Are we falling out of love with public transport? Bus travel has been in decline for decades, with the exception until recently, of London.
But even in London travel by bus is in decline and now we are also seeing a drop in travel by train and London Underground. For those who thought that year-on-year growth in train travel was inevitable, given the experience since privatisation, this is an alarming development. alt=”” src=”https://www.route-one.net/wp-content/uploads/traffic.jpg” style=”float:right” />
What’s the cause? I don’t think it’s a question of cost, or people becoming fed up with service unreliability, although these factors doubtless have an impact.
Bus operators have had to deal with the inexorable rise in car ownership as one key reason why patronage has declined almost every year since the 1950s.
But today there are surely wider issues in play. The most obvious is the growing trend for home working, with employers becoming more relaxed about staff working the odd day a week, sometimes more, from home.
Conference calling is now commonplace and often a preference over travelling to meetings. The explosion in online shopping means that the need to travel to the high street, whether by bus or car, is rapidly diminishing.
With the likes of Uber and others now experimenting with multiple passengers sharing a vehicle (shared rides) and therefore substantially reducing the fare per person, a taxi is now becoming a more comfortable and flexible alternative to the bus.
There is a quiet revolution taking place in how and why we travel. We don’t even need to go to the bank anymore, thanks to internet banking and a surge in the use of debit cards which now outstrip cash for the first time. Over 3m people now never use cash.
I reckon that if you are in work and have an enlightened employer who allows you to work at home as often as you like, you could probably stay indoors all day, every day.
Putting aside the obvious examples of visits to doctors, dentists and the like, the need to travel probably now has as much to do with a desire for social interaction than anything else.
Has public transport, as we know and understand it today, reached its peak?
If it has, then there are serious implications not just for bus, coach and rail operators, but for government transport policy too.
I have a hunch that while travel by public transport may, perhaps, have peaked, the technical and social revolution we are witnessing today has not.
A child born in 15 or 20 years’ time may look incredulously at its parents and say “you used to travel on a bus? What’s a bus?”
