James Lawton: Gridlock and debt pour water on London's Olympic flame

What a stupendous gift, what a mouth-watering banquet of the soul, the mayor of London is offering as bait for the 2012 Olympics. Imagine it as you dreamily fondle your gear stick: a free lane on the M25.

He also says that our visitors, ordinary punters and not just the heirs to Michael Johnson and Marion Jones, will be be able slap a sticker on their windscreen and race through Shoreditch. How that's for a fantasy? The Finchley and Edgware roads will be a breeze. The Olympic flame will burn away a great city's misery.

Cabbies will come home to their loved ones with unhaggard demeanours which do not suggest they have been involved in Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. They will no longer bang on about how long it takes to get from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand – or how the new timing of the capital's traffic lights might have been dreamed up by the Marquis de Sade.

It sounds good – too good. It would be better if this picture of transportantial heaven was not being painted in the depths of hell.

Or if, with the notable exception of Manchester's commendable success in staging the Commonwealth Games, we were not undoubtedly the world's worst served, allegedly advanced nation when it comes to the challenge of getting the people to big-time sports events, which is of course not to mention the even more basic chore of getting them to work.

As the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, announced how strenuously the Government would be examining cost controls and overall planning for an Olympic bid, one could not help but recall overhearing the travel plans of a fellow resident of a Milton Keynes hotel on the eve of a British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

One of his aides mentioned that with official pre-race requirements, the party should be at the helipad by late morning – or about six hours after the most of the rest of the vast crowd checked into their first traffic jam. It was, you may have guessed, Two Jags – the man who the other day, after five years of cultivating the appeal of public transport, was party to the announcement of extra lanes for such choked-up arteries as the M6.

Of course it would be wonderful to have the Olympics here, and then look back on them with the pride of Sydney or Seoul or – most satisfactorily of all – Barcelona, where all the city's ambitions, even dreams, were perfectly realised in a beautifully conceived and efficiently organised Games and a legacy of dramatically enhanced road communications and some breathtaking urban renewal.

But the Catalans embraced the Olympics as a waking dream, and they did it with cohesion and co-operation and not as some desperately conceived cure-all for an infrastructure of both sport and daily life that was plummeting towards the Third World.

One jaundiced London cabbie last week concluded a 20-minute analysis of the organising powers of the government of his city with the statement: "The Olympics would be lovely – but would anyone see anything?"

Can we really believe in our capacity to pull off an Olympics coup after the accumulation of fiasco represented by Wembley and Pickett's Lock and the woebegone campaign to stage the 2006 World Cup? Only with the full-hearted leadership of the government, and perhaps, if we had that, for whatever motive that moved them, we could indeed be as pragmatic as the burghers of ancient Athens, who candidly saw in the spectacle they gave the world so long ago the chance to liberate themselves from the fumes and the gridlock.

But in this case pragmatism has to be supported by some iota of confidence that we still have the capacity to get things done. We helped save the Olympics in 1948 with our ration-book, prefabricated Games, but do we any longer have the capacity to save ourselves?

Wembley and the Dome are perhaps not the most encouraging models. If we are going to do it, let's do it, let's not talk about it as we did so tragi-comically the Dome, let's make a leap of faith, a kindling of national pride, a statement that if Seoul could do it so well, Barcelona even better, and Sydney even make you believe again that the whole bloated rigmarole was actually worth the candle, why not us?

All we need is a little faith and a Government which is finally prepared to put our money where its mouth is. The signs are not exactly redolent with hope. Jowell and the sports minister, Richard Caborn, are already talking about cost over-runs even as they continue to knock down Wembley.

The chance of the project – its only one – is that the Government will back it not as a dream but a means to two ends – the chance to bask in the glory enjoyed by Harold Wilson, when he declared: "England only win the World Cup under a Labour Government" and at the same time give the people of London a city with some potential to work.

Simplifying the argument is the fact that today an Olympic bid without total Government backing is an automatic non-starter. The pattern which has become so depressingly familiar here, government and private money hoping to ride on the back of each other without any truly solid commitment to the future, just won't do with the hard nuts of the IOC. They want it all down in black and white – and without a hint of anything in red.

The catastrophe, both moral and financial, of Atlanta certainly marked the end of private enterprise Olympics. What we got was a tawdry, disorganised product which demanded a rescue act for the idea of a continuing Games quite on the scale so miraculously produced by the state money and volunteer army of Sydney.

It is of course true that there has been a downside to the Sydney glory, including the reality of a white elephant Stadium Australia, but what an exuberant statement of self-belief it was, what a demand that a nation should show itself to the world in the best possible light.

Some of us, of course, believed the consequences of the Montreal Olympics of 1976, which are still felt in the pockets of city rate payers, would make the current debate utterly meaningless. We thought the Olympic goose had been burned to a crisp. Twenty-six years on, it remains a sore subject among many Montrealers.

One of them told me this week: "We still call the Olympic stadium the Big O – but now it means the Big Owe. We are reminded of this every time we get our bills for city taxes... there is still the line, Special Olympic Tax – the last time I looked it was 156 dollars on top of the yearly bill. There are still law suits surrounding the main stadium, which is going to be a complete white elephant when the Astros baseball team eventually leave town, which is inevitable. They've just agreed to play 22 games next year in Puerto Rico.

"Three of the Olympic swimming pools are covered over now, and are part of trade exhibition space – which is ironic because we're scheduled to run the World Aquatic Championships. We're building an open air complex – in the Canadian climate. Makes a lot of sense, don't it?

"The previous mayor of Montreal, who was basically the city's head gardener – he was superintendent of parks before he took office – was concerned that the Olympic velodrome was losing a million dollars a year. So he turned it into a nature exhibition. We call it the bugs museum. It's losing four million a year. The man who came up with the Olympics for Montreal, mayor Jean Drapeau, declared that the Games could no more make a deficit than a man could have a baby. We made a deficit of a billion dollars. Hey, good luck with the Olympics."

One of Montreal's problems was, of course, feeble city government and the irrational belief that everything, including a clapped-out infrastructure, could be solved by a five-ringed circus. That, when you think about, is pretty much what Londoners are now being told. The goal, no doubt, is a brilliant one, but no one should feel sheepish about a touch of scepticism.

London, after all, already has a Big Owe. It's called Wembley Stadium.