If you haven’t been able to tell, I am slightly obsessed with transport.
To date in my blogs, I have blamed my commute for poor regional productivity, talked about why our active travel policy isn’t working but we still should be optimistic about it, and discussed the benefits of a universal parking app (yes, really).
Ultimately, how we travel tells us a lot about how we live and how well our economy functions. Helpfully, the DfT agrees with me and so every year they ask us how we are travelling and give us a helpful insight into how, where and why we move. In turn, that tells us a decent amount about what’s going on in the economy.
Here are 3 key takeaways from the DfT’s annual travel survey.
We are still in a post-pandemic world (at least for travel)
I can’t believe that the pandemic is still a relevant factor in our lives. More than 3 years since the end of the final lockdown most of life is back to normal. However, we still move differently than we did in the pandemic.
As the graph below shows, prior to the pandemic, we had a broadly positive long-term story to tell. People were doing similar numbers of trips and spending a similar amount of time travelling, with the main difference being that the distance travelled had been on the increase from the 1970s until the pandemic.
This is because of the population growth in our cities, suburbs and satellite towns – more people were moving into and out of town and city centres to work and shop. It meant connections between hubs were getting quicker and more desirable, which in turn had positive economic effects. Each trip was an opportunity to shop, to grow a business or even just to see our friends. A properly invested-in transport system should aim to move people as far as they want to go as quickly and efficiently as possible.
However, since 2020 the story has been a negative one.
Today, people are travelling less than they did pre-pandemic. The main driver of this is the change to our working patterns due to the working-from-home phenomenon, with the decline in commuting not offset by greater leisure travel.
In fact, if you look at the numbers, we do fewer trips, travel fewer hours, and for less distance than we were pre-pandemic. That doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but ultimately, it is an indicator of why economic growth has been so sluggish over recent years.
Chart 1: Trends in trips taken, miles travelled, and hours spent travelling: Great Britain (1972 to 1988) and England (1989 to 2023) (NTS0101)
The majority of people still commute by car, and that’s a big net zero problem:
Public transport basically isn’t improving. Transport currently accounts for 26% of our emissions and most of that is from car journeys. We know we need to convince people to change from using their cars to public transport, but the reality is that people in England commute by car 70% of the time. In rural areas, it increases to a whacking 81% of all commuter journeys.
This is particularly important outside of London where public transport sucks (that’s the technical term) and this shows up in the data. We are basically a huge outlier on this point compared to our European counterparts as the Centre for Cities has shown.
Unless we can drive our public transport usage up to the levels of Zurich, or even Hamburg, our transport emissions won’t drop the way we need them to hit our net zero targets.
The £2 bus fare is working, but it hasn’t made buses great again
Proper investment in buses is the most important and cost-effective way to get people back onto public transport and commuting. It’s also the most important way mode of transport for people who are economically deprived or who live in non-urban settings.
A more equal society would see bus ridership increasing as a way of improving social mobility.
The UK, however, can’t claim to have been anything but an abject failure over the long term. Bus usage has been cut by about 40% across the country since 2002.
Chart 10: Trips per person per year by selected public transport modes: England, 2002 to 2023 (NTS0303)
But, to put a cheerier spin on it, the story post-pandemic is slightly better. In everywhere but London, average trips by buses outside London increased by 8% in 2023 compared to 2022.
This may have at least partially been impacted by the national £2 bus fare cap which came into effect on buses outside London from January 2023. Trip rates on London buses have remained similar from 2023 to 2022.
The public ownership of buses across the Combined Authorities also provides a ray of hope for our future bus transport. There’s a lot still to prove, but Bee Networks across the country could help spur a bus renaissance. Find out more about our work on Transport
