I attended a recent meeting in London of the Transport Economists’ Group at which Professor Peter White, University of Westminster, talked illuminatingly about recent developments in local bus services in Britain.  There has been a major divergence between London, with growing bus use, and the rest of the country where patronage has been declining.  Moreover, growth in London has been greater than would have been expected based on established relationships between bus use and fares, frequency, car ownership etc.  Possible explanations include the attractions of real time information at bus stops, good timetables and route maps, reduced boarding times and hence faster trips with prepayment ticketing, simple fare structures, low floor buses to speed boarding, bus priority routes, and frequent services at nights and weekends.

Average distance travelled in London has held steady over the past decade.  Use of public transport has been rising while car travel per person has been falling.  This is evidently helpful in terms of sustainability.   The greater availability and use of buses must be one important contributory factor.  Others might be increasing levels of access as population density rises, more people living in the city centre, more people from overseas working in London (perhaps being less likely to run a car), as well as car parking constraints.  It is important to apprehend better these influences, both to improve access and choice within London, and to see whether a shift to public transport could be promoted in other towns and cities.

If I said there was a city in which public transport use was increasing and car use falling, you might suppose that this was a city in economic decline - since the historic trend has been for car use to increase with rising incomes.  The combination of economic dynamism and declining private car use in London is therefore unexpected and needs to be better understood.