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@Oliver Schick
Thanks, Charlie and dommyracer. Squeezing additional motor traffic capacity out of junctions is a favourite game of traffic engineers and, as Charlie said, one of the most self-defeating pursuits known to man. I haven't noticed changes to the junction BMMF describes, but signal timings in that area have always been tight. There are plenty of phases you can reduce in favour of people driving their spare sofas around--the pedestrian phases, the intergreen timings, the timings for side roads, etc. It's an extremely retrograde step. 'Smoothing the Flow' is essentially a combination of two separate techniques: SCOOT and Pedestrian Countdown, and as dommyracer said, there's a bit of hot air about stuff that's going on, anyway, and has done since before the days of Ken. Some of it is new--new stuff gets trialled all the time.
The Mayor should of course commit to motor traffic reduction. Currently, the rule, though, is to maintain motor traffic capacity in new TfL schemes.