The Economist May 21st 2022 53
BritainThefutureoftransportThe road not taken
O
n may 24th a wonderful new railway
will begin operating in London. The
Elizabeth line crosses the city and its sub
urbs in an eastwest direction, making
stops in the financial district, the West End
and Heathrow Airport. The trains running
along it will be 205mlong monsters. The
project is an engineering feat, and will be
admired by Londoners. It also seems ex
tremely lavish, considering how travel pat
terns have changed.
Since last September the daily number
of publictransport trips taken in London
has hardly changed, even as pandemic
related restrictions have been lifted. The
Tube is about threequarters as busy as it
was before covid19 hit, buses about four
fifths as busy. Travel behaviour seems to be
stabilising around the country. “We’re ap
proaching a steady state,” says Jonathan
Spruce, a trustee of the Institution of Civil
Engineers. People have settled into a new
pattern, which is drastically different from
the prepandemic one.
Apart from electric bicycles and scoot
ers, which are hard to measure, Britons
have cut back on all kinds of poweredtransport (see chart). The London Under
ground is particularly quiet, the railway
network almost as subdued. People are
even driving less than they used to, and
buying fewer cars. Just 536,727 new cars
were registered in the first four months of
this year, down from 862,100 in the equiva
lent period three years earlier.
Weekday travel is down by more than
weekend travel, suggesting—astonishing
ly—that people are more reluctant to go to
work than to go shopping or drinking.
Rushhour travel has declined most. The
Office of Road and Rail found that sales of
peaktime railway tickets between October
and December 2021 (when some restric
tions were in place) were only 70% of the
prepandemic level. But offpeak ticket
sales were 82% of normal, and advance
tickets, which are bought by holidaymak
ers, were 95% of normal.
A similar thing has occurred on the
London Underground. The number of peo
ple passing through ticket barriers be
tween 8am and 9am on May 12th was 33%
lower than three years earlier, while travel
between 3pm and 4pm was down by 21%,and travel between 10pm and 11pm just 7%
lower. Londoners are making different
journeys, too. Trips within the city became
shorter in the first year of the pandemic;
the average distance fell from 4.4km to
2.8km. People seem to be pootling about
suburbia but going into the centre less.
Early in the pandemic it was thought
that people might avoid modes of trans
port that seem claustrophobic and poten
tially germy. But fear of contagion no lon
ger seems to sway travel behaviour much.
Transport Focus, a passenger watchdog
which conducts regular surveys, finds that
76% of Britons who did not travel by train
in the previous week, and 70% who did not
travel by bus, would nonetheless feel safe
doing so. Over a third of people claim they
will never feel safe using public transport
again, but some of them probably felt that
way before the pandemic. Commutatis commutandis
Instead, the differing fortunes of public
transport networks can be explained by
who uses them and how. Services designed
to carry whitecollar workers into city cen
tres, such as the London Underground and
commuter railway lines, are quiet because
more of those people now toil in spare bed
rooms and garden offices. Buses are busier
because they are used by students, shop
pers and manual workers who cannot
avoid travelling. “A lot of people here are
still having to go into work,” says Martijn
Gilbert, the chief executive of Go North
East, which runs buses in and aroundThe pandemic seems to have changed travel patterns for good→Alsointhissection
54 Thatbloodyprotocol
55 Bagehot:UKSA!UKSA!
→ Read more at: Economist.com/Britain
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