The funny thing about London

It's official, Ken Livingstone lost his bid for re-election. Part of it is due likely to the crash in preference for Labour more generally, part fatigue, part failures. Part of it is due to the fact that voting includes all of London's 32 boroughs, many of which are "suburban."

If you read the book The Future Once Happened Here from the late 1990s, it's quite interesting, being about the decline of U.S. cities. It uses DC, NYC, and Los Angeles as examples, but does discuss people like Rendell in Philadelphia (now governor of Pennsylvania) and Daley in Chicago, and the author looked at cities that had reform-oriented mayors come to office (Rendell, Giuliani, Riordan) and the impact vs. business as usual.

Livingstone was truly a transformational mayor, focusing on transportation-related issues--in part because London is set up differently so that most of the local municipal services are provided by the individual boroughs, not the Greater City--in ways that broke new ground for cities world-wide.

While it is true that Singapore has had congestion pricing for decades, London's adoption of the scheme brought renewed focus on the technique and has led to its reconsideration as a technique elsewhere. Similarly, Paris was not the first city in Europe to introduce paid-for bicycle sharing schemes. Bicycle sharing programs exist in many other European cities, including a system provided by Deutsche Rail, which was launched in 2001.

What's interesting is that London had a transformational mayor and he was turned out of office. What's interesting is that city's have mayors that some believe to be transformational, but aren't. And a lot of other cities are stuck in the business as usual/decline mode.

-- City Mayors: Mayors running the world's cities website

It's easier to be innovative at the local or state level than it is at the scale of a national government.

But it's still very difficult.

There is a magazine called Public Manager that I need to start reading. They have a conference coming up next month... I want to see if I can work up about three blog entries into one article about transformational delivery of public services.