LONDON BRIEFING/Chris Johns: The government's decision to give official backing to London's bid for the 2012 Olympics has elicited two predictable responses: how is anybody gong to get to the games and what about the Dome?

The proposed extra taxation on London residents has attracted less attention, but will eventually take centre stage, particularly if the bid is successful.

All this is rather negative but not surprising. London's transport infrastructure is now beyond a joke and is damaging inward investment.

The history of various failed attempts to produce a decent integrated transport system is littered with fiascos that would be funny if it were not for their consequences.

An early example is to be found decades ago when somebody was trying to figure out how the bus and underground systems should link up with each other. It was observed that the underground system tended to run to and from the centre like the spokes in a bicycle.

Overlaid on this were plans for bus routes that ran laterally, meeting up with the underground at key junctions.

This way, people could move east-west (or vice versa) with ease on buses, or north-south (and other radial routes) on the tube. Good idea.

It took a long time for the penny to drop: most of London's main roads run radially, just like the tube, so the buses have to take the same routes as the underground system.

Trying to move between London's suburbs either west-east or east-west is, to this day, often a complete nightmare. Sometimes you have to travel into the centre and back out again.

Ken Livingstone's congestion charging for motorists has certainly improved the journey time for buses but the underground system remains squalid, inefficient and visibly crumbling.

Memories of the Millennium Dome are still fresh. The umpteen failed transport initiatives from John Prescott are still painfully obvious.

Tony Blair has already blown hundreds of millions of pounds on an ill-fated adventure that provided a perfect illustration of why government should not become involved in matters best left to the private sector.

The authorities had no idea how to build something at reasonable cost that would provide services that the paying public would happily consume in sufficient quantities. Sure, lots of people came to the Dome - and many thoroughly enjoyed the experience - but there was no way on earth that the project could ever recover its capital costs.

That, to many people, sounds horribly like the experience of many a city that has staged the Olympic games in recent years.

Not all cities have had a bad financial experience with the games. Los Angeles is reputed to have made a significant profit but Montreal is still paying back debt incurred in the 1970s.

The financial outcome seems to depend on the quality of the management team that is put in place.

Sounds like any business. Hopefully, the government has learned some lessons from the Dome about its own management abilities.

We should not be surprised if people wonder how spectators and athletes will move around London if the games are staged here.

We are entitled to ask about the government's track record in building and managing large-scale, capital-intensive projects.

Questions will inevitably be raised about the fundamental nature of the project itself: the competition among cities to host the Olympics might suggest their allure is as big as ever.

But the underlying reality could easily be that they are like a great business that is now past its best.

Money and the drugs issue are argued by many people to be eroding spectator interest in many sports.

On this line of thinking, the UK government is about to make a huge capital investment in a business with a declining rate of return.

The same management team that brought us the Dome disaster is proposing to build several large-scale stadiums and housing projects in the same part of London, the East End. Transport, which is a daily grind for all Londoners, will not, we are assured, be a problem.

To be fair, governments are supposed, occasionally, to offer us projects that inspire, ones that lift spirits and boost confidence in ourselves.

For good reasons, Britain has lost faith in its ability to manage large infrastructure projects. Perhaps this time will be different.

Perhaps it is churlish - or even cynical - to doubt the wisdom of the Olympics bid. Perchance to dream and all that. Dream on.