"We must give full credit for this solution to Ken Livingstone," said ABD spokesman April Fule. "After all, if the answer to over-crowded roads is to charge drivers £5 more for using them, the solution to over-crowded tubes must be to charge passengers £5 more for using those."

The ABD praised Mr Livingstone's keen analytical mind and efficient approach to the problem. "Most people would have thought that you need to solve over-crowding by increasing capacity and by removing bottlenecks from the system. It takes a special kind of insight to realise that you can avoid all that tiresome investment and instead simply punish commuters for daring to travel to work."

The ABD believes that the potential for a truly integrated transport strategy has barely been tapped. To further integrate tube travel with road transport, the ABD suggests:

• Tube ticket duty, tripling the cost of tickets.
• A Tube Tax Disk, costing commuters £155 a year.
• Speed cameras on underground platforms, issuing £60 fines to commuters who walk faster than the council-set speed limit.
• Electronic tags to track commuters and charge them for each metre of underground passageway they use.

Greenhouse gas detectors have also revealed that there is a high concentration of CO2 on the underground system. Commuters will be warned to reduce their CO2 emissions by breathing out less. Those who fail to comply will be banned from using the tube system.

"The advice to tube commuters must be to travel outside of peak hours, and to avoid congested routes," said April Fule. "We suggest that people on the Northern Line take up shift work, and travel at times when the tube is closed, thus significantly reducing overcrowding. People using the Central Line should move to less crowded cities like Nottingham and Bristol. This is the kind of innovative thinking which is currently only being applied to British roads, when it could be equally usefully applied to all forms of transport."