Public Transport - micro analysis

Peak public transport exposes the arrogance of our civic planners 

Tom Welsh Sunday Telegraph 18.2.2018

It’s all very embarrassing for Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London. Not only is the body that runs transport in the capital on his behalf in crisis, facing a deficit of almost £1 billion following his grossly irresponsible and Corbyn-esque promise to freeze fares, but the number of people using that transport has fallen too.

It can’t be emphasised enough how shocking this is. Londoners have been fed bullish forecasts about demand for trains, the tube and buses for years, and the Mayor’s office only recently set out in great detail its dream of a city essentially free of cars, part of a country-wide obsession with planning away individualised mobility in favour of collectivised transport.

The alternative – that public transport usage has peaked – would shake his ideology to the core. This extends beyond the capital. Regional rail operators are in trouble as the number of passengers is not rising as expected after decades of growth. Bus use is falling in large parts of the country. Professor Tony Travers points out that passenger numbers in New York and Paris are flatlining, at best, too. Khan will be hoping the drop is temporary.

What is going on? A variety of explanations are offered, from the quality and cost of public transport itself, to changing behaviour (a rise in home-working, or an increase in the use of taxi apps like Uber). A hidden recession in the UK, not picked up by the official statistics, seems unlikely and the population is still growing.

But if falling usage persists, admittedly a big if, a zeitgeist will be dead – and well before we once thought, with the exciting future of autonomous electric vehicles still many years away. The implications are enormous. With HS2 already indefensible, its cancellation will become even more urgent. Countless smaller projects will have to be re-examined for whether they remain cost-effective in a very different transport environment.

Schemes to get everyone on public transport are often promoted on the basis of “efficiency”, but that argument only avoids being sinister if officials can claim that their policies are enabling people to more easily do what they already want to. If they persist in making it impossible to use cars as, all the while, public transport usage declines for reasons other than cost, it becomes harder to deny that they’re creating inconvenience for ideological ends.

The risk is of a Leftist backlash. Even if public transport usage is falling because of secular trends – more working at home, more online shopping, businesses moving outside our great cities, cheaper taxis – expect calls for subsidies to be increased to boost demand artificially. Germany is considering introducing entirely free – taxpayer-funded – buses and trains, an idea Labour might find attractive. But this would be to throw good money after bad. Far better to take this as a lesson in the dangers of hubristic central planning, and a reminder that officials are rarely as far-sighted as they think they are.