Olympic Park / Queen Elizabeth Park - loop road open?

Ah, I was riding across there just a few weeks ago and was wondering when that was finally going to happen.

This happened shortly after Johnson 'became' Mayor of London. I was doing some work with the Eastway Users' Group (the group trying to secure a reasonable replacement for the old Eastway) at the time. Between 2004 and 2008, we'd successfully negotiated a plan for the Velopark, with a wide western loop that extended almost all the way to Waterden Road, and it was all done and dusted, when suddenly we were being summoned to new meetings and it was all up in the air again. We called their bluff and said that their real motivation was not to have 'a better park' but to build housing there, but they just lied to us in meeting after meeting. I only attended a few of them, but I know the others found it intensely frustrating.

They basically wanted to push the western loop of the circuit far back because of wanting the land for housing. I think that initially they may even have wanted to keep it east of the river, although I can't remember. It ended up with a hard-fought and still not adequate compromise. Planning being largely unaccountable, anyway (though not as bad as per the latest proposals under Johnson), and the Olympics adding another couple of layers of opacity, unaccountability, and corruption, we knew they were lying but there was nothing we could do.