The report estimates the final cost of the Olympics and Paralympics at $11.6 billion, after $32.3 million was cut from the budget of the main stadium. That includes a savings of $11.3 million by scrapping a planned fabric wrap around the venue.
Olympic Delivery Authority chief executive David Higgins said organizers have saved a total of $1.2 billion since construction began.
Transport for London has now sent its plans for the £25 million project - which would connect the Royal Docks in east London with the O2 in south-east London - to Newham and Greenwich councils and the Thames Gateway Corporation.
If approved, the scheme would entail construction work on two two-storey stations either side of the river, as well as three towers supporting the cable, with the project scheduled for completion in time for the 2012 Olympics in east London.
The six month trial will bring wi-fi connectivity to the ticket hall and both the Bakerloo and Northern line platforms.
It will be free for BT broadband customers and for mobile users with free wi-fi minutes.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson wants to see widespread mobile coverage.
The Charing Cross trial begins on 1 November.
Speaking during a public debate on the Olympic Park after 2012, Burdett warned that 30 years of investment in east London had done little to raise its socio-economic profile and that unless the Olympic Park was stitched into its setting, little would change beyond the park’s perimeter.
He said: “I am reminded by major urban developments of the last 60 years that have become nightmares that any large-scale intervention like this could do something very negative.
“The worst thing it could do is create a massive ghetto of people who are different from those who are there.”
So far only three parties are known to have expressed an interest but a "handful" of others are expected in the next fortnight.
They have until September 30 to submit their bids to the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC).
The OPLC is the body which is tasked with finding a tenant for the 80,000-seater venue in Stratford, east London.
Indeed, organizers are enthusiastically trumpeting their projections that the 9.3 billion pound ($15.2 billion) Olympic project is both on schedule and on budget.
Granted, original financial estimates almost tripled shortly after London was awarded the Games in 2005, beating out Paris and New York, among others. And once the budget was set, the global economy went into the loo, ensuring that finances would match logistics among the massive challenges to creating a successful Games in a city so old, complex and densely populated.
Though London will be the first city to play host to a Summer Games for a third time, it has been a while and the first time the city truly won a bid to do so.
“In my role as Minister for Sport and the Olympics, I am the person responsible for Olympic legacy. Providing a sporting legacy from the 2012 Games is my top priority. We are committed to provide a lasting legacy for athletics. It is vital that we use the 2012 Games to get more people involved in sport and to ensure that our elite athletes are receiving the best possible opportunities and we are working closely with our partners to achieve this goal,” [said Hugh Robertson MP, Minister for Sport and the Olympics from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport]
it is here, at Sugar House Lane in Stratford, that Inter Ikea, the investment and construction arm of the Swedish furniture giant, has bought a 13-acre site. Within the next few years, Inter Ikea will have built a mixed-use development consisting of office and retail space as well as lots of Ikea housing – some 1,500 units or so – and it has already started working on a master plan for the site.
Peter Andrews, the chief executive of the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation (LTGDC) , says that he fully expects it to become "a Covent Garden in the East End". A retail, housing and leisure hub abutting the Olympic Park, this Ikea village will be one of the things making the new East End a place in which people will be proud to live, as well as a tourist destination to die for.
The initiative, which follows similar projects in cities including Paris and Montreal, aims to ease overcrowding on London's commuter network, with 400 bicycle "docking stations" from Notting Hill in the west to the Tower of London in the east.
"The new system could transform the way Londoners as well as tourists navigate the city," said a spokesman for Transport for London (TFL), the capital's main travel authority.
Nicknamed "Boris's Bikes" after cycle-mad Mayor Boris Johnson, the system is free for the first half hour, although the rate rises steeply if the cycles are used for longer periods, with a maximum daily charge of 50 pounds ($78).
The 60 miles of lanes will be in addition to the Olympic Route Network (ORN) which will be roadwork-free and cover 2.5% of the capital's roads.
The ORN will be used by 82,000 people and cost about £25m.
The lanes will total nearly 60 miles in length, while the ORN, which will include measures such as closing side roads, banning turns and altering traffic light sequences, will comprise of more than 100 miles in London and about 170 miles outside London.
"The most enduring legacy," Britain promised in the bid, would be "the regeneration of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there."
Yet while building progresses on schedule in the future Olympic Park—Europe's biggest construction site and one of the biggest regeneration projects in British history—locals fear the broad urban renewal so central to the bid could become a lesser priority. Since winning the right to stage the Games five years ago, London has gone through a deep recession and a collapse in the real-estate market that hasn't spared the Olympics. Private funding that was supposed to help pay for the athletes' village, for instance, couldn't be found, saddling the public purse with the entire construction cost.
The Premier League club believe switching home grounds will cost them £125 million and have asked the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), who are responsible for the future of the London 2012 venues, for a six-month "lock-out" to hold exclusive talks on the deal.
And, two years before the Olympics start, Brady said: "We'll hear by the end of the month whether we've got it [the lock-out deal].
Organizers also expect to use all of London's majestic sites as telegenic backdrops. The marathon course will take runners past Buckingham Palace and cyclists will race past Trafalgar Square. Wimbledon and its famed Centre Court will stage tennis matches.
But these Olympics aren't only about sending pretty pictures around the world, Coe said, or about providing the best atmosphere for athletes.
His vision is broader.
"The greatest driver of social cohesion in most of our communities is sport," Coe said. "The way the Games have galvanized communities the length and breadth of the country is extraordinary."
Britain's much-trumpeted Olympic legacy following the 2012 Games could amount to little more than the regeneration of a small pocket of east London. With just two years to go before the £9bn Olympic Games become the focus of world attention, questions are being asked about whether they will be able to persuade a nation of couch potatoes to put down the remote and pull on their trainers or trunks.
Despite venue and stadium construction being on budget and ahead of schedule, officials have admitted that there is a "big gap" in plans to increase nationwide participation on the back of the event. Promises of an Olympic legacy were central to London's winning the bid in 2005. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt, said yesterday that there was no specific funding set aside for the Games to be used as a catalyst for a surge in sports participation.
Organisers say they've been true to their word with schemes to train local people.
However, the feeling among some residents in east London is that the jobs just haven't materialised.
It's all to do with fun and fitness. London is hosting the Olympics in 2012 and wants people to get in shape. Ping pong is an easy way to start. The intention is to get a million people playing more sport by 2012. Ping pong is a perfect entree: Sport England's latest Active People Survey indicated a 9,900-person increase in adults who reported playing table tennis at least once a week.
Its task is to create a place where people will want to live, work and play in a part of town that people have been eager to escape, where jobs have been hard to come by and where welcoming, wide, green spaces are too rare. There are hopeful precedents in the new towns built after the second world war, the garden cities of a century ago and in the private estates built in west London in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There are voices calling for much more social housing in the Olympic Park. It is true that London is short of homes for poor people. But concentrated social housing goes hand in hand with joblessness and enduring poverty: too much of the first will condemn the area to too much of the second and third. To imitate the success of the new towns and garden cities, and to generate jobs and encourage prosperity, the park will need a mix of homes as well as a good swathe of greenery. Get this right, and the games might almost be worthwhile.
While parts of East London have been transformed — as any visitor to the financial centre, Canary Warf or the 02 Concert Arena will testify — large parts remain huge pockets of poverty. Newham, where around 60 per cent of Olympic events will take place, is among the poorest — and most ethnically diverse — boroughs in the UK, according to the government indices of multiple deprivation, with high rates of joblessness, homelessness, child poverty and infant mortality. Around 15 per cent of adults lack employment, according to the Trust for London charity, while the rate of infant mortality stands at 7 in 1,000.
To the north of Stratford International station sit 3,000 brand-new, unoccupied apartment homes across 91 acres: the Olympic Village. To the south sits a shiny shopping centre, a new Westfield, or Eastfield perhaps, waiting to open next year. It abuts another station, Stratford Regional, on the southern tip of the site, which is being expanded to process 125,000 people a day. Both stations will, in two years’ time, disgorge these kinds of numbers on to this island for four weeks of partying in the summer of 2012 for both the Olympics and Paralympics, all at the British Government’s expense. It will cost about £9 billion, more than three times the original figure.
The island, like the homes and the shopping centre, is not yet open for business. The Olympic Park site is pregnant with cranes, diggers – and promise. The language of promise is written in hyperbole and coat-hook statistics on which any builder here will happily hang his hi-vis jacket: £5 billion worth of engineering contracts; 120 miles of electrical cabling buried in underground tunnels; 4,000 trees being planted; 350,000 plants; 2,000 newts relocated; a quarter of a million loaves of bread needed over two weeks. It will take a miracle of baking coordination.
The problem is that the last Government promised to hand over ownership of the Olympic Park to the OPLC, debt-free, so that it could do the financial deals to sell or rent out the venues to the private sector after 2012.
It's a pretty fundamental action to take. Would you be able to sell your house if you didn't have ownership of it or possess the deeds? No chance.
But the new coalition Government has now put that decision on ice, while the Treasury reviews financial decisions taken by Labour.