UK Edition
Bob Kiley, London transport supremo – obituary
Bob Kiley, who has died aged 80, was a former CIA agent who was hailed as the saviour of the New York and Boston public transport systems when in 2001 he was lured to London by its then Mayor, Ken Livingstone, to effect a similar miracle for the British capital.
Kiley moved across the Atlantic to become the capital’s first Commissioner of Transport for London (TfL), the public body which reports to the Mayor. His £2 million salary package (together with a £2m rent-free Regency terraced house in Belgravia) made him the world’s best paid public servant.
Over the next five years Kiley was instrumental in transforming the capital’s transport system, securing the investment to modernise London Underground and expand the bus network. He also introduced the congestion charge and oversaw the introduction of the Oyster Card.
Along the way, however, he became a pawn in the internecine squabbles of the Labour Party and fought his own private battle with alcoholism. In early 2006 he quit his job four years before the end of his (renewed) contract.
Kiley was a strange bedfellow for “Red” Ken; the two men described their working relationship as “a CIA activist working for an unreconstructed Trotskyite”. Their views on London transport, however, proved very similar.
In particular both were vehemently opposed to plans, promoted by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, for public-private partnerships (PPP) in the running of the tube.
Within a few weeks of Kiley’s appointment, Treasury “sources” were rubbishing Kiley as “grossly overrated” and “old”. Kiley joked that he had expected to find Whitehall like East Germany under communism but had found it more like North Korea and dismissed Brown’s henchmen as “teenagers in sneakers”. He also released a 17-page report on the shortcomings of the PPP plans.
There was some surprise therefore, when, in addition to his role as transport commissioner, in May 2001 the transport secretary Stephen Byers appointed Kiley chairman of London Regional Transport (LRT), the government-appointed body which was in the process of devolving most of its powers to TfL.
There was speculation that, with a general election in the offing, the appointment was a tactical move designed to close down the argument over PPP until after the vote. Sure enough, in July, just 10 weeks after his appointment, Kiley was sacked from LRT, Byers accusing him of attempting to halt negotiations with private companies bidding to take part in PPPs.
Kiley remained as Commissioner of Transport for London, and he and Livingstone then took the government to court for judicial review to prevent PPP. They failed and in January 2003 three separate private consortiums took control of maintaining various tube lines. In July the same year powers for running the rest of the Tube network, including manning and maintaining the stations, was transferred to TfL and LRT became defunct.
Kiley would be proved right about PPP. The original contracts were for a 30-year period beginning in 2004, yet by early 2010 the private consortiums had failed and control of the infrastructure had returned to TfL.
In December 2004, Livingstone announced a four-year extension to Kiley’s contract with TfL, running until 2008 at an increased salary, but in January 2005 an Evening Standard investigation suggested that all was not well at TfL headquarters at Windsor House, Victoria.
Disgruntled TfL insiders were quoted as saying that Kiley could be angry and unpredictable and he was said to be in the habit of slipping out of his office at lunchtimes and popping across the road to the Threshers off-licence in Victoria Street to buy bottles of vodka.
(Later on Livingstone, in typically combative form, declared that he would “rather rely on Bob Kiley’s advice when he is drunk than [Evening Standard editor] Veronica Wadley’s advice when she is sober”.)
In November 2005, Kiley announced that he would be standing down in January 2006, after five years in the job. He was paid almost £2 million in a settlement, with an agreement that he would remain as a £3,200-a-day “principal transport adviser” to Livingstone until the end of the Mayor’s term in 2008. His contract had been due to run until 2009/10.
It was a sad end to a tenure which had seen improvements in London’s transport infrastructure which helped London to secure the 2012 Olympics.
The son of a Woolworth’s executive, Robert Raymond Kiley was born on September 16 1935 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and studied Business at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He gave up an opportunity to progress to Harvard Law School to work for the National Student Association, a CIA-funded group, becoming its president in 1959.
He went on to Harvard’s Graduate School, but dropped out after a year and a half to work for the CIA, at first covertly funnelling assistance to student groups around the globe. Later on he worked at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he became manager of intelligence operations and executive assistant to the then director, Richard Helms (who in 1977 would received a suspended prison sentence for lying to Congress about the CIA’s operations abroad).
Kiley went into transport management in 1970, first as an assistant director at the Police Foundation in Washington DC. Two years later he became deputy mayor of Boston, where he successfully maintained public safety during protests against the desegregation of schools.
In 1975 he was recruited by Michael Dukakis, governor of Massachusetts, to be chairman and chief executive of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, with responsibility for transport systems in Greater Boston. There, in addition to expanding rail services in the Boston area, he curbed political patronage and union perks.
After a period as a vice-president at the Management Analysis Center, in 1983 Kiley was appointed chairman and chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs New York’s railway, subway and bus system. He remained in the position until 1990, and, in his time in the role, built on the progress achieved under his predecessor, Richard Ravitch, in securing state funding to revitalise the city’s railways, buses and underground railways (“subways”). He also launched a clean-up campaign, targeting litter louts, fare-dodgers and graffiti artists, which is said to have inspired Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” approach in the 1990s.
Through that decade he held a series of business appointments before moving to London.
After his resignation afrom the role of transport commissioner, in March 2007, in an interview with the Evening Standard Kiley admitted that his intake of vodka had been going up as his workload went down and confessed that: “If you ask me what I actually do to earn my consultancy, I’d have to tell you, in all honesty, not much. Do I offer the British taxpayer value for money? I’ll leave that for you to decide” – a remark that caused much huffing and puffing in the press and at the London Assembly, TfL’s spending watchdog. Four months later he was reported to be in a US clinic, receiving treatment for alcohol addiction.
In his interview with the Standard Kiley hinted that his drinking was related to the shock he had endured in 1974 when his first wife Patricia and their two sons, aged three and five, had been killed in a car accident near New York.
Kiley is survived by his second wife, Rona, and by their two sons.
Bob Kiley, born September 16 1935, died August 9 2016