LONDON BRIEFING: Regular travellers between London and Dublin will attest to a slow but inexorable increase in the horrors that a typical journey can bring. Neither city can boast an airport authority that has been able to work out that Monday mornings can be quite busy, particularly at 6 a.m, writes Chris Jones

Also, Friday evenings can be quite tricky, but airport managers clearly haven't been told about this. The people who run airports should be made to travel at peak times at least once a month; service standards would improve immeasurably.

Aer Lingus has recently added to the joys of the experience by deliberately overbooking flights between the two cities. "But all airlines do it and we have been doing it for years,' said the smiling check-in lady by way of explanation about booked, paid for but non-existent seats.

Well, it's the first time I've seen them do it in 17 years of travelling between London and Dublin. A very large crowd of aggrieved people, all with steam coming out of their ears, seemed to attest that the new low-cost Aer Lingus has economised on staff who can add up; that it happened twice in one week also hints that Willie Walsh thinks he has discovered another way of squeezing more pre-privatisation cash out of the pot.

With Ryanair you get what it says on the tin; Aer Lingus keep figuring out how to spring nasty surprises on its customers.

If anybody from Ireland's trade union movement wants to see an argument against privatisation of airports they should visit Heathrow. Actually, this is a touch unfair: Heathrow's problems are not really related to its ownership, but I'm surprised that it is not more often described in terms of a botched privatisation. Any sentient critic of the sale of publicly owned airports, looking for ammunition, should pass through Heathrow occasionally.

All of London's airports have to cope with being far too small for current and future passenger needs and management are right to lay the blame on years of planning delays for lack of adequate facilities.

But that is only part of the story. With each redevelopment of Heathrow's four terminals the airport increasingly resembles a shopping mall with a couple of runways tacked on at the back. The shops are clean, attractive and spacious. Every other facility in the airport can be described in exactly the opposite terms. If this was a prison, the inmates would be complaining about human rights violations and sending photographs to the UN.

And now we have a new shopping centre being built, called Terminal 5. Clearly, there aren't enough retailing facilities at the other four terminals. They cannot get any more planes to fly in or out of the airport without building another runway (which looks a very remote possibility) so the point of a new terminal must be to act as another holding facility for hapless passengers. I'm willing to bet that the queues for security will be just as long when the new shopping centre opens and that anybody entering the new facility will risk being deprived of both oxygen and adequate natural lighting.

Travelling from Heathrow into London is much easier these days because of the Heathrow - Paddington Express - when it works. The decaying approaches to Paddington station offer plenty of bottlenecks and more than the usual railway delays. And west London offers only a tube or taxi ride to most people's destinations, since the Paddington area itself, although being regenerated, is still largely a commercial wasteland. Access to the City is hopeless and we await the much vaunted Crossrail - linking West London with the City - with bated breath.

It is encouraging that the foundations for the first Crossrail station have been dug underneath a new office block adjacent to Moorgate in the City, but depressing to know that the authorities are still arguing about finance and that we are at least 10 years away from the first train running.

At least if we want to travel by rail to Paris we will soon only have to find our way across to St Pancras, once the Eurostar link switches from its excellent, purpose-built facility at Waterloo.

I've yet to figure out why this is happening; but much the same could be said about most of the debacle that is Britain's transport policy. If Tony Blair wants the British people to warm to the French he should pay for us all to have a ride on one of their trains and promise to provide a similar service in the UK.