Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

I think that what isn't happening yet is a return of commuting traffic, but leisure traffic is returning. Every restaurants in Chinatown has a queue to get in - I've never seen this before, even at Chinese New Year. The DLR, Central and Piccadilly line were all busy on my way here too, although there were seats available.

It will help you burn off those calories

I'm sure it being the last* day of eat out to help out has made a difference - we only went to Chinatown as all the restaurants around us we tried were fully booked for this evening.

*The last day of the central government scheme, there are a variety of local schemes and deals being offered by individual establishments/chains/areas in September.

Just a nudge on what was said above, some stats from the Eat Out to Help Out scheme shows unsurprisingly that price interventions work.

Hyde Park Winter Wonderland cancelled today (not altogether surprising), so that should help the Central and Piccadilly lines in particular. I note that Winterville and South Bank have yet to make a decision. Winterville is certainly possible to go ahead, as they've always been ticket only, but it doesn't have a location as far as I know due to the issues with Clapham Common which were prevalent before covid-19. South Bank I believe has never been ticketed, so may have more problems. 

I'm possibly starting a phased return to London from October, but that's yet to be confirmed. Hopefully it's still reasonably easy by then.

I was there last week, I walked from Liverpool Street station as I also wanted to visit Leadenhall Market. Much of Liverpool Street Underground station is closed, only one set of escalators to / from the Central line are in use, these being the ones which offer direct interchange with the subsurface trains.

Bank junction area was only really alive because of passing buses and workmen making a hefty racket installing a bike lane that has caused Threadneedle Street to be closed in one direction - shoving many bus routes along other roads in the process.

The Euston Road is always busy, after all its part of a designated ring route around the centre of central London. The new bike lanes have made a difficult situation even worse. Despite being advertised as temporary I saw bus stops being moved in ways that suggests that the plan is really about trying to deter traffic from using this route. Great, I say - but beware what you ask for as one of the side effects of this virus pandemic is that London is risking becoming a doughnut (or Polo Mint) city where people live and work around the outside and the middle dies. Maybe tourists will return and keep some areas alive but apart from that...

re: the Dettol hand gel dispensers, I saw them in the ticket hall at Embankment yesterday (Weds 2nd Sept 20).  

Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey says the Waterloo & City Line should reopen but to me that seems like putting the cart before the horse. I don't believe that people are going to return to their offices just because they can get from Waterloo to Bank on one train instead of needing to change at London Bridge or Tottenham Court Road.

In 2006 The Waterloo & City Line was closed for nearly six months, it didn't stop people commuting into the City.

In the USA, there are specially-designed buses for schoolchildren, on which no-one else travels...

Over the last 25 years I have occasionally worked in I.T., and have wondered with colleagues why at great expense of time and money we transport people from places such as Arundel and Wellingborough to London, so they can sit at a computer and send e-mails to their co-workers in the next room. The lockdown and Government advice not to use public transport, has finally shewn that it is possible for the (home) office to be in a house in Arundel or Wellingborough. The system has been tested over the last few months and for many businesses the new system is working fine.

I have friends that commute into London, and what they tell me is very bad news for public transportation. Some offices do not plan to open until after Christmas, in many cases setting up the unsocial distancing and modifying the offices is too much hassle especially as the advice is changing with the wind direction.

While offices will be reopening over the next few months in some cases home working and flexible working will be the norm, with the option of attending meetings in person. A number of employers are looking at the costs of running large office blocks in London, and have found out that their employees are happy working from home and many are glad not to spend several hours on overcrowded trains that are regularly late or cancelled. With all the talk of the so called new normal, why would anyone want to go back to the rush hour unless it was really necessary?

The only reason we have public transportation is to transport as many people as possible as quickly and efficiently as possible from A to B. London has seen some improvement in its transportation system but it is still too slow, and far too expensive. It will need to do much better if it wants to attract office workers out of the home office, and back into the City or West End.

The biggest problem to working from home, espcialy in large organisations, is that it makes it much harder for new hires to get themselves known by anyone outside their initial team, so it makes it much harder to move your career on. A couple of graduate recruiters I know with new cohorts starting soon are very worried about this - usually they'd spend three months in different divisions of the business getting to know processes and people and things like that which become very different when it's not just moving to another floor on the office. Not to mention random meetings at the watercooler/post work pint etc where you make connections and network.

Add to that for some they may have a nice house in the shires with a study and all they need to work at home but not all do - again especially the younger workers. And the potential issues around social mobility - if you move from a job you can't do from home to one in management and suddenly you're expected to no longer need a space in the office that can be problematic or even alienating.

I think it will take a little while and have some lag - partly due to a bit of a race to be seen to make claims like google etc "working from home until Easter" - but offices will return with a bit more flexibility, so you won't be taking a day off when there's a childcare problem or you need someone round to fix the boiler. However it will probably take until 2022 with all the impact that has on fare revenues in the meantime. I also don't expect international tourism to fully bounce back until then, if not longer.

There are a few news outlets today running with the story of government developing a so called "First Ride Free" scheme to encourage greater use of the public transport network and hit home the fact that it is safe. This emulates to a lesser degree the approach taken by some governments on the continent who have issued free carnets to their citizens to help nudge them back onto sustainable transport.

Thoughts?

So once again it’s freebies for one particular subset of people. If it’s safe then there shouldn’t need to be free rides and the like.

In any case the problem isn’t really leisure use, quite a bit of which has returned, but commuter use. Free rides aren’t going to encourage this to return when it’s primarily being driven by factors like home working.

It doesn’t help that we just don’t seem to have a government which has any kind of medium-term strategy for where we go from here. The eat out scheme was about as tacky as it gets. A “let’s all get safely back to the office” scheme would be more beneficial IMO.

There’s only so much loading up of trains with leisure passengers which is viable, especially now the school holidays are over and more and more people are (supposedly) returned to work.

Normality is what we need.

And some fell on stone ground...