Not good at TfL

The double whammy of losing the Government grant and the fares freeze in this Mayoral term had to hit home at some point; not surprised.

It would be very interesting to know just why the number of journeys in London has fallen.

The answer might be complicated, and comprise a number of separate reasons, but it does seem odd.

potential reasons that I have seen mentioned
1) recession leading to greater unemployment ??

Employment higher than it has ever been, Unemployment at lows not seen for many years. Which two quarters has growth turned into decline or have you a new definition of recession.
Whatever the reasons I think you need to look further than item 1.

The long-running series of disruptions will not have helped.

Officially TfL don't know for certain why trip rates have fallen. By that they mean they have not establised a clear causal relationship in the many data sets they look at. This is from the Travel in London reports. The new one is now out but there was a short summary in recent board papers.

content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-report-11.pdf

My mad musings cover some of what others have said.

- less discretionary income,
- change in employment nature / location (home working / flexible work locations),
- online shopping / home delivery,
- modal transfer,
- families moving out of London,
- changes to shopping habits - more localised, more frequent trips but smaller shopping bought each time. Can be done by walking.
- pub / restaurant closures / take away food delivered to homes.

Also declining public transport performance - esp buses. Some of that loss on the buses will have gone to the tube but some has gone to cycling, walking, uber or private cars. My use of local buses is vastly lower than it used to be - partly because some trips are dreadfully slow and services are unreliable. Other people will have deserted the rail network because of strikes and ongoing disruption.

It seems from the very latest patronage numbers that the tube is holding up OK with peaks still busy. Buses are not doing well and the latest business plan forecasts continued decline in usage levels. TfL have, though, abandoned last year's plan for another 20m kms of cuts to services. There will still be some more cutbacks but nowhere near as bad as projected. Looks to me as if political pressure from City Hall has forced that change. Overground, Tram and DLR are bumping along broadly where they were last year - that's a reversal of past growth trends but at least patronage is not falling. TfL Rail is higher than last year - that's driven partly by fewer closures on the Shenfield route plus the addition of the line to Paddington in the numbers.

I am very surprised they have not done this. There is obvious scope to trim some tube services to save money and, as you say, ease pressure on some fleets. I suspect they're a bit terrified that a cut would lead to less revenue. There are no plans that I can detect in the new business plan numbers for any cut to total LU kilometrage - there is no break down by line. However when compared to last year's plan there is a reduction in future levels so if there were plans to expand Tube kilometrage these have been pulled back somewhat. For example in 2022-23 the new total kilometrage is 4m kms lower than the old one.

Last formal recession 2009. but "However, the 2010s saw four separate periods of Quarter on Quarter fall in growth: 2010 Q4 (-0.4); 2011 Q4 (-0.1); 2012 Q2 (-0.5); and 2012 Q4 (-0.2).[20] Effects of this recession have been lasting into the early-mid 2010s. "
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_Kingdom

Employment numbers is another shibboleth - the ONS definition of employed is "The number of people in employment in the UK is measured by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and consists of people aged 16 and over who did one hour or more of paid work per week (as an employee or self-employed), those who had a job that they were temporarily away from, those on government-supported training and employment programmes, and those doing unpaid family work. Employment levels and rates are published each month in the labour market statistical bulletin"
www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/methodologies/aguidetolabourmarketstatistics

Wage growth is also massively affected by a decade of non-growth and inflation
www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45875599
"The fact that 3.1% is the biggest pay rise since February 2009 says more about how weak pay growth has been in the last decade than how strong it has been in the past year. Strip out the effect of inflation (as measured by the Consumer Prices Index) and you get pay growth of just 0.6%.
Then look back at the last decade, the worst decade for living standards in 200 years. If you're a half-full person, well we're up by about £25 per week on average since the squeeze on living standards was at its tightest back in 2014.
But if you're half-empty, we're still earning about £20 a week less than we did 10 years ago when the global financial crisis struck."

It may not be a formal recession, but wages and growth (and possibly most importantly wage security) have taken an absolute battering when looked at in terms of the money in the pocket of the person who will take public transport.
Now look at rental rises
link

I think the flip-side of that is greater transparency as to what things cost - the other end of the scale to some of eg the (UK) Southern Railway's creative accounting to pay for electrification. We now know much more what things cost because someone is sending a bill for them.

If you think of all the projects that have overrun in the past, how much of the cost of eg prelims (ie site costs) were just absorbed by departmental budgets/governments (a lot of big UK infrastructure projects in the thirties were funded by government loans/grants for unemployment relief). And don't forget how many projects just plain went bust.

Crossrail is also super-expensive because it's all last man in tunnelling. When the early tubes went in, there was very little for them to hit. I'd be interested to compare the cost/mile for Crossrail vs cost/mile of the last two miles of whatever was the last project to go into Bank

A couple of reasons for loss of patronage, maybe the amount of tube closures.

Journeys on rail replacement buses are not counted as there's no requirement for passengers to tap in on the buses. TfL seem to be providing them to the travelling public for free and spend an awful lot on supervising such services.

The vast number of people on zero hours contracts. As the survey above says, anyone id deemed to be in employment if they work one hour a week. Anyone working one hour a week is unlikely to use a bus or tube for that amount of time. My zero-hours contract means I only work weekends and at times where public transport is not available, so I could never use it anyway.

What is the cost of free travel for the yoof of London and pensioners and anyone else who qualifies for free travel? Who pays TfL for that?

Free travel doesn't actually cost anything as the buses and trains would be running anyway. You could argue that charging pensioners and the rest could create extra revenue but its likely that people would make fewer journeys if their free travel was withdrawn.

Its like the erroneous argument that free travel for staff and dependents costs TfL the equivalent of a Zone 1-6 Annual Travelcard, I use my Staff Pass mostly to travel within Zones 3, 4 and 5 but most working days I only use it on two single bus journeys to work and back again.

In London the fares revenue from buses, Tubes, and other TfL services goes to TfL not the operators, the only area I imagine where free travel could possibly deprive operators of fares revenue would be on National Rail services within Zone 6 during the morning and evening peaks.

"the use of free passes may result in otherwise paid for journeys being provided free of charge".

Precisely, it is potential revenue that could be generated by charging a fare rather than an actual cost to the provider but that assumes that the journey would be made if free travel were not available. There is always the possibility that people with free travel would make less journeys by public transport if the free travel were withdrawn rather than paying a fare. The result would be another empty seat on an off peak service.

I wonder if there are any figures for use of Freedom Passes during the peaks. It used to be different in my days on the ticket barriers, Pensioner Freedom Passes couldn't get in until 09:30 although at Stratford it was 09:25 to allow the "Twerlies" time to get up to Platform 8 to catch the 09:31 to Shenfield (or something like that).