01Introduction
Why increasing public transport use matters
Much of the recent debate around public transport use has been framed in terms of finding ways to return passenger numbers to pre-Covid levels. While this may be a helpful short-term staging point it should not be seen as the destination. Prior to the pandemic public transport use in most parts of the UK had been declining for decades with transport use in large cities well below international comparators. Rather than attempting to return to what, compared to many large cities outside the UK, was already a low level, it would make more sense to draw on successful practice from around the world to enable us to be more ambitious with a vision for greater public transport take-up.
Transport is crucial from an economic perspective because it connects people to jobs and increases the pool of potential workers from which companies can hire from. Access to education is also essential for any modern economy and here too transport provides the vital connections to schools, apprenticeships and further training opportunities. From a social perspective transport links us all to family, friends, services and other amenities.
Private transport has an important role to play in meeting these needs but it has three big problems. The first is the space occupied by roads and car parks. When taken together parking spaces in London amount to fourteen square kilometres – an area ten times the size of Hyde Park.1 Parked cars need at least three times more space than public transport and ten times more space than bicycles. When traffic is on the move even more space is required to maintain safe distances between vehicles. At 30mph one car requires 28 times more space than a cyclist and 70 times more space than a pedestrian.2
Second, private transport has a detrimental impact on the environment in terms of carbon and nitrous oxide emissions. This creates air pollution which is not only unpleasant but kills thousands of people in the UK each year.3 Finally, private transport puts those at the poorer end of society at a disadvantage.4 Those less likely to own a car are also likely to have greater difficulty accessing jobs and education.
For these three reasons policy at both the local and national level should be encouraging modal shift from private to public transport. These efforts should focus on ridership in the UK’s largest cities outside London. Public transport is significantly easier to provide in dense urban areas because more people live close to stops and stations and there is greater competition for limited road space, which results in traffic congestion. These factors increase demand for public transport and make it a more viable proposition than is the case in areas with lower population densities. This is clearly seen in London – 46 per cent of people in the capital use public transport to commute to work and this rises to 80 per cent for those working in central London (with a further 10 per cent cycling or walking).5 But in other large cities in the UK the figures are much lower. Figure 1 shows that only 16 per cent of Birmingham and Manchester residents commute to work using public transport compared to 40 per cent in Hamburg and 33 per cent in Lyon. Out of the 25 European cities sampled, six of the bottom nine for public transport use are UK cities.
Figure 1: Large UK cities have lower shares of commuting by public transport than their European peers
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 963,000 workers would travel by public rather than private transport. This would double the number of workers using public transport to travel to and from work. If the UK’s smaller cities (with populations under 600,000) performed as their European counterparts do the gain would be less pronounced with an additional 340,000 workers using public transport respectively.6 These figures suggest that there are significant opportunities to increase public transport use in the UK’s biggest cities. The purpose of this research is to look at lessons from around the world regarding measures that have been taken to drive up public transport ridership that could be applied here. The research looks across seven policy areas and considers both ’carrot’ and ’stick’ approaches to improving ridership levels. These are then used to inform policy recommendations designed to encourage greater bus, tram and train usage in the UK.