Commentary by Tony Travers

Ken Livingstone has already been to Paris, Berlin and New York, seeing how things are done elsewhere. Londoners cannot know just how bad the Underground is until they use a well-run metro in another city.

Moscow's underground is one of the most intriguing. Built by Stalin with both willing and forced labour, the cathedral-like stations are a glorious monument to a particular kind of public service ethos. The network is one of the public transport wonders of the world.

To stress the reliability of the system - and to assist in disciplining it - each time a train heads off down a tunnel an electronic clock starts to count the seconds until the next one arrives at the platform. During the daytime, it is rare for the indicator to reach 60 seconds.

This means 40 to 45 trains an hour at peak hours, compared with 20 to 25 on most Tube lines. Recently London Underground announced the Piccadilly line service is to be cut from 27 to 24 trains per hour.

In Moscow there are no long gaps between services and no insufferable hold-ups in tunnels. Small wonder the Russian system carries more than three times as many passengers - more than three billion a year - as the "severely crowded" London Tube. The Moscow metro is fast, wellmaintained, reliable, and strike-free. There is no litter and little graffiti. And this in a city of desperate economic problems, and appalling terrorist attacks, during the past decade.

For the time being the Government remains in sole charge of our Tube. Despite marginal changes in performance, the overall level of service is way below that of the past. The Mayor will return shocked by the Moscow metro's quality. Luckily for the Government, few Londoners have ever used it. If they did, we might have a Russian-inspired revolution.

? Tony Travers is director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics