitz,

has been leaching in at joins

between the lengths of cast-iron pipe used by Victorian engineers

to support the roof of the tunnel.

If we left this for six months, it'd just be...

probably wouldn't even be able to get this out the gully.

Sometimes it'll get a bit tough.

What you having for tea tonight then?

-Beans, they're in there.

-Beans.

Back above ground, Shaun's treating girlfriend Jacky

to a night at the Blackwall Tunnel.

I met her at Butlins Disco Inferno a few years ago.

Yeah, nice, she comes up and sees us weekends.

We go down the cafe together, highlight of the day!

-You know how to treat a girl, hey?

-Yeah, know how to treat a girl, yeah.

I live in the New Forest where it's nice and quiet,

so this is a big difference.

Yeah, you do notice the noise. Takes a bit of getting used to.

Keep turning the telly up cos you can't hear anything.

We just painted the Portakabin cos one of the fellas who was here before liked to smoke

and it was a bit yellow.

One after the other - chuff, chuff.

-Mushroom.

-Like a mushroom colour, yeah, mushroom.

Yeah, with the artwork, it looks nice.

That was found on a skip that, and we cleaned it up.

It can be hard, I mean we've had blokes... Like, girlfriends, wives

obviously they don't want you working away as such.

It's a job, ain't it? I've been doing it for ten years.

Yeah, it's OK.

Beneath the River Thames, Ken and the maintenance team are nearly done.

We like it down here, it's peaceful. There's no vehicles, it's lovely.

Just go through and you can have a look, see where all the sweepers

have been through, swept it all up and cleared it all up.

All the walls have been washed,

look, all nice and clean, all ready for the public.

And then you come to this little spot here

and you're halfway through the tunnel.

It's about... It's roughly midway,

but you're in the centre of the Thames here,

cos you can see by your red panels, so directly above you is water.

It's about six foot of clay above the top of the tunnel here.

But it's continually monitored so we keep a check on it.

'OK, everyone near the flood barrier,

'be aware we're about to lower the gate, over.'

WARNING SIRENS BLARE

Despite Ken's confidence in the integrity of the Victorian structure,

in 1999, metal floodgates were installed.

This is the floodgate, in case the tunnel's ever breached.

This gate stops, obviously, the Thames flooding

the surrounding areas. It just actually holds it either end.

And what's going to breach the tunnel?

Who knows? People say an explosion,

but probably old age or something from the river

but the odds of that happening is very, very unlikely.

It's just a precaution, a back-up measure.

We don't actually seal anybody in.

If the tunnel does get flooded and the barriers are brought down,

people can still escape out.

If you can swim this far, you can climb up the ladder and get out.

You haven't got much chance, have you, if you get stuck inside?

It's breached the tunnel by the river and now you've drowned.

HE CHUCKLES

Yeah, can you lift the gate up for us now, please, thank you.

WARNING SIRENS BLARE

Get the cones out.

It's 15 minutes before the tunnel's scheduled opening time

and vehicles are already queuing to get in.

'They're all clear on the south side.'

Received, thanks a lot, Stuart.

07:46, northbound open.

It's 7.50am Wednesday morning.

'This is BBC London, 94.9,

'time for London's travel news now, with Paul Murphy.'

'Notting Hill Gate closed eastbound for repairs to a burst water main,

'queues on the approach and a couple of bus routes diverted in that area.

'Also, the Limehouse Link Tunnel, one lane is blocked eastbound

'after a car broke down. I'll have more at quarter to.'

In central London, the morning rush hour is in full swing.

CRASHING

Oh, mate, your car's on fire, get out of the car.

CROWDS SCREAM

Get out of the car, man, your car's on fire!

The busy commuter hub of Vauxhall is plunged into chaos.

A bus driver calls into the traffic control centre from the scene.

What has happened? What has happened, over?

OK, going to get them along there as soon as possible, over.

SIRENS WAIL

Unbelievable, man. Unbelievable, man.

We're getting reports that a helicopter has crashed

in the Vauxhall area of London, close to the River Thames.

London Fire Brigade says it's received a number of calls.

Fire fighters are en route.

Look at that. Part of the helicopter. Mate, that's nuts.

Nuts, mate, that's something surreal out of a movie, man.

Unbelievable, man.

Unbelievable, man.

The number is 02036506.

Apparently the helicopter exploded

and then the fuel from that spread out and set on fire.

It's pretty... It's terrible really, it's not good.

The helicopter has come down at a critical junction,

where six of the busiest commuter routes in South London meet.

And Transport For London's first priority

is to divert traffic away from the area.

Obviously you've got strong plans up at Edgware Road

and everything. They must be on, yeah?

-The gating plans?

-Yeah, the gating plans.

I hope they're on, they must be.

-It's not, is it?

-No.

-Fucking hell.

This is unprecedented for London.

We haven't had anything like this for a very, very long time.

Erm, the police have declared it as a major incident.

We've got a closure here as well and there must be one here.

The road closed there, that is to restrict traffic going into Vauxhall.

It's quite a big crash site.

Obviously you've got bits of debris everywhere.

I think they'll be treating each individual location as a crime scene.

The ramifications for us are

we're going to have closures for the next week or so, I think.

SIRENS BLARE

In Vauxhall, the emergency services are cordoning off the entire area.

The helicopter's come down in the road down the side.

It's burst into flames and we have two fatalities at the moment.

A lot of roads are closed cos we've got the train station closed

because of structural worries, the tube station closed,

and not one bus is running through Vauxhall.

So at the moment, it's absolute chaos.

Another one of them.

On Vauxhall Bridge, one of Transport For London's incident response teams

are busy putting the road closures in place.

Well, we've closed Vauxhall Bridge.

We've closed Lambeth, we've closed Kennington,

we've closed Nine Elms,

Chelsea, South Lambeth...so far.

And there's still more to be done.

You need to get the "buses only".

And what about "road ahead closed"? I need two of them.

Are you having to make up signs?

Improvise, yes.

Improvise, yes, cos it's not a standard sign they want

so we have to make the best what we can do.

Two people have died and 13 people injured,

including one who is critical

after a helicopter flew into a crane in South London.

It happened in Vauxhall near to the MI6 building.

The helicopter, flying very low in foggy conditions,

hit the crane at the top of St George Wharf Tower

and eventually crashed on the road below,

bringing part of the crane down with it.

The entire area in Vauxhall is cordoned off.

Can we please clear the area.

The crash has closed down one of the major transport hubs in London.

During rush hour, tens of thousands of people pass through Vauxhall on public transport

and thousands of vehicles converge at the Vauxhall Road junction.

We're fire fighting, this is the development that got struck

where the crane was struck and where the helicopter came down.

Normally this is a big gyratory of traffic coming all the way in

from South London and actually from East London as well.

They all come in this way and this is the critical point.

We're using a strategy of actually reducing traffic coming in

towards these points. We're going a bit further back and just

giving more red time, less green time, for people coming into town.

It stacks them up a bit on some of the bigger trunk roads,

but it's better than coming in to somewhere that's more condensed

and packed and where they will... The Americans call it gridlock,

we don't have grids so... but it's the same principle,

traffic just stops moving because there isn't enough road space.

TANNOY: 'For bus services towards Brixton, walk towards Stockwell.

'And for bus services towards Lewisham...'

Buses on 11 different routes normally use Vauxhall Bus Station.

All diversions remain in place due to the Vauxhall incident,

including northbound Vauxhall. Thank you.

Two hours after the helicopter crashed, the bus management team

are still trying to deal with the fallout.

Was that 178?

We've diverted all our services now.

The problem we've got with that now is the delay side, the delay factor.

All around Parliament, Whitehall, all around there, up to 60 minute delays.

Again coming through from Elephant and Castle,

coming through from Brixton, Stockwell, Clapham,

about 60 minute delays.

This is how tight London is now, you take one area out,

it completely messes it up for miles and miles.

It's like having the Blackwall Tunnel closed, you know?

It's just going to knacker the whole of London.

We need to make sure that there is something in Waterloo Main Line

to let them know in advance so they don't turn up here

thinking they're going to walk down Wandsworth Road.

Alan Dell is in charge at Vauxhall Bus Station.

Thanks very much, Laura. Cheers, bye-bye, bye-bye.

The most important thing now is to get the transport system

up and running and back to normal as quickly as possible.

We haven't had buses running a normal service

since about eight o'clock this morning.

People rely on the bus service on this side of London.

Tube connections aren't brilliant over here

so it's really important to get the buses running.

What sort of timescale are you looking at?

Well, this probably won't open here for, erm....

I'd say until this evening.

So if we sort of plan for the evening peak.

If we say get it open for the evening peak to get

-north and south London through.

-Yeah, that's what would be my plan.

Yeah, that works well.

I think we will need to take that back to the Oval

for Harleyford Road going towards...

Yeah, where that closure is there, that'll need to remain I think.

In the traffic control centre, Chris must now devise a plan

to help reduce congestion before the evening rush hour hits.

Want to keep this movement out, we could get pretty much a free run

going that way which would keep Vauxhall...

keep that free route running.

'When we first heard about the incident, a lot of closures were put in.

'We didn't, nobody really knew what was happening.'

At that point we're not looking at managing traffic congestion,

just keeping people safe.

Now we know exactly what's going on on the scene,

we know where the closures need to be.

When I was interviewed for the job,

they gave me a scenario which I had to sit and...

The scenario was a plane crash not far from that location,

so it's one of the training scenarios that we do use.

So although we never thought it would ever happen,

it's, erm, you know, we knew roughly what we would have to do.

Are we able to move the permanent closure right up Nine Elms Road?

Yes, it is just literally a dozen cones and some road closures.

-Hectic.

-Just slightly.

Southbound Vauxhall Bridge has been reopened at this point in time.

Three routes going back to line of route, southbound only,

That's going to be route 36, 185, 436.

Nice one. As soon as we get some movement in the bus station,

we'll give you a call back. Much obliged.

Now the Transport For London team are reopening some of the roads in the area,

a few key bus routes can start running through Vauxhall again.

Once you close this movement off,

which is what we want them to do, close that off,

everyone will be forced to come, that's there basically.

But as the evening traffic builds, the road closure plan must

constantly evolve to deal with new traffic backlogs as they occur.

One more.

Every change on a map in the traffic control centre

means more work for Ian Bailey and his team on the streets of Vauxhall.

Tonight is basically going to be opening it, closing it,

putting it this way that.

By the end of the night, we should have it perfectly running.

So tomorrow it'll be, come rush hour, it should run lovely.

-Hey, it's road closed.

-INDISTINCT SPEECH

Yeah, but it's still road closed, doesn't matter.

Mate, he wants you.

You can't go through a road that is closed.

-Where are you going?

-Thank you very much, sir.

MAN SHOUTS

Angry commuters!

"I'm going through. I don't care." Simple as.

There's a big sign saying "road closed".

"I don't care I've got to go there, so I'm going through."

We've been doing this since eight this morning

and we ain't even had a chance...

We've had a chance for a cup of tea but that's about it,

a quick cup of tea but nothing else,

no dinner, no lunch, no breakfast.

There's no-one else to cover us, so we've got to do it.

You've just got to put your head down and just get on with it.

As Transport For London do their best to limit the inconvenience to road users,

on the streets immediately around the crash site,

the investigation into what went wrong has only just begun.

One, two, three, four, five...

Five...

It's 7:00am

and in Blackheath, south east London,

the battle to keep London moving continues...

..whatever the weather.

HE LAUGHS Got me!

See, he did that on purpose! Completely soaked me.

Transport For London have designated 360 miles of the capital's roads as red routes

and employ full-time inspectors to patrol these key thoroughfares,

on the lookout for anything that could add to delays.

You do have to be able to walk fast because you've got to walk

eight kilometres a day and there's other people reliant

on you getting your job done so that they can get their job done.

Another pothole.

Yeah, I'm on Shooters Hill Road again. It's another pothole, mate.

Yes, mate, yep.

Cheers, mate. Bye-bye.

In an ideal world, there would be enough money

to resurface roads every year, but that simply isn't the case.

We just have to tackle 'em as best as we can.

Within the next 24 hours, one of our response teams

will come and make that job safe.

So we move on.

Right, what road is it?

MUFFLED VOICE ON PHONE

Ah, nice. All right then, mate.

All right, bye.

Toby Melville and Indra Gurung are the incident response team

working Alan Easton's south east London beat.

Indra used to be a Ghurkha so he's quite a tough mind, you know?

He likes to get things done. So it's quite hard to tell him...

When you want things done, you have to speak to him very nicely.

I was a soldier.

I was in British Army for 20 years.

Once I retired, come back here to this job.

I'm more used to being a soldier, but I like this job.

Why's that?

HE LAUGHS

Cos I'm in London.

Not in the back street of Kathmandu!

One, two, three, break!

UK's one of the best places to bring up your children.

My two children are here with me, my wife is here.

Lucky I'm employed. HE CHUCKLES

Every year Transport For London staff carry out

over 36,000 repairs on the red routes.

We can do 20, 30 potholes a day.

Potholes get on my nerves.

A lot of these roads are built on old, old roads,

like Roman roads and stuff.

They're so old, all the time there's something needs doing with a road.

You know, the amount of traffic that runs over it

and then with all the weather and the salt and everything else

that goes on it, it sort of breaks the road up.

Hopefully, we get things done and people don't even know that we're here,

so hopefully we're done in literally a couple of minutes.

And then people come round and noticed that it's been fixed,

like a little elf or a little something's come out

in the night or the daytime, and just done it all, like magic.

Yeah, but this one, nice and easy.

It's safe now for everybody.

We'll pack up we'll get out and hopefully

no-one will know that we're here, that's the plan.

I have to say, as a cyclist, I could do better than that.

Yeah, we can whack it again.

What we do is we come out and we make things safe.

Well, I'll tell you, if that was your drive and

you paid someone a large sum of money to come and fix a hole in your drive

and they said, "OK mate, OK, Guv, that'll be 200 quid,"

what would you say?

Well, I'd say that's not a permanent repair

-and it's not a permanent repair...

-Is that what you'd say?

Well, I understand what you're saying.

That's rubbish.

Well, I can see what you're saying, I can see what you're saying.

We'll give it another whack.

We'll give it another whack, we'll give it another go.

Yeah, I mean that's like, you know this isn't very technical, is it?

This is like icing a cake, you put the base bit on

and you stamp it down and then put the top bit on

and then you really, and you're meant to like have it

-smoothed gently into the road.

-Yeah, I understand but...

It's not a permanent repair, though.

-It's temporary measures only, ma'am.

-It's to make safe.

Quite often, I do get abuse but I don't care.

I'm used to it. It's part of my job.

So I need the contractors to go down to Camberwell New Road.

What are you doing? Are you closing it off into the Oval and forcing them all up?

Forcing them all right.

It's the day after the helicopter crash...

So northbound Camberwell New Road.

..and in the traffic control centre

and on the roads around Vauxhall, its impact is still being felt.

People are like, "That was yesterday, today's a different day,"

and they're all trying to get to where they need to go to.

But this is day two. This is pretty standard stuff

when you have a big incident like this, just that...

It's like the hangover if you like.

It's all really exciting the day that it happens

and people avoid it.

Now it's just business as usual, getting the congestion out of the way.

The crane the helicopter hit has been deemed unsafe.

Until it's dismantled, the vital Vauxhall gyratory system must remain closed.

The crane that was struck by the helicopter is massive,

I've never seen anything actually that big before.

Normally those cranes assemble themselves.

Cos they're so big, you use cranes to start assembling them and then it starts building itself

because it's so big there's nothing else that could build it.

Because it's damaged, it can't disassemble itself

so we have to get a crane that is capable of doing that.

It takes two days to build a new crane big enough to dismantle the old one.

But by Sunday afternoon it's finally ready to be lifted into place.

-So is it all done now?

-It's all done.

We're going to be getting lanes four and five back

-hopefully in the next couple of hours.

-Today? Great!

Yeah, the one way system will then be reopened.

Cos I live there, you see,

and I can't get in and out with my car. You can get out,

but when do you think you'll be able to get in which is there?

As I say it'll probably be, I don't know, four o'clock this afternoon,

-something like that.

-Great! Thanks very much.

-Cooking on gas so to speak.

-Yeah, thanks very much.

Although we're all electricity in there!

There's no gas in there, but thanks very much anyway.

-All right, OK, bye.

-Bye.

Since Wednesday, the boys have been hard at it.

They've been working late, trying to keep the public informed,

keeping the roads moving, then we go home, then you get rung up to come

-back because we are the boys.

-We are the fourth emergency service.

Yes, the fourth emergency service, keeping London moving.

Here we go, first vehicles now. Got the one way system reopened

and this is the first set of vehicles now coming through.

I think they'll be grateful.

Come Monday morning they'll be able to drive through, won't they?

Be over the moon.

We're up against it every day really,

but we deal with it, it's our job to.

Hiya. We've just come across a dead fox

so we're going to need a T-number for this job.

In south east London, another day brings

another early start for Toby and Indra.

I don't think Indra's going to eat this fox,

probably been there for quite a while, I think.

What do you reckon, Indra, you going to eat this one?

HE LAUGHS Not in a million years. I would never eat fox.

What do you like to eat?

Number one, deer. Number two, pheasant.

And number three, wood pigeon. HE CHUCKLES

Fox is smelly, dirty animal so never eat fox.

I can live on goat testicles. HE CHUCKLES

Honestly.

Ask any Nepalese, any people,

that's really nice. I've eaten many, many times

and I can virtually live on goat testicles.

You most probably say, being an Englishman, disgusting.

Yeah, I think I'll stick to... I'll stick to English food.

Ah, you'll stick to your sandwiches!

I cannot live on sandwiches and potatoes.

But before they get round to breakfast, Toby and Indra need

to deal with the results of some recent inclement weather.

See that lovely flood.

-Good job I had my Wellington.

-Yeah.

In addition to London's 9,000 miles of road,

Transport For London are also responsible

for miles of walkways, footbridges and underpasses.

We were told that the pump inside, which works automatically,

is not working, I don't know.

Despite the flooding, Indra's determination to keep London moving remains undampened.

For you lot, there's no alternative apart from this.

You're going beyond the call of duty you are!

He's really good, you see, look.

Thanks!

There we are, mate.

Thank you very much. Thank you, you're a star.

I need to get a train really urgently,

so the man's just helped me right out, so thank you very much.

-He was very happy carried on my back.

-You carried him?

Yeah, carried on the back because he didn't want his shoes wet

because he's going to court.

I don't mind, I don't mind. He was very happy.

I'm sure they'll say health and safety against that.

This is where this country gone wrong. Too much human right,

too much of health and safety - claim culture.

Indra, you should start charging people a pound a time!

RADIO: 'The A1 southbound through Borehamwood slowing up Stirling Corner to Apex Corner.

'Streatham High Road congested northbound from Streatham Common to...'

Travelling in rush hour is a nightmare, I know it is.

At certain times of the day we know there's going to be congestion

and there is every morning.

But there is a team out there working 24/7, 365 days a year

making sure that traffic is flowing.

Lovely, cheers.

Now, hang on, let's just work out how far you are from the next exit.

Your vehicle is too tall for the tunnel.

Everything that can be done is being done.

We are trying to improve times for, obviously,

your passengers and yourselves travelling around this diversion.

If we can do something about it, it's brilliant.

You start seeing those queues going away.

I do find that quite rewarding, thinking, "I did that, I fixed that."

-RADIO:

-'Coming into town through Acton, looking a lot better

'after a van broke down earlier this morning at Gypsy Corner.

'The M4 westbound now clear of the multi-vehicle crash...'

Wow, we're really rolling now!

We've just moved about 50 yards in about 20 seconds.

This is like Formula 1.

Could somebody please give up the chair for this gentleman?

Somebody just did, that's wonderful.

London essentially was a prehistoric village.

Considering the amount of road space we have

and the amount of vehicles we do deal with every day,

it's an impossible act really, isn't it? It's like a magic trick.

I don't know how we do it.

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