Asked by the government to provide a frequent a timetable during the Coronavirus outbreak to allow social distancing, TfL have risen to the challenge. But losing £150m a week has pushed the organisation to the brink. We look at their financial options and the possibility that because of their Local Authority status, within 24hrs, they will have no choice but to begin cutting Tube and bus services by law.
Like all large organisations, TfL takes strategic risks seriously. This is something with which any regular reader of their public papers will be familiar. Nowhere is this more true than on the subject of their finances.
This isn’t simply because they are public body (and a relatively diligent one at that). It is also because their unique setup brings with it unique financial challenges and mechanisms through which to approach them. TfL are, in essence, a local authority in their own right. One that employs approximately 28,000 employees directly, and many thousands more indirectly to operate London’s vast transport network. Nor does it stop there. TfL are responsible for one of the largest capital (construction) portfolios in Europe – Crossrail, Northern Line Extension (NLE) and more. They aren’t just moving London around, in many ways they are helping to build and rebuild it, too.
Their multi-faceted role means that TfL’s finances are always a carefully balanced web of operator income and borrowing. The operational income – both current and projected – supports the borrowing which takes multiple forms – government loans, development funds, the regular paper markets and more. All the time, HM Treasury and the various market ratings agencies (such as Standard & Poor) watch on carefully for fluctuations that would make TfL a bad bet for future loans. Reputation is interest rates and to TfL, interest rates matter.
Coronavirus: A unique challenge
In most major, mid- to long-term crises a transport operator such as TfL might face, the relationship between operating cost and level-of-service required is a direct one.
Take, for example, the 2008 recession. During this period, GDP dropped by 7%, leading to a 2.3% drop in London Underground usage. This represented a significant financial hit for TfL, because the overwhelming majority of its income comes via its ‘farebox’ – the money passengers pay to be be moved around.
Had the crisis continued to suppress demand for too long though, then this direct relationship between shrinking profits and customer demand would have enabled a difficult, but obvious solution: reduce services to balance the budget.
The challenge offered by a pandemic is different. Indeed it is something that, like many other transport operators around the world, TfL failed to really anticipate. Here, the relationship between falling demand and the service requirement is inverted.
In order to limit the spread of the virus and contain the outbreak quicker, it is important to minimise individual public transport journeys. But it is also critical to run as many bus, Tube and train services as possible. This maximises the spread of passengers over as many separate vehicles and carriages as possible, helping to maintain social distancing.
It is to Mayor Sadiq Khan’s, TfL’s and everyone who works in London transport’s credit, that they have been largely successful in delivering the above. Doing so has cost, and continues to cost, lives. As of April 2020, 37 London transport workers were known to have lost their lives to COVID-19, including 28 bus drivers. As this article was being written, another name was added to that list.
The financial impact
Preserving that inverted relationship between services and usage has come at an enormous financial cost. Thanks to the papers published in relation to the emergency TfL Financial Committee today, May 12th, we can finally start to see what that cost is.
TfL are currently running approximately 80% of scheduled bus services and 50% of Tube services. The number of passengers carried, however, has dropped by 85% on buses and 95% on the Tube. This means that it is currently costing TfL £600m a month to operate services.
That leaves an anticipated revenue gap for 2020/21 of roughly £4bn and climbing.
Some mitigating measures (such as the government furlough scheme) and existing emergency funds can be used to offset this, but TfL’s new emergency budget anticipates at least a £3.2bn funding shortfall for this year. This is unsustainable, for a number of reasons, so it is no surprise that TfL are now turning to the government for help.
The myth of more services
Before we look at the issues TfL face in addressing this shortfall, and indeed why this will require financial intervention from the government, we should first address two myths that seem to persist about London (and TfL’s) approach to the current crisis. These are that running more trains is, or would have been easy, and that Londoners can simply use public transport less, temporarily.
That TfL should be capable of running more services was a loud refrain at the beginning of this crisis. It will no doubt manifest again as the government relaxes lockdown and London attempts to return to work.
When uttered genuinely, this myth is the result of the human tendency to translate our lack of knowledge of the complexity of a problem into think it must be simple to solve with ‘common sense’.
In the spirit of all complex concepts sounding far better in German, let’s call this Abermankönntedocheinfach (“Surely they can just…”).
Abermankönntedocheinfach will always be the bane of transport planners and operators. In London, it manifests particularly strongly when it comes to Tube cooling, ‘driverless’ trains and Tube strikes. In the current pandemic it has manifested in a mistaken belief that increasing service levels is easy.
It is not.
On both buses and trains, more services require drivers and operators who are not sick or self-isolating. There is a finite pool of such individuals, and these are specialist roles. Training new ones is both time-consuming and expensive, even when the entire population of London isn’t ‘staying home’.
Not all of the instances of this myth are genuine, however, and it is important that we call out those that are not. This is particularly true on Social Media or in tabloids.
Some such instances of city-baiting: a chance to show that living in London is ‘worse’ than living elsewhere, while often failing to acknowledge that ‘different’ and ‘worse’ are not actually the same thing. Others are political opportunism and distraction: it is no coincidence that many of demands for more services have come from those, such as the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock, who have their own awkward questions to answer. Similarly, the prospective Conservative candidate for Mayor, Shaun Bailey, was particularly vocal on a subject that – as a former member of the London Assembly Transport Committee – one might have expected him to display more understanding of.
Finally, many instances of this myth must simply be branded as the incidents of hate they are. They are overt or dog-whistle attacks targeted at London’s minorities, in an effort to portray them as somehow ‘un-British’, or at Mayor Khan himself, because of his ethnicity or religion.
There is no need to debate this myth when it is raised this way. Doing so only serves to amplify those who do not deserve to be amplified.
The myth of reducing public transport usage
The second myth that must be addressed is that demand for public transport usage in London can be reduced, even temporarily.
The scale of executing this challenge in London is something that is understandably difficult to grasp outside of the capital, or indeed outside of the UK. Nothing highlights this better than the updated advice issued by the government this week on public transport usage across England. This recommends that public transport should be avoided, where possible, while restrictions on car journeys are eased.
“Drive to work” may sound like a reasonable temporary measure. And indeed for the majority of the UK it is not only reasonable, but a return to the norm. In London, however, this simply isn’t possible.
This is a complex issue, and one which could easily translate into an article in itself. A few very broad comparisons, however, should serve to highlight the difference between London and the rest of England in this area.
The population of Greater London, for example, is approximately 8.6m. The rest of England equates to approximately 47.4m. In 2011, the DfT published driver licence data split between London and ‘rest of UK’. Adjusted for ‘England only,’ this highlights that roughly 50% of people in England, excluding London, hold a driving licence. In London, this figure is only 25%. Again, this is a broad comparison, but the difference is marked.
Even when London households do have access to a car, the balance of that access is different to the rest of the UK population. TfL have some good statistics on car ownership and access, and we have included some graphs below.
All the data demonstrates a key issue for getting London back to work without using public transport: If you are young. If you are low-income. If you are female. If you are from a minority ethnic group. If you are any of these things or more, then you are less likely to have access to a car right now than even other Londoners, who we we have already highlighted are significantly less likely to own a car than elsewhere in the UK. And there is a better than average chance that you would not know how to drive it anyway.
Using public transport in London is not optional. It is a necessity.
Solving the funding gap
Understanding the unavoidable role public transport plays in London is important, because it highlights what isn’t a solution to TfL’s operational funding crisis: reducing services in any significant way. If anything, services are going to need to increase in the coming weeks as demand starts to trickle up again, rather than the other way around.
This leaves two major options: some form of financial relief package from the government, or increased borrowing from either public or private sources. It is worth looking at TfL’s borrowing options first, as these are more constrained at the moment than TfL themselves are generally prepared to admit.
TfL have a long history of borrowing, primarily for capital investment (e.g. Crossrail or rolling stock purchases) but also to meet operational need, as outgoings naturally don’t always align with the incoming revenue curve (similar to how football clubs borrow against season ticket sales).
That borrowing has always taken multiple forms, all strictly governed by the various legal acts under which TfL operate. These place limits on things like its overall debt ceiling and even what currencies they can actually borrow in (Sterling, unsurprisingly, by HM Treasury decree).
Let’s look at some actual figures. Last year, TfL borrowed approximately £640m from the market in some way. This was actually slightly down on their forecast borrowing for the year (£730m) and excludes a separate line of borrowing worth £750m, set up with the DfT. This was specifically ring fenced for meeting the Crossrail project overrun costs. Overall, this brought TfL’s total current borrowing to approximately £11.5bn. For context, this is roughly twice TfL’s annual income of about £5.8bn.
What matters less than understanding the minutiae of those numbers is noting the relationship between them. In proportion to its income, TfL are carrying a lot of debt already.
All of this is within their borrowing limit, but hasn’t left much room spare. Indeed one thing they have had to become increasingly conscious of is their rating with agencies such as Standard & Poor. These act like a credit rating for organisations and – just as with personal debt – an agency rating affects the interest you are likely to be charged (or need to offer) on your debts and bonds.
Indeed to address potential concerns about the amount of debt they were already carrying, TfL agreed to start maintaining a funding reserve of £1.2bn at all times, on top of existing operational reserves, for potential loan-related payments. Again, this isn’t unusual – Arsenal Football Club did something similar to reduce risk and interest on the large loans they required for the Emirates Stadium – but it helps highlight once again that TfL is already running close to the limit of what it can effectively borrow.
Now to the current situation. Of the £4bn shortfall TfL are forecasting, they estimate that they can absorb about £800m via strategic reserves and other means. That already leaves another £3.2bn of outgoings to cover, and adding that much debt to their existing pile is, quite simply, not an option.
To use a domestic metaphor, TfL are already paying off a mortgage, have maxed out two credit cards, and are half way through the balance on a third. Now they suddenly find themselves needing to pay for a new roof, and they don’t have enough credit left on that last card.
Scoring points
It would be easy to point fingers and ask just why TfL are so heavily extended. No doubt we will see such comments in the coming months from those either unfamiliar with the way transport funding works, or simply looking to score points. The question of Mayor Khan’s ill-judged Fare Freeze will no doubt be raised again. As we pointed out when the manifesto pledge was made, this was a mistake. In doing so, he surrendered one of the few mechanisms the Mayor has to tweak TfL’s farebox year-on-year.
What has become clear over time is that this decision was made, in part, because Khan’s team had indulged in an ill-judged piece of Abermankönntedocheinfach of their own. They’d seen fare increases as linear – that is, that they yield the same increase in revenue year on year – and believed they could easily budget for that. But this isn’t how fare rises work. They scale in multiples.
There is no doubt that this decision has cost TfL upwards of £650m in cumulative revenue in his first term. Khan and TfL point to savings made elsewhere to counter this, as well as claiming that it has offset what would otherwise have been a fall in passenger numbers due to decreased cost of travel.
On this, we remain unconvinced. What is true, however is that the Fare Freeze has no real impact on the unprecedented situation today. TfL do not have £12bn of debt because Sadiq Khan decided to forego £650m of farebox revenue over the last four years. Claiming otherwise is the kind of basic mathematical failure that would make a Year 3 schoolchild blush.
In a similar vein, the government easily cannot reasonably point at TfL and say that it is their own fault that their existing borrowing is so high.
It is true that recently much of it has related to Crossrail overruns, for which TfL must ultimately take the blame. Despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, the buck stops with them and the Mayor. That they were forced to borrow to deal with those overruns, however, was something on which the last Conservative government insisted.
On top of this, a considerable amount of TfL’s legacy debt has been incurred dealing with the ruthless cuts in funding that happened under the ‘Austerity’ Conservative governments of David Cameron, or on projects directly pushed by Boris Johnson as Conservative Mayor for London. This includes the Garden Bridge, as well as the cancelled Metropolitan Line Extension to Watford, to focus on just a few big-ticket items.
When is a bailout not a bailout?
All of these factors mean it will be hard, if not impossible, for the government simply to dismiss TfL’s current issues by demanding that they take on more debt. Drawing too much attention to why TfL’s debt exists is likely to raise awkward questions about previous Conservative governments, and the former Conservative London Mayor in charge of the current one.
Indeed the TfL committee papers indicate that ‘constructive’ funding discussions with the government are currently underway. These will no doubt be happening with some urgency, as TfL will already be approaching the limits of their contingency funding for operations in a crisis (as a responsible operator, TfL have always kept a 60 day operational reserve in place for exactly this scenario).
Those constructive talks are likely focused on a way to take some of TfL’s existing debt off of it, in a way that doesn’t scare the Treasury or the DfT. Perhaps more importantly for the government, it will need to be in a way that isn’t seen outside the M25 as a ‘cash payment’ to London. This is, of course, the downside of the current political model of never thinking more than one Daily Mail headline ahead. Poking the biggest sub-economy in the UK and its transport network may earn you fawning headlines on a regular basis when times are good, but backtracking from that then becomes somewhat problematic in a genuine crisis.
The need for London’s economy to rebound, however, may provide the clue to the likely solution. This lies in the sheer economic impact of TfL’s current capital investment programme – Crossrail, the NLE, new trains and rest. Those projects have an enormous economic impact not just on London, but the UK beyond. As the committee report points out:
“The majority of our costs are spent on our supply chain and internal labour costs: in the financial year 2019/20, we spent around £6bn through our suppliers. Without a stable source of income or funding during the COVID-19 pandemic our supply chain will not be able to gain adequate assurance that TfL will be able to fund their future commitments.”
TfL Finance Committee Paper, May 2020
One can read that paragraph as either a hint to the direction of current discussions, or as a threat to what will happen should they prove unsuccessful. There is £6bn of downstream work reliant on TfL finding a way out of their current crisis. Much of that work is in areas such as construction and manufacture that the government is not only keen to see resumed, but resumed in a responsible way. TfL are likely pointing out that, with the controls they are in a position to put in place over their various projects, they are capable of being an excellent example of ‘Stay Alert’ done properly. Or they are, if they can feel secure in their operational funding.
The betting money here at LR Towers, therefore, is on a funding package that looks to lift some of the existing debt accrued on projects such as Crossrail off of TfL’s books, which can be packaged up as economic stimulus. This would then allow them to largely borrow their way through their operational funding issues, through regular mechanisms.
This would leave TfL no worse off than they are now, but make it very clear, from a government perspective, that this is about kickstarting the UK economy in an orderly fashion and preserving service levels, not giving a ‘financial boost’ to the capital. Which wouldn’t play well with either the Shires or the newly blue elements of the north.
Coupling any such debt relief with a pause on new capital projects (such as the Bakerloo line extension or Crossrail 2) and a temporary review process for future projects with heavy DfT involvement would also allow the government to save face. Such measures would also make reasonable sense anyway. Just what shape travel demand, and funding availability, will be in London once the pandemic passes is anyone’s guess. Not reviewing such projects would be bad policy all round.
On a political level, a new review mechanism would also give the Conservative government, as well as those within the DfT who may feel that TfL have flown a bit too close to the sun in recent years, an opportunity to publicly clip both a Labour Mayor’s and his transport fiefdom’s wings.
Whether that is deserved or not is open to question, but this is an area where the latter two have hardly helped themselves in recent years. On the subject of both rail devolution and (when things were going well) Crossrail, Khan and TfL were both happy to publicly poke central government. What goes around, comes around – something that they may pragmatically have to accept in the quest for a reasonable solution.
Remember that bit about being a Local Authority? It matters
Whilst the signs are thus positive that some kind of funding arrangement will be put in place to see TfL through this crisis, both TfL and Londoners should be wary that the risk of an alternate approach still remains.
That approach would be for central government to abdicate its responsibilities to help and place them on London instead. It would be to lean into that flawed principle of Abermankönntedocheinfach and claim that TfL ‘can surely just…’ find some money somewhere else, or even just keep kicking the hard decision on funding down the road until TfL’s reserves run out and it is too late to deal with this financial crisis in a sensible way.
This would perhaps be a more disruptive route to take than some in government might currently realise. This is because of something that we mentioned at the beginning of this article. TfL is, to all intents and purposes, a Local Authority.
This brings with it some statutory requirements.
One of those requirements is that it runs a balanced budget, in line with its previously agreed budget. If it cannot do this – or more importantly if its CFO believes that it cannot do this – then certain processes automatically come into play.
This includes the issuance of a Section 114 notice. A Section 114 notice indicates that the Local Authority cannot meet its financial obligations for the year, and it must not engage in any new activity that might further aggravate the current financial situation, beyond delivering its minimum statutory obligations and – within 28 days – convene a board meeting to agree to a new budget that would bring it under budget.
This isn’t a catastrophe. If anything, it is a process meant to protect core local authority services in times of crisis. The problem for TfL, however, is that a close read of the GLA act will reveal that its statutory obligations are way more limited than one might expect. Largely because this is one of those situations that no-one ever really thought would occur, so people assumed a lot of things weren’t necessarily important to spell out in the Act.
What does that mean today? Well, to quote TfL’s Chief Financial Officer, Simon Kilonback:
I think it will shock everybody, if you are to read the GLA Act, just what our minimum statutory obligations are as a transport authority. It does not include running a Tube service. It includes running a minimal bus service for children living more than two miles away from their school. It requires us to run the Woolwich Ferry, and it requires us to regulate and license the taxi and private hire trade, and it has some obligations on highways maintenance. But it does not include a minimum obligation for the running of our core transport services.
So it is inevitable, if we are unable to agree the funding in short order, that we would have to take steps to reduce our core costs, by reducing the amount of services that we provide to London.
Simon Kilonback, CFO TfL, Finance Committee, May 12th 2020
It should be emphasised that this doesn’t mean that the Tube will stop overnight. TfL can continue doing anything they’re already doing, within reason. But it does mean that if they have to budget for cuts, then – in accordance with the Section 114 – many of the services that will be hit will not be those that TfL’s critics probably see as ‘waste’. It will be core services on which London relies. At the very least, extending services and carrying out a whole range of other activities necessary to facilitate a return-to-work for London will necessarily be curtailed while the mess produced by the initiation of the Section 114 process are unpicked.
It is worth noting that, as of May 12th 2020, Simon Kilonback has indicated to the TfL Finance Committee that without the conclusion of a deal with the government within the next 24 – 48hrs, he will have no choice but to begin the Section 114 process for TfL. To quote:
I think if we are unable to conclude the financial negotiations within the next 24 – 48hrs, then we will have to… I think it is unavoidable at that point that we will have to commence the statutory Section 114 process.
Simon Kilonback, CFO TfL, Finance Committee, May 12th 2020
The FINAL risk remains
Beyond all of this, there is still one further option the government could take. It perhaps represents the ‘absolute worst case’ scenario. That is to simply claim that Londoners ‘can surely just’ follow the same guidelines as everyone else. That all that is required to deal with this crisis is ‘common sense’, or ‘British determination’, or any other phrase that uses inverted commas as protection from critical scrutiny. Weak leaders, of all political persuasions and managerial levels, like phrases like this because they allow them to appear to offer a solution whilst failing actually to do so. They are a way of encouraging people to generalise their own experience into a collective one, and in doing so abdicate both responsibility and blame for the inevitable problems or inequalities that then occur.
Public transport in London is not optional or avoidable. It is both a necessary and inevitable part of the solution to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Mayor, TfL and every single person working in London transport right now are doing their part to keep London moving, at enormous personal, human and financial cost. It is time for the government to step forward and help that vital effort continue.
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Very good ‘Mr Bull’ !
I liked the realistic way you discussed financial matters, but also your pointing out that without a good public transport network London would just come to a halt !
Harjinder Singh
As used be from Southall Middlesex
Now from Ghent, East-Flanders, Belgium
Longer term the model may also suffer – currently the highest earning fares are those from Zone 5/6 to zone 1. With companies thinking more home working is going to save expensive office space by allowing more staff to WFH [work from home] 1 or 2 days per week – some even asking them too the long term impact could be huge.
Many might see this as an opportunity to move from endlessly upgrading signalling for peak time service increases to looking to provide transport for more orbital trips. This is going to need a model based on some form of taxation not on fares – hard to make non zone 1 trips pay for investments themselves at £1.50 a pop.
The Abermankönntedocheinfach option is sadly one that cannot be ruled out with this government, although one would hope that the essential transport system for the capital of the country would be above such machinations.
In which case, should it happen, the choice is for TfL to stop all services, furlough all workers, and pretty much turn off the power, in order to survive as long as possible, or drive themselves off the cliff trying to provide the service demanded of them in unprecedented times.
Unions probably would support the shutdown – it would protect workers from incidents such as https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52616071
The ‘economic stimulus’ option is a simple way to solve everything though, so hopefully clear sane heads will prevail, and not make irresponsible political capital out of this.
Btw, your favicon has reverted to WordPress.
And in before the press say that self-driving trains would allow a running service regardless of staff deaths.
…that Londoners can simply use public transport less, temporarily. This myth is horribly prevalent.
The other myth, horribly widespread, is of course, that “London gets all the money” – which ties in to the “City-baiting” that you mention … the “dog-whistle” attacks are also directed at the whole of London & Londoners, as well, unfortunately.
Car ownership
Note the huge discepancy in ownership, relative to distance from the centre: The City, Islington, Westminster, Ken-&-Chelsea are not by any means deprived areas, but look at the low percentage of car ownership – because their inhabitants have access to very good public transport.
By the way: This is, of course, the downside of the current political model of never thinking more than one Daily Mail headline ahead. Love it!
or even just keep kicking the hard decision on funding down the road until TfL’s reserves run out and it is too late to deal with this financial crisis in a sensible way.
Ah yes, so TfL goes bust & everything grinds to a halt – what then? Have any of the ideologues thought of what the outcome might be? As in the amazingly minimal statutory obligations you then go to ….
your last sentence in that section is really scary.
However, in today’s political climate, I am very afraid that, between the present & immediately-previous Mayors of London, we are staring a collapse of London’s Transport in the face.
As Sykobee has suggested – it’s not “just” this government, but the temptation to engage in political point-scoring & finger-pointing, something both Johnson & Khan are good at.
Dan P
Indeed: “The Boss” is currently WFH all the time – she does not expect to go back to more than 3 – possibly 4 – days a week at the ( In the City ) office – ever again.
I can’t see the government being overly impressed by TfL giving up around £650,000 of daily revenue from bus passengers, based on the reduced numbers travelling when touching in was still mandatory.
It’s also noticeable that while bus patronage in other parts of the country is also quoted at 10-15% of normal, service levels beyond London are more like 40% of normal (compared to TfL’s 80% figure), and I suspect TfL has not been as ruthless at identifying surplus capacity as have bus operators elsewhere.
Car ownership is not merely based on public transport for local journeys, or finding somewhere to park, but the fact that getting out of Z1-2 to anywhere where a car would be useful is such a pain. Inter-city journeys are by train are much more attractive to Z1-2 people than Z5-6 ones. I presume that parking restrictions and costs in central London won’t be waived, so there is no-way people could drive in from the outskirts even if traffic were lighter.
The bigger question for TfL is whether the crisis has blown their ridership growth prediction model long term. Its not just WFH, its people being much warier of the health risks of commuting and seeking work outside the capital, or realising they rather like being home with the kids and downscaling their lives. Social lives could change with people deciding that zoom meetings with friends, while inferior to being down the pub, are so much cheaper and convenient. A bigger problem for London than the provinces when travel to the central pubs takes an hour.
@John B: I don’t know about London but Brighton & Hove (the second largest collector of revenue from parking fines, behind London) have run their parking enforcement down to a skeleton staff for the last six weeks.
Question, which may be answered in the next few days:
How likely do people think, based on experience & information, that TfL will have to go for Section 114?
And, will the politicans be able to resist playing the endlessly childish blame-&-point-the-finger game, or not?
It may not make huge difference to their finances but I can’t see why TfL should not reinstate the Congestion and Emissions charging zones as soon as possible.
I’ve seen conflicting reports about the length of time needed for this.
Headlines of “nurses charged to drive to hospital” are inevitable.
Thank you for the article, nice to know what’s coming up.
I think it’s necessary to remind readers of the Conservatives secondary motives with London transport, such as the letter I learned of through LR where the Transport Secretary chose “to keep suburban rail services outside the clutch of any future Labour mayor”[1]. It’s that sort of thinking that will noticeably affect the rest of TfL’s year, as much as we may want to avoid partisan talk here. Maybe we’re in a different time and the central government funding (rather than loans) could return, with a required emphasis on working from home., cycling and green engines.
https://www.londonreconnections.com/2017/overgrounded-how-londons-dream-of-rail-devolution-died/
I suspect reducing the service on a line will do little if anything to reduce the expenditure – the energy consumption is only a small part of the running costs. The only way to save substantial money on the tube is to shut lines and stations and then furlough the staff or make them redundant. Very few would be needed to look after a suspended system, London Underground practice it every Christmas Day.
Does a reduction in services (bus/tube/both) actually save much money, particularly in the short-term?
@JohnB 12May at 2340
“I presume that parking restrictions and costs in central London won’t be waived”
It’s complicated.
The Mayor has suspended the C charge (for the life of me, I can’t understand why he did this), and has asserted that it will not be reintroduced before June.
Some local authorities are not enforcing parking restrictions. Not necessarily a deliberate policy, but the result of (1) wardens are either off sick or (2) have been reassigned to other duties during the crisis.
Furthermore a few private car park operators are temporarily allowing NHS staff to park for free.
Overall, a number of perverse incentives to drive into central London…
While you quote car ownership (hence availability) statistics, perhaps it should be noted that those go back to 2011 – and looking at the ‘Technical Note’ whence they come, that headlines that the overall figure – that 54% of households then had a car – was down from 57% in 2005/06. While I don’t know what has happened since, there must bean expectation that it fallen further.
We’re expected to use common sense. That’ll be because neither the Government’s advisers, nor the Government for selecting them and for following their advice unquestioningly, exhibit any. For example, there are already hordes of cyclists, and motor cyclists, passing (for example) Kennington Gate. At all the red traffic lights, will the vastly increased numbers of cyclists be able to observe social distancing without stringing themselves out impossibly in a great long 2-metre queue, or will they (probably) just bunch up in a static peleton? Doesn’t make sense does it.. Needs thinking through properly.
Marginal savings from reducing frequency in the short term are not huge unless TfL can Furlough the drivers which would be very challenging.
They might be tempted (or threatening) to run a night tube style network but the Tories would use that to attack the mayor. and the mayor to attach the Tories. The unions would cry foul but i expect they would point at central gov rather then khan when push comes to shove.
There is a big political issue that people don’t really understand who controls what in the devolution- the mayor cannot borrow (beyond the limits set by gov) to fund transport, nor can he tax to fund transport. Unlike Germany we don’t have a fixed set of rules governing what tax goes where so central government can cut taxes and devolve cuts. In most areas there is a mix of central gov and regional go (and local gov) which creates Tory (central)/ Labour (city region)/Tory (local) fights- not especially helpful in getting stuff done- where the slef interest is making sure blame is allocated first.
Khan actually has quite strong relationship with certain members of Tory party (Osbourne/Javid) but he really riles other parts of the party especially within London GLA. The tories dislike the fares freeze and the fact that unlike the rest of the U.K London’s cheap bus fares model has been used as a comparison point to high fares elsewhere. Central gov I think many will be asking why TfL needs to spend £600m on subsidising buses which could be used to fund investment the are coming to DfT to ask for- they might say that has to be the first sacrifice, the second being the fares freeze.
@Jamesthegill
Parking enforcement is the domain of the local London Boroughs, not TfL. I’m sure many boroughs have furloughed their parking wardens, but this is of zero help to TfL.
Parking enforcement in many boroughs has been contracted out to organisations like Serco. In this case, my guess is the parking attendants will keep doing what their employer has been contracted to do.
In Hounslow I read that parking enforcement continues as normal, permits were issued to some NHS staff and others, numbers of parking tickets issued was down 70%.
I have travelled into town once in the last two months. Unfortunately sometimes a physical presence is required, even in IT.
One massive problem that is ignored in the use “avoid public transport” advice is: Parking… In the City?????
I went by car for my singular foray into town. The Congestion Charge and ULEZ are off and I was able to book a space in the underground carpark of the building. This 12 storey building has a grand total of 25 spaces… Do the maths…
Excellent article – fully up to the high LR standard! No news yet as to which route Government might take but the temptation to rub the Mayor’s nose in it a little must be quite high – no love lost between current and previous Mayor’s – which is a shame as BoJo ought to appreciate the difficulties of the situation even if he doesn’t agree with Khan’s policies.
Best wishes,
Mike
Thanks for another really interesting article.
A bit off topic, but I was wondering if you had a source for the fact that Arsenal have to keep cash on hand as a term for their stadium loan. It’s something I’ve assumed is the case for a while from their finances, but would be great to have it confirmed.
Thank you for the interesting article. On car usage, has anyone worked out the % increase of traffic in London if Londoners would use the car as much as the average Briton? I bet the number would be scary…
The Simon Kilonback quote on statutory duties also made me laugh: This is exactly why so many bus services outside London have disappeared: they are easy to cut, and within council’s transport departments often the only big expenditure that can be cut.
Now this may be a bit off-topic, but I think it is simply wrong to describe the fares freeze as ill-judged – at least unless you believe that the UK government financial treatment of TfL is fair or that the Mayor’s job is not to serve Londoners but to protect the UK government decisions to impose unique costs on them. Most of TfL’s income is from fares, which is unique for a large European capital city. The lack of alternative for Londoners is stressed, and in particular poorer ones, but it says Khan ‘decided to forego £650m of farebox revenue over the last four year’ – I think he decided to provide a benefit that skews towards those needed it most? As the articles rightly states, the fares freeze has nothing to do with TfL’s current financial woes, so why call it ill-judged?
I also don’t think responsibility for the Crossrail overrun lies with TfL. If you have an approval system for infrastructure projects that gives complete control to the UK government, that requires endless information (though admittedly often idiotic one) and allows decisions to be influenced by personal interest / prejudices of ministers, then in my view that’s where the buck stops.
Christian Schmidt
Not so: Khan was warned about the consequences & ignored the advice.
I have zero time for either him, or his predecssor, I’m afraid – certainly as regards their effects upon travelling in London.
Christian Schmidt (and Greg T),
The issue about lost of revenue v need to provide cheap transport is only one issue involved in freezing fares. Personally, on this score, I think this is a political decision that could reasonably be made either way though I admit to strongly being in the ‘don’t freeze fares’ camp.
What I and some other people are far more concerned about is that it puts the Mayor of London in a weak position when negotiating with a not-completely-sympathetic government. Covid 19 shows why you should not do it.
Mayor: We are in desperate trouble due to the lockdown and need government support
Govt: But why should we subsidise you when you have introduced a fares freeze against our wishes? If we did this we would be effectively paying the subsidy you needed to have the fares freeze whilst passengers in the rest of the country have had to pay far higher amounts.
The government argument may be flawed but that attitude will always make it more difficult to make a case for government money. If the mayor could turn round and argue that the fare level was set at its most cost-effective level then he might have a better case. He can’t and the whole thing is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a political stunt.
Just to add a further twist, it is exceptionally the case in London that most buses have centre doors and, given the high driver death rate, it makes sense to prevent passengers using the front doors. So all buses are free (even those with only front doors). If you are collecting no fares at all, at least on the buses, then arguments about fares freezes are pretty irrelevant.
“Training new ones is both time-consuming and expensive”
and currently suspended due to social distancing
“Shaun Bailey, was particularly vocal on a subject that – as a former member of the London Assembly Transport Committee – one might have expected him to display more understanding of.”
Bailey was only elected to the GLA in 2016 but he’s still on the Transport Committee, replacing Kemi Badenoch in 2017 when she quit to become an MP. Prior to 2016 he’d never held office (local councillor, etc) with no apparent transport background other than owning an Oyster card
Looks like TfL will declare bankruptcy by the end of today if nothing is agreed – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52662171
Looks like it will happen because it is politically expedient to the Conservatives.
sykobee
Oh dear. If that turns out to be true, I will, very unfortunately, have made a correct prediction:
And, will the politicans be able to resist playing the endlessly childish blame-&-point-the-finger game, or not? – Not.
I despair of all of them at times.
Playing 5-year old playground games is more important, to them, than seeing that a capital city of 10 million people has adequate transport facilities.
Incidentally – I forgot to ask earlier – how will/not London Overgound be affected, because it is effectively a TOC, even though it’s a concession?
Would/will they go down with the rest of TfL’s transport, or are they likely to carry on with government support, as the other TOCs , ncluding IIRC “Merseytravel”, which is another concession?
I would appreciate it if someone with more knowledge of the arcane details gave us the benefit of their knowledge on this aspect of the developing crisis.
BBC reports Government agrees to £1.6b bailout. I wonder if that is included in the £2b Grant Shapps was touting at the Downing Street Press Conference today.
As ASLEF Shrugged commented, training has indeed been suspended both in the classroom and in the driving cab. I can only speak of London Overground but close to 100 trainee or experienced drivers are presently furloughed. The vast majority (approximately 80), are trainees at various stages of the pathway to becoming a train driver. It must a tricky time for them with so much uncertainty regarding service levels and whether there will be an ongoing requirement for so many new drivers. Some will have left jobs with higher salaries than their current trainee wage (although it is much more competitive than it used to be) and they would have planned to be on trainee money for 9-10 months or so. Of course for some at the very start of their training and having worked so hard to pass the rigorous assessment process, there will be a worry as to whether they will be required at all.
In addition, although the Class 710 simulator can still be used, qualified drivers cannot gain ‘live’ driving experience under instruction on 710’s due to the current ban on having two people in a driving cab. There are still not enough drivers trained up on 710’s at the present time.
I must also report that some of the morning services have this week seen quite large numbers of standing passengers with proper social distancing made impossible. It makes a mockery of the circular blue stickers now on most platforms denoting 2 metre spacing. I don’t yet know how we will see a return to pre-covid service levels. Although there are fewer drivers in isolation now than at the start, it is still a factor (and could of course worsen if the easing of lockdown sees a rise in cases). There are also restrictions on the numbers of drivers who can be accommodated in existing messrooms for breaks. This apparently simple problem is not necessarily easily overcome without extending breaks to enable drivers to walk to other facilities. Indeed there are some relief locations that do not have additional adequate facitites, meaning that more ‘passing’ might be required.
While management and the unions have worked quite well together under the reduced timetables, to split diagrams where possible and send drivers home rather than hold them spare putting further pressure on messrooms, some current diagrams are very intensive. This has been accepted by most drivers as part of the effort to keep services running to get NHS staff to work. Now the service is being utilised by so many others getting to work, putting increased risk on those workers as well as on train care and station staff, I am not sure that drivers will so readily accept so much time in the seat. It would not be acceptable to use the crisis to reduce costs by using fewer drivers to driver for longer hours. Whilst everything has to be done in accordance with ‘Hidden’ which governs our hours and conditions, there are locally accepted arrangements which take account fatigue and the intensity of the driving. Currently, with a reduced service there have been extended turnaround times, easier driving (basically due to less trains meaning more green signals!) and less door-blocking and ‘negative’ passenger actions. All these things reduce fatigue. As things get back to normal, fatigue will increase and some of the diagrams we work now would seem even heavier.
I would imagine much of what I have said is transferable to other TfL services, including the underground. I do think as a matter of urgency the Mayor ought to be looking at getting oyster readers to near the middle doors of buses to start clawing back some revenue. On a more personal note, we as train drivers are reasonably well protected. My heart goes out to bus drivers and other transport workers and the families of those lost who have been disproportionately affected by this virus. Sealing off the front of buses was done far too late. I feel that Khan does a reasonable job in the main, but he makes a lot of being the son of a bus driver and he was way too late on this.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52670539
A few points become moot…
Strings Attached – including “temporarily” removing the Geriatric’s Pass availabilty during the Peak Hours ….
So it would be good to have the OP, the learned Mr Bull’s comments on the arrangement as announced last evening (14th). Do we have enough detail for clarity or is all we know that the Section 114 debacle has been avoided with detail to follow? What happens next?
Excellent article! And good to see you interviewed on the TV News! 👏
Superb article. I love the Abermankönntedocheinfach concept; so true!
It’s worth remembering that it was Johnson who introduced free travel for over-60s in peak hours. There obviously a chance that it will never return and, when the restrictions are eased, I’ll have to dust off my Oystercard.
According to Ross Lydall (Standard transport correspondent), the government has insisted on some radical changes to C charge. Longer hours and 7 days per week. Does one sniff the hand of Andrew Gilligan in here? Charge being reintroduced from Monday 18. I suspect most contributors to this site will approve wholeheartedly, but who could have predicted such radical moves only a few weeks ago…
I know we read carefully on politics here, but doesn’t this present political embarrassment for Tory mayor candidate Bailey…. Johnson has forced tfl to adopt C charge measures that Bailey seems to campaign against.
“Peak Hours” – originally ( IIRC) morning peak only.
Will the new “temporaty” restrictions be the same, or will it apply in the evening peak as well?
Anyone know any details, yet?
One of the big drawbacks of an evening peak restriction is interchanges such as Hammersmith, where mid-journey the card holder has to leave and re-enter a station. Do you stop the Freedom Pass holder mid-journey, and if not how do you stop others claiming they are changing trains but actually just starting a journey? Unlike a pay as you go journey, the gate can’t tell the difference.
The Freedom Pass is also an ENCTS card, so use between 9.30am and 11pm on buses can’t be restricted.
I suppose night bus use could be withdrawn, but I can’t see this saving much.
Khan clearly doesn’t want people driving to work as the reinstated congestion charge rises to £15 and many major streets in London are being pedestrianised, so cross-city journeys will be difficult.
“main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists … Cars and lorries will also be banned from Waterloo Bridge and London Bridge.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/15/large-areas-of-london-to-be-made-car-free-as-lockdown-eased
I suspect many of these emergency changes will become the “new normal”. Not a bad thing to combat climate change if it cuts through red tape, but I’m sure the lack of consultation will lead to unintended consequences.
@JohnBray “Khan clearly doesn’t want people driving to work as the reinstated congestion charge rises to £15”
We are still waiting for the dust to settle, but the way I’m reading this is that the urgent reintroduction of the C Charge, and hike to £15, was imposed on the mayor by government – rather than being his choice.
Question to those who know more about how Oyster technology works.
Does the reduction in time validity of freedom and 60+ oyster card require major software/firmware change, or is it a relatively trivial amendment?
TfL’s financial crisis cannot been considered in isolation from the similar massive (albeit to be presented in much smaller chunks) crisis imminent in public transport in the rest of the country, because the operators there will be begging HMG for the same banknotes as TfL will have to continue demanding. For 35 years provincial England has existed principally on the basis of wholly-commercial bus services (except for the lucky % using subsidised rail services and the small % on LA-supported bus services). But until the end of ‘distancing’, and probably for a good while after whilst old people etc slowly drift back, it will be impossible to run ANY public transport service without government support. (The low profit margins on buses in normal times not helping that). From March up to now bus operators have been living in a false paradise where they can run near-empty buses at no risk to themselves, and even ‘boast’ of how few users they have; but that was put in for a few weeks, not forever.
Also, London is not going to be able to support itself financially from the ‘rate base’ to the same extent as elsewhere, because the users of its central area facilities are so much more dependent on people travelling a fair distance by public transport (and on overseas tourists). Even if the central retail and leisure destinations are allowed to reopen, the public transport will be unable to carry in the customers in enough numbers for profitability. No such problem in the average car-based smaller place, where few customers come from very far away anyway!
Whilst the problem is not ‘soluble’ so long as distancing persists, HMG, in seeking a reduction in the sums being begged for by London, will surely be looking not just at the likes of banning free travel in the peak as discussed above, but at the whole extraordinarily high level to which free travel is allowed in London, even on trains; all the more so given that a large % of the beneficiaries (especially on trains) are well off.
Again, people are not now ALL travelling for free on buses elsewhere. (Why have London bus drivers not been given a totally enclosed cab since they stopped having to issue tickets? – I’m not familiar with the exact present screen arrangements on every current London bus type, though).
Over the next months, car-based rural and smalltown England will return to something like normality (hospitality industry excepted). Bigger-town England will hobble along with more High St shops gone, and ‘nobody’ caring about any local public transport problems because only ‘unimportant’ people use buses. But big city England faces incurable wreck, because of its SUCCESS in weaning people off cars. After 30 years of the powers- that- be talking (more like hypocritical waffling in the shire counties!) about how everybody must use cars less, those without cars are now not only suffering more but also being actively denigrated as disease-spreaders. The extraordinary comments made by Shapps this week after the ‘return to work’ overcrowding ** , about people having a civic duty to not use public transport, have already been noted elsewhere for what they are, i.e. chauffeur-driven Tories telling dirty immigrants doing real jobs that they are a selfish public menace ***. (OMG, getting a bit leftie here…). Even out in the provinces where buses have been carrying an average of 1 passenger of late, making them one of the safest places around, those of us who use them still happily get told by motorists that we are wrong to do so. Now that motorists are more or less being told that they can go where they want, the iniquity worsens.
(The big difference from the 1960s is obviously that cycling walking are it appears benefitting from the situation now – although what this will actual amount to in the Shires waits to be seen. If one were to comment on WHAT SORT of London people live in places + have jobs in places where buses rather than cycling / walking are the only viable transport, it would get a bit leftie again…. ).
Unless money really does grow on trees, the only available way of changing the situation from wholly insoluble to manageable has to be formally reducing the distancing rules somewhat, in combination with varying working hours etc. (At the moment govt is just making itself ‘good’ by imposing strict rules, whilst castigating the plebs because it is impossible for London to function without breaching them).
** Did Boris & Co actually tell TfL and other UK transport operators that they were expected to carry a lot more people from Wednesday? or does HMG think that wholly new increased schedules can be set up in 48 hours?
*** Extraordinarily, the new govt Transport Guidance issued this week says that ‘people from different households’ can now travel together by car, so long as they think they ‘need’ to, with no restriction on the number in the car! This does not seem to have been much noticed (well, not many motorists read such things). It has not been mentioned in the more general guidance issued.
On the two key “myths” I would make a few observations:
The reductions in TfL services have been far greater than would have been necessary as a result of sickness or quarantine – not sure about LU, but on buses many drivers have simply been on standby, and recently considerable numbers have been furloughed. The delay in getting services back to normal is mainly due to the inflexibility of the furlough scheme with its minimum period of 3 weeks – it seems TfL jumped the gun there. I’m sure the savings from ending furlough for TfL staff will have been factored into the government’s calculations (7000 staff, if that is the correct total, would cost around £250 million a year).
Clearly, increasing peak services above normal levels would be impossible on the tube, but some reallocation of resources outside peak times and on buses could assist. It’s obvious that if you are short of staff you should cut lightly used daytime, evening and night services, not peak services, but that is the exact reverse of what TfL has actually done by running weekend or flat timetables, so I think you give them more credit than is due.
In terms of reduced usage, temporary or otherwise, of course we cannot simply expect everyone to go by car, as not everyone can, and the roads would not have enough capacity and there would be major parking problems. However, only around 25% of the workforce is furloughed, and presumably most of the rest are still working, in many cases from home. So provided those people that can work from home continue doing so and leisure travel is kept to a minimum, by my reckoning the existing transport system should have more than enough capacity to cope. Social distancing would be impossible in many workplaces anyway without it. Furthermore if people stagger their journeys to make better use of surplus off-peak capacity, then even more people can travel. Not everyone can drive, but if those that can do so, there will be enough public transport capacity for those that can’t.
In the absence of data in some crucial areas, it’s not worth doing too many precise calculations, but public transport in London is not as important as is often assumed, once you move away from the centre. Weighted by journey length, car accounts for almost exactly half of all passenger travel in greater London anyway, with 32% on rail and 12% on bus. Walking and cycling are only around 3% and 1.5% respectively. These figures are calculated from LTDS 2016 (which incidentally has issues about cross-border trips), but won’t have changed much.
Car use is down by maybe 40%, thus 30% of the usual total, rail down by about 95%, thus just 1.6% of the usual total, and bus use by 85%, thus just 1.8%. I’m not aware that walking or cycling for commuting (as opposed to leisure) is up at all. So it looks as if overall only 35% of usual travel is taking place, so at a guess around 40% of the workforce is working at home (though this ignores leisure travel/school children etc). With road capacity at 100% (of 56%) and public transport capacity at 12% (of 44%) the total is 101% – hey presto! Those figures will be a bit out, but clearly we don’t necessarily have a massive problem in terms of meeting demand.
As an aside, the 10% increase in cycling TfL has been talking about would only take it to around 15%, which is clearly nowhere near enough to cover the normal public transport use of 44%. Given that cyclists probably already use more than 10% of the total road space in central London this wouldn’t even be possible anyway. (Not sure why so many people seem to think cycling is the solution to anything – bikes use up road capacity just as cars do, arguably more so due to their low speed and only 1 person per bike, compared with around 1.5 per car. Even walking is no magic bullet – how many cars, let alone buses, can you get past a pedestrian crossing in the 30ish seconds it takes a puffin crossing to get one pedestrian across the road?)
Of course this ignores large disparities between inner and outer London – in outer London most travel is by car, or bus for short journeys, whereas most people reach central London by train. However, one would speculate that as central London is largely filled with offices, it is largely those very people that won’t be needing to travel. So if everybody that can work from home does so, public transport use will plummet by default anyway.
Then of course we come to finances. Public transport is never going to be able to run at a profit with social distancing in place. Normally, commuter rail lines in London mostly make a modest profit – for TfL that is used to cross-subsidise the bus network. With passenger numbers down 90% they will be making roughly a 90% loss, which is unsustainable. However, that doesn’t mean TfL can’t do anything to help itself.
The fares freeze has often been quoted as costing at £650m over 4 years, but is this an up to date cost? It seems to be the same figure that was being (optimistically) quoted before it started, but of course nobody knew what inflation would do at that time, and I seem to recall it has actually been rather higher than forecast. RPI from Jan 2016-2020 is 12.3% so TfL could be forgoing over £650m *every* year now, though I do appreciate that not all fares have actually been frozen, e.g. Travelcards. On the other hand, you also have the bus hopper fare (which I support but should have been funded by fare rises), and free travel for the old and young – the last of these goes back to Ken Livingstone. Overall, TfL could quite easily be forgoing £1bn in revenue a year now from these policies.
You have also had billions of pounds spent making the road network worse, first with traffic calming, now cycle lanes and (though less expensive) 20mph speed limits everywhere. Quite apart from the capital cost, these measures have pushed bus operating costs up by around 15% per mile as a result of slower journey times.
Additionally, the bus network is very wastefully run, with poor matching of service levels to actual demand. Average passenger loadings are only around the 15 mark (I did work this out a few years ago, but it is very convoluted to get from the available data) – a double decker can carry that many even with full social distancing. If resources were reallocated from places and times where loadings are routinely only in single figures even without lockdown then some quite substantial enhancements could be made to peak services. Even on the Underground, the frequencies at the outer ends of lines are much greater than required by the demand, albeit this is largely dictated by infrastructure limitations.
Thus it is fairly obvious that TfL could easily have been managed very differently and never needed any subsidy or got into any debt. Even old LT was quite wasteful, and they almost eliminated the subsidy in the late 1990s, and bus operators have become far more cost-efficient since then thanks to competitive tendering. These are political decisions made by successive mayors, and in my view it is quite right for the government to play hardball. It is just wrong to spend profligately to get elected, and then expect to get bailed out when the going gets tough. A one-off handout for the virus is one thing, but if the mayor wants to spend taxpayers’ money he should raise it himself.
It’s unclear how long social distancing is here to stay, but perhaps it is time to reinvent the interiors of buses and trains. If passengers were given individual compartments, capacity could be raised to maybe 60-70% of usual. (It wouldn’t solve issues with air quality or hygiene on surfaces admittedly.) With journey time staggering, we could still accommodate the normal passenger numbers overall – though I very much doubt demand will ever fully recover. I have long argued against the cattle-truck conditions Londoners have to put up with (of course this is common elsewhere as well), but if the virus has changed travel for good then it would be a great opportunity to deal with both issues at once.
Greg T, I guess I disagree, if you are put into an impossible position (e.g. UK gov just withdrawing TfL support) you cannot just agree with it. You may in the end have to accept a compromise (like Khan is now) but only after you’d tried other options and make it very clear who did what. I think all Londoners will now know who froze fares and who raised them. (And in any ‘it’s-not-that-simple’ discussion Khan should still be able to explain where the buck started and where it has to stop.)
Pedantic of Purley, “But why should we subsidise you when you have introduced a fares freeze against our wishes?” Answer: because you withdrew the support in the place, which (as John Bull can witness 🙂 ) is the main underlying cause of TfL’s financial mess, and not the fares freeze. (I admit I am strongly in the ‘PT fares are way too high in London’ camp.)
Peter Kay, yes much of provincial England (and Wales) is in trouble – and worse because the system actively discourages councils to plan ahead, few will have the capability or capacity to sort out their buses. Some rural areas that kept their supported bus services (and thus the staff that plan them) should be ok if they get cash, similarly towns with municipal operators and PTEs. But in many other places (hello Northamptonshire!), who will be able to spend the cash even if it appears?
Robert Munster: Some fairly bold claims there. But just one point I can take immediate issue with. If average bus loadings across the network are 15, that does not mean that you can run the service with buses capable of carrying no more than 15 people. Near the ends of the routes, and at quieter times, there will be fewer passengers than the average, and by definition of average, there will be more than the average at busier times and places. No form of public or private motorised transport (with trivial exceptions) can operate without carrying a fair amount of fresh air around.
Malcolm – yes, you are quite right, but as I had already written rather a lot I was hoping it would be obvious enough not to need saying! The biggest issue is directional flow, i.e. if buses carry 30 people one way and none the other, that will be an average of 15. Nonetheless (under normal circumstances) there is a good deal that COULD be done to increase this figure significantly or (under present circumstances) to provide the buses where and when they are needed. We have bus routes that are packed at one end at carry fresh air at the other, when the obvious solution is for half the buses to turn short, but TfL don’t like doing that. Unfortunately TfL has always shown practically zero interest in tapping the considerable planning expertise that exists in the private bus companies, whilst its own expertise seems to be severely hampered by the length of time since it has actually run any buses itself.
The comment that “ but public transport in London is not as important as is often assumed, once you move away from the centre” is up with “but how did you enjoy the play Mrs. Lincoln”. London is the powerhouse of the nation. And the great majority of people in Central London, particularly those on low incomes, don’t have a car. So it’s in everyone’s interests, from Carlisle to Truro, to keep London moving.
IIRC when I was working for LT back in the 60s it was reckoned that 12 passengers represented a commercial load. Of course this was with typically RT and RM buses whose fuel consumption was very good compared with modern vehicles. 15 would have seemed OK then.
It seems to me that unless the 2metre social distancing rule can be abolished there is no hope of anything approaching normality. Perhaps the experts and politicians should work from this point and try to devise systems which do not require bodily separation?
Peter Kay
Thanks for pointing out the parallels to “Outside London” – we needed to be reminded of that.
[Political and personal slights snipped. LBM]
Bryn Davies
Thank you
I live in zone 3, with very easy access to roads out of London ( the M11 principally )
But, although I have a car, I only do about 2000 miles a year & often less.
When not walking or occasionally cycling, I am more likely to be on a train of some sort, be it Tube or Overground or “BR”
Fragmentation seems to have happened, again, & we know that it never works.
Jim Jordon
You’ve put your finger on the really weak point: The 2 metre separation.
Watch what ( Shock, horror, flee in terror! ) Other countries do about this, as they come out of their lockdowns?
Of course, given our general maladministration, no-one will even consider learning from anywhere else … in the same way as France / Italy / Belgium / Germany (etc ) are seriously reducing their C-19 caseload – only then does our misgovernment want to introduce quarantine for visitors who are less likely to have the virus than we are.
You know it makes sense!
As regards the usage – and reduction in usefulness of – Freedom passes, it is worth noting that there are effectively three sub-types: Disabled, Over-SRA*, and over-60 (as introduced by Johnson-as-Mayor to try to retain votes.) Although many non-Londoners complain regularly about the Over-60 one they don’t about the first two, probably because reasonable facsimiles exist elsewhere (limited to buses usually though) and whilst I don’t see the loss of the over-60 one as a big deal the reduction of validity of the first two is much more serious, affecting people often on low income too.
The worry is that this government, for purely political reasons, chooses to force this as a permanent change.
(* standard retirement age – whatever it happens to be this week. 65? 66?)
Robert Munster – some sweeping assumptions about cycling in your post. I’m not sure how you can say that cyclists “probably” take up 10% road space in central London. That seems more like a wild guess.
In traffic modelling bikes are treated as 0.2 of a PCU (Passenger Car Unit) or 5 bikes for every car so your claims about road space occupied are also wide of the mark.
This is certainly an interesting statement which bears further analysis.
“Not sure why so many people seem to think cycling is the solution to anything – bikes use up road capacity just as cars do, arguably more so due to their low speed and only 1 person per bike, compared with around 1.5 per car. ”
As well as the official modelling assumption (0.2 PCU):
– Bikes are faster than cars in central London on a normal day. This doesn’t require superhuman fitness or jumping red lights. e-Bikes are surprisingly quick (20kph) and cyclists make steady progress in most traffic conditions. They could easily go faster if the law was changed – the US allows 20mph – and it would be a software upgrade for many existing e-Bikes.
– Adding more bikes doesn’t really slow things down, certainly not as much as adding more cars. This is because cyclists are quite small and can adapt to obstructions with more flexibility.
– You can definitely get more than 1 person on a bike – around here (zone 2) Cargo Bikes full of kids are a major form of transport, if they were all replaced by Chelsea Tractors you wouldn’t even get out the end of my street without being stuck in gridlock.
For what it’s worth average car and van occupancy accross the whole of the UK is only 1.6. However this probably includes Taxi and PHV drivers. If you counted the number of “people moved per car trip” you might actually end up delivering less than 1 person per car journey on average in London!
I do think that bikes and busses should be separated. Because busses are so large, they confilct with cycles a lot, both slowing each other down. But separating busses and bikes should be at the cost of cars not bikes or busses.
Thank you for the article. Very interesting. Yes, you’re right there is a level of anti-London and anti-Khan prejudice which like most such viewpoints is badly thought out. Personally I have viewed the resurgence of anti- Khan off the record briefing with dismay. Just because London aspires to be the only city or region in the U.K. with a decent, even world class public transport system, others seemingly mock that. Why on earth would they do that ? Last year it covered over 80% of operating costs through fares – even with the freeze, which by the way is crucial for low income Londoners. Have people have no idea what housing costs here ?
I’ll take one example from R Munster. Apparently our buses are under loaded with an average of 15 passengers per bus. That’s good ! Much better than the provinces. And our service levels are high because a conscious decision was made to go for passenger number growth as part of a strategy for modal shift – you know climate change and all that. And it has worked spectacularly. Incidentally this policy began under the Major government on the tube when we last had a Tory government that listened to evidence rather than being totally bound by ideological prejudice. During the mid 90’s tube frequencies were steadily but significantly increased, especially in the off peak and evenings to drive demand not follow it. Livingstone followed through when he became mayor. It’s a great idea, not a mistake.
Great article, thanks.
The bike question is very interesting. A lot of people don’t go on a bike because they are simply too scared. To date, the ‘superhighways’ have not mitigated this. In some ways, the quietways had more potential in this respect, but still suffered from major disconnects on approaching the central area. The Streetspace plans look pleasingly ambitious and carry the advantage that they can easily be tweaked to overcome shortcomings, unlike some recently installed permanent infrastructure. The big deal will be whether the combination of this, and the pressure to keep off buses and tubes, will be sufficient to make cycling come across as un-scary thing to do. I suspect that sharing routes with buses will still be too frightening. It will only work, if, for instance, one side of Waterloo and London Bridges are 2-way for bikes and the other 2-way for buses, and that the junctions on their approach are equally safe and easy to navigate. Lots of reorganisation of bus stops and junctions to do, in that case.
REYNOLDS953 and BOB:
I only put in the bit about bikes as an aside as it is not really what the article is about. However to tackle your points:
The 10% figure is certainly a guesstimate which is why I said probably. However if you look at Blackfriars Road as an example, where it passes Palestra, the superhighway currently takes up 15.4% of the total carriageway width including pavements, without including the dividing separator. If only actual road space is included, then it is 26.9% – and that is a relatively wide road. I read somewhere that this cycle lane was close to capacity at peak times, so that road at any rate appears to be well over 10%. Obviously I appreciate this is a major cycling corridor and there are alternative roads without such cycle lanes and possibly with a lower proportion of cycling, but I think 10-15% is probably right overall.
Surprisingly I’d never come across a PCU unit before, but to put a figure of 0.2 PCU on a bike is totally absurd and no surprise then that TfL’s models consistently produce nonsense. TfL don’t seem to quote any source for these figures, and they are also at least 12 years old, so I would surmise that they are not very scientific, and possibly just made-up. Indeed having searched around, other organisiations are quoting figures between around 0.4 and 1.2 for bikes. To be honest I think using PCUs is a pretty daft way of modelling traffic anyway, as it is far too simplistic.
What matters is not the size of the vehicle, but the length of time it takes to pass a point. Given that the bulk of this time is the gap between one vehicle and the next, and that will be the same regardless of the vehicle size, then whether it is a bike or car makes virtually no difference. A bike is a bit shorter, but largely offset by its lower speed. The only way a bike might get a significant advantage is in width, but at best that would be two bikes per car width given much higher safety margins needed (1m rule etc.), but only if you have two bikes going the same way at the same speed. So on a normal mixed traffic lane it is likely to be around 0.9-1.5PCU. On a bike lane it may be around 0.5PCU, due to the lanes being narrower, but certainly not 0.2. On a wide road it may be possible to accommodate a bike and car side by side (but not 2 cars), but lanes tend to get narrow at the critical junctions, so this isn’t very relevant.
The other point I’d make is that car vs bike is really a false comparison. Whilst some may switch car to bike it would seem likely (given that the fall in car used happened several years before the rise in bike use) that the majority of cyclists have come from public transport. Does anyone have any data on this?
Obviously bikes are faster than road transport in congested conditions because they can jump queues. However in doing so they just slow everyone else down even more. Having the slowest vehicles at the front is not an efficient way of doing things, as anyone who has organised a race will know. I’ll grant that bikes are more flexible, and I am certainly not blaming bikes for all the problems, but it is a fact the congestion is now far worse in central London than 20 years ago, even though motor traffic levels have fallen dramatically.
Having dedicated bike lanes certainly benefits everyone where there are enough cyclists and there is enough space, other things being equal – though there are very few roads where that is actually the case. What I have a problem with is the promotion of cycling without any real understanding of the practicalities. The way I look at it is that it is not cars per se that are the problem but private transport i.e. cars and bikes. Whatever the precise figure for car vs bike, it is clearly vastly less efficient (in terms of road space usage) than a well-loaded bus – never mind a train which gets people off the roads altogether. Buses get very badly delayed by bikes as there is frequently nowhere safe to overtake between stops, which then accelerates the switch from bus to bike and makes the problem even worse.
From LTDS 2016, average car occupancy in London is 1.55 not including vans/PH vehicles. Of course this may not be evenly spread across London or by time of day/week. The big increase in PH vehicles is a big problem, as they (and taxis) spend a lot of time “empty” – I wonder to what extent this is an unintended consequence of restrictions on car use.
Of course all these figures will be thrown out by the current situation. I hope cyclists are remembering to maintain their socially distanced 20m gap.
MIKEC:
I largely agree with you, but you are a bit out of date. The prioritisation of public transport in London stopped in the late 2000s and it has been stagnating if not in decline ever since as the focus has switched to walking and cycling. And yes, you do have the current PM to thank for that, although even Livingstone was moving in that direction. However Khan has greatly accelerated it and in my view has inadvertently done a lot of damage to the bus network, despite being famously the son of a bus driver. The main problem is that he tried to fund the fares freeze by cutting ‘back office’ staff, but those back office staff are the ones you need to run the network effectively and efficiently. I was no fan of Livingstone but at least he did have a fair understanding of how the (public) transport system worked, which is more than can be said for most politicians.
I’m certainly no petrolhead but it’s important that we recognise that many car users have no alternative, especially in outer London. Either we accommodate them or we have to be brutally honest and tell them to give up their jobs and/or lifestyles. Failure to plan realistically will just lead to disaster. The important thing is to ensure there ARE viable alternatives for as many as possible (and that generally won’t be walking or cycling).
In terms of “driving demand” it’s funny how we seem to see this as a good thing. All travel is bad, but in general it facilitates things that are good. It’s just that travel by public transport (and possibly bike) is less bad than travel by car – but the things it facilitates may also be less good. It is totally subjective and all depends on what values you assign to various things – there’s not much point saving the human race if we’re all doomed to a future confined to mud-huts eating grass. The relevance here is that I believe long term WfH could be one really good thing to come out of this situation, easing pressure on public transport and the road network – though we should also remember that data infrastructure has its own carbon/environmental footprint which is quite substantial.
ME:
Further to my earlier posts, I have done an analysis of a random sample of 20 bus routes (was going to do more but it was a bit tedious) to compare frequencies with passenger numbers, and the results are here:
http://www.londonbusroutes.net/miscellaneous/Analysis_of_bus_frequencies.GIF
Hopefully of interest to some. As I was saying, there is a big mismatch between supply and demand, by a factor of around 6. Under normal circumstances (and if funding were not an issue), this would be justifiable, but it is something I think TfL should definitely be looking at. Of course this is for normal times, and with much of the off-peak/night demand being discretionary it is likely to become even more extreme in the months ahead if nothing is done. If you look at the area under the pink graph, essentially you can take a chunk out wherever you want and put it somewhere else (albeit remembering to multiply by 5 for MF) and it won’t have too much impact on costs provided you don’t go to extremes.
A couple of pieces on this theme, from an economic-political viewpoint:
In the FT: Public transport struggles to cater for the few at https://www.ft.com/content/a25d7eb2-3ca8-40e1-95e5-cb885210f818 , and “The treatment of Transport for London is the surest sign that the government wants the economic damage from this crisis to last for as long as possible”, at https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/05/15/the-treatment-of-transport-for-london-is-the-surest-sign-that-the-government-wants-the-economic-damage-from-this-crisis-to-last-for-as-long-as-possible/
Neat lie slipped into the questions by the Daily Mail in its Covid19 ‘opinion poll’ this weekend: “Was Sadiq Khan wrong to increase London congestion charge by 30% to £15?”
Jeremy GH: The FT article is behind a paywall. The other piece,, and the reples attached to it raise some thought provoking issues, including a few already aired in the article and comments here, but no harm in seeing them afresh from a new angle. We haven’t heard the last of this “deal”.
On London has a podcast on the government’s £1.6bn TfL bailout, with this article’s writer John Bull, with his public alias, featured.
Two points regarding the data used in the article:
I very much agree that the figure for the average loading of a bus at 15 people per bus is as daft as saying that if a man walks a dog then on average they will both have 3 legs each.
On the subject of car dependency and lack of driver’s licences among Londoners: I think the data is somewhat skewed. London has a far higher proportion of foreign inhabitants than anywhere else in the country. EU citizens, and citizens of a number of other countries are allowed to drive in the UK on their own country’s licences for extended periods of time (e.g. I only swapped my licence for a UK one about 12 years since I first arrived in the UK…). If – as I suspect – the analysis only took into account holders of UK driver’s licences, it is little wonder that London seems to have so many people without a (UK) driver’s licence.
Having said that, it is nevertheless pretty obvious that Londoners are far more dependent on public transport to move around than people living anywhere else in the country.
re.STRAPHAN ‘ EU citizens, and citizens of a number of other countries are allowed to drive in the UK on their own country’s licences for extended periods of time’
EU validity was a program of integration that is subject to renegotiation. The others are ‘British’ territories that are relatively low numbers. Generally NO as quoted on GOV site.
UK.Gov
You can drive in Great Britain on your full, valid driving licence for 12 months from when you became resident.
After 12 months you’ll need to apply for a provisional licence and pass the theory and practical driving tests to drive in Great Britain.
The article only uses driving licence numbers as a “broad comparison”. And Straphan’s point is quite valid as regards the past and present. EU driving licences have not historically needed to be rapidly exchanged for UK ones, although that has now changed, but they can still be exchanged without another test. (The phrase Aleks quotes applies to “other countries” only). The rights of people who have not yet come to the UK may well be “subject to renegotiation”, but that does not affect the point made in the article, which is about people in London now.
And a quick walk around Earls Court will demonstrate that Australian citizens (one of the countries with reciprocal schemes, which hasn’t been a “British territory” for quite a while now) are not exactly low in numbers in London.
Looking back a year and a few more years we can see why London (well, London’s public transport for the context of LR) is in our current state.
[Accusations of blame and name calling snipped.]
Not to mention how the infrastructure started to be overstretched for the last 5-10 years!
Emergency board meeting at TfL August
The Department for Transport’s (DfT) offer made Friday 22 July of a £3.6bn capital funding settlement for Transport for London (TfL) is for a period of 20 months and is filled with “wide ranging and complex conditions”.
The DfT has provided over £5bn in bailout cash for TfL since the start of the pandemic to ensure that London’s public transport can continue operating on a day-to-day basis. The DfT is likely to want TfL to return to self-sufficiency and require no further
funding from central government after March of 2023.
Andy Byford would like to return to a place where cash is provided by the government on a long-term basis similar to Network Rail’s Control Periods and National Highways’ Road Investment Strategy periods. He said he would ideally like a 10-year settlement, but would settle for five or even three.
On top of the capital funding agreement, TfL is looking for a final £1.2bn revenue agreement to see it through the 2022-23 financial year.
London has enjoyed a high-level of integrated and subsidised public transport the envy of many urban communities around the UK, with pioneering initiatives like capped fares and universal travel passes. However, that has only been sustainable on the back of high ridership and economic support from the local authority. The pandemic has been a huge setback for both and now TfL is teetering on the brink of direct administration by the UK government.