Rail use falls for first time in 20 years.

Odd that the London commuter lines showed a decline.

Mode switch due to the Southern disruption? Or the works at London Bridge? Or the loss of Thameslink? Or is the expansion of TfL Rail counted in these figures, confounding the use of Oyster and the traditional Annual ticket?

It’s easy to answer

Rubbish service (would love to use more choicer words but the profanity filter would kick in)
Too expensive I do believe it’s the most expensive in Europe per mile on some routes

This topic has cropped up elsewhere and I've yet to see a clear response. I think several things are going on which makes it very difficult to know for certain what is going on.

I understand there has been a methodological change in how the stats are compiled e.g. what data sources are used. There are also all the issues others have set out above - industrial action on some TOCs, planned long term works affecting weekend and holiday travel, the timing of the Easter holidays (in different quarters last year and this). If we believe what users of GTR have said in the media then a proportion of them have stopped using trains altogether for their commute and others have changed jobs to remove the need to use trains. Those sorts of changes will appear in the longer term trend as having pulled down season ticket volumes permanently.

Being entirely speculative I think there is a softening in the London labour market and I think some people have moved away, left jobs and others have returned home to Europe in the light of wider political "issues" (ahem) currently being played out. All of TfL's numbers are below target and some modes are seeing negligible growth year on year. Clearly people can get their target setting wrong but I assume TfL have worked on the basis of expecting to see continued employment and population growth and a reasonable level of leisure related travel. There's not a huge slump in usage on TfL services but it isn't growing as per past trends either. Plenty in the media to suggest people are trimming back on discretionary expenditure which will dampen down shopping and leisure trips and that'll affect the main line as much as TfL.

You might want to rethink your wording. While it is indeed true that in some parts of London the ethnic makeup (and indeed their wealth / average incomes) of its inhabitants has changed, such trends have been going on for four decades now - which covers both roughly two decades of decline but then almost two decades of growth in passenger numbers (and numerous recessions). I would also observe that its not all one way traffic - indeed one of the complaints from certain 'trendy'* areas of the capital is how locals (some of which may mostly be made up of folk not falling into the 'white Caucasian' tick box) are being pushed out by the rise in property prices in said 'hotspots / trendy' places by said 'White Caucasian' persons

Also known as  'Gentrification' in some circles

Actually, for longer than that. Almost the precise reason my parents (principally my Mother) actually moved us out to Maidstone in 1963, although the price/mortgage issue was the 'party' line fed to me.

Luckily, the attitude did not pass on to me.

Is there much evidence of an increase in jobs in the counties and a corresponding decrease in London?

If people are getting priced out of the London housing market, but the jobs are still there, you would expect commuting numbers, or at least distances, to rise.

An example in the press only yesterday.

I would suspect that there are four things at play:

1) Disruptions
2) Methods of statistics gathering and subsequent analysis
3) Normal random fluctuations
4) Older people who started commuting when services were better stopping commuting, and not being replaced by younger workers who see the state of services and choose not to use rail.

We really need to see at least one more year's worth of data before we can even tentatively decide if this is part of a trend, or merely a singular anomaly.

Some of the analysis on this thread chimes with things I've noticed in my experiences.

I would add that many people from across the UK and abroad come to work in London temporarily and want to "feel" what the city is like, house/flat shares are very common in zones 1-3 where people would like to save or simply enjoy the convenience of living in inner-london. The internet has had a massive impact on this, sites such as spareroom have contributed to the rise of flat shares.

I myself grew up in inner London and am in a "blue collar" job on the railway, many people in the industry I've noticed have moved out to the home counties and have managed to find reasonably priced properties there. I myself would rather put up with flat sharing until I can fork out for a small flat in inner London and have a multitude of frequent transport options around the clock than have to do the long slog in on a mainline train. I don't know how people do it everyday.

Nothing to do with the economy

More people work from home
More people use cycles
Elderly people get free bus travel but not free train travel outside London

People buy fewer newspapers. That's nothing to do with the economy. It's to do with changing lifestyles.
My philosophy lecturer said "Change is constant - therefore a state of constancy represents a change, so it cannot therefore exist"

White flight in the UK is summarized on Wikipedia and is not just a UK thing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#United_Kingdom

I don't think there is any demonstrable evidence *yet* that people are being priced off the railway. If that were correct I'd have expected to have seen a trend emerge before now given policy for many many years has been to increase the farepayers' share of industry funding. The railway has had almost 10 straight years of growth largely off the back of the economy doing well and low interest rates allowing people to have more disposable income. More of the TOCs have introduced online ticket offers with a view to getting "bums on seats" off peak and that includes many of the traditional South East commuter TOCs. The key influences on rail travel demand are the state of the economy and employment levels (especially Central London employment). Since the 2008 recession both of these factors have had a positive trend. Even during that recession rail usage was relatively resilient and didn't drop as far as in previous recessions.

In respect of the latest numbers I think a lot of people, on both sides of the "privatised railway" debate, have tried to seize on them as either indicating a crisis or that we remain on the same path to the "sunny uplands" of ever increasing usage. The more honest position to take is that no one really knows yet what the *national* picture is. I dare say some analysts in some of the TOCs who will review daily, weekly, monthly numbers in fine detail for their companies have a view as to what is or is not happening on the parts of the rail system. However that will still be relatively uncertain because you need more data over a longer period covering known fluctuations in the data to be able to reach a reliable conclusion as to the trend. Furthermore it won't emerge into the public domain because of the risk of damage to share prices in the TOC owning groups.

My own hunch is that we may be seeing the start of a change in a number of economic variables for a whole load of reasons but we cannot reach any firm conclusions yet as to whether we will see continued modest growth, a plateauing of economic activity or a recession. There are obvious reasons why a lot of people are hedging their decisions in a number of areas and why that may be contributing to some slowing of economic activity.

2018 has the potential to be a very interesting year as several large rail projects come to fruition then with new services being introduced / long term disruption ending. New rolling stock for several companies also offer some prospect of new growth (assuming the new trains are reliable and attractive to passengers). Unravelling the effect of this alongside everything else will be fun!

To say it is not race, is hiding one's head in the sand. People are voting with their feet. The jobs are following them. London used to have the largest manufacturing base in the country. Now nearly all gone leaving only a service industry.

An area I know well is Paignton, South Devon, once home to a giant electronic firm employing 5000 people. They even built houses for their employees. It closed some 20 years ago leaving the NHS as the biggest employer. New smaller electronic firms are beginning to re-establish in the same area spurred on by the South Devon College which is just short of university status and Torbay's three grammar schools. Paignton has a number of primary schools one of which has 700 pupils; the biggest in all Devon and they do not receive the money schools in London receive.

One of the reasons there is so much house building going on (6000 houses over ten years). Torbay is included in the Devon Metro.

People living in London have no idea what is going on outside. Pensioners in particular with Freedom passes live in fantasy land compared to their counterparts outside London such as Epping or Thurrock. The Brexit vote, which was not on party lines, so should be alright to mention here, reflected this.