Covid-19 had a huge impact on the operation of public transport networks in the UK, and much focus has been on whether ridership will return to pre-Covid levels. But this misses a much broader point that public ridership in large UK cities in particular was way below comparable cities in mainland Europe.
This matters because public transport is important for connecting people to jobs, especially in highly concentrated areas such as city centres, alleviating the environmental impacts of transport, and ensuring those who don’t have cars, largely poorer parts of society, are well connected.
Given this, policy should be looking to double the share of people using public transport to get to work in places like Manchester and Birmingham. Before the pandemic, just 16 per cent of people used bus, tram or train to get to work in Manchester, 22 per cent in Newcastle and 18 per cent in Birmingham. This compared to 33 per cent in Lyon and 44 per cent in Munich. If the UK’s 10 largest cities (each with a population of over 600,000) were to match their European counterparts in terms of the share of commutes by public transport, an additional 936,000 workers would travel by public rather than private transport.
Figure 1: Large UK cities have lower shares of commuting by public transport than European peers
To provide guidance and inspiration as to how to close this gap, this report examines the approaches taken by cities around the world which have successfully, and often significantly, increased public transport use. It draws on a range of city transport case studies from the UK and abroad including France, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Finland, Singapore, Canada, Japan and Australia.
Regardless of the specific measures chosen, increasing public transport use in cities requires policies to make public transport a more attractive and convenient option than other modes, particularly the car. The report looks at seven policy areas that, in combination, have helped achieve this in cities around the world. These areas are:
1. Increasing the density of property development to put more people within reach of transit networks while improving the viability of new and existing systems, as has been the case in Lille.
2. Integrating existing public transport networks to ensure a seamless travel experience, as has been done in Queensland, Australia for example.
3. Providing reliable and frequent services to give greater certainty over travel times, as has been done in Singapore.
4. Implementing priority measures, such as enforced bus lanes, that can help make public transport attractive as part of a long-term traffic management policy, as has been done in Edinburgh.
5. Offering clearer ticket pricing to give greater clarity over how much a journey will cost, as has been done in Portugal.
6. Adopting road pricing to make public transport financially more attractive than commuting by car, as has been done in Singapore.
7. Imposing restrictions on car ownership and parking to make public transport more convenient and less expensive than using and maintaining a car, as has been done in Barcelona and Japan.
Figure 2: Factors determining the attractiveness of public transport
London, the only UK city with public transport usage comparable to the continent, has adopted over time a package of policies across these seven areas that both show how these approaches are relevant for other UK cities. Its density of development; the institutional arrangements it has in place through the existence of Transport for London (TfL); the control it has over the bus network as well as roads, trams and trains; and its ability to raise revenue through things like the Congestion Charge allow it to make the most of the transport network it has in place.
Local and national policy should extend this package of policies to other large cities in the UK too. It should give other transport bodies the powers TfL has, it should link transport with housing development to increase densities around stations, it should bring in bus franchising where existing commercial partnerships aren’t working and should use revenue raising tools like congestion charging or workplace parking levies.
There are politics to be managed within this, as the recent furore around the expansion of London’s ULEZ scheme shows. For contentious decisions like charging drivers, politicians will need to carefully communicate how and when schemes are introduced. They should exercise the same caution though over politically popular schemes too, such as discounted ticketing, if these schemes aren’t accompanied with investment to improve the running of the network. Subsidising a system without improving its performance isn’t likely to bring about long-term change.
Figure 3: International lessons from case studies
