I read yesterday that Transport for London are throwing at least £6.5 billion at the transport infrastructure in and around London for the 2012 Olympics, and that there’s generally some worry that it’s not going to be enough. That is, it’s still going to be gridlock; so much so that there’s talk about asking companies to stagger working hours, relax rules on working from home and maybe some people should look at going on holiday for a few weeks?

It seems to be that there would have been a much better solution to all of this.

For clarity, I need to point out that these figures are approximate - I researched them, but only quickly and only using Google.

There’s 12.58 million people in the Greater London area, approximately 66% of whom are of working age (15 - 64). Let’s assume 100% employment, and we have a smidge of 8.3 million employed people.

Given an average London wage of £26,000, that gives a take home wage of approximately £20,042, or about £385.42 a week.

If we asked everyone who falls into the above employment bracket to just stay at home for two weeks, we’d have to pay them £770.84 (385.42 x 2).

That comes up to a total of around £6.4 billion - some £100 million cheaper than the current amount of cash being thrown at the London transport network, and an obvious saving. But of course it’s far more than that, because currently the estimated £6.5 billion spend will merely lessen the chaos and gridlock - my plan would remove 8million people from the streets of London for 2 weeks, keeping it nice and clear for tourists, olympians and journos alike.

And let’s not forget my numbers are also grossly understated - I’m assuming that every person aged between 15-65 in the Greater London area is employed here, which is quite frankly laughable. You could likely cut my budgeted cost in half (unless I’ve done my sums wrong somewhere!).

So there it is - how the transport worries for the 2012 Olympics could have been solved in an instance, and with no annoying roadworks, gridlock or exclusive lanes. I await my appointment to the Government.