All change for the future of urban transport

When London Underground workers went on strike last week, large parts of the UK capital’s transport network came to a halt.

Yet millions of commuters were able to simply skip the disruption and switch to working from home, underlining the rapid changes in use of public transport in cities around the world.

As a result, policymakers face a paradox as they plan for the future. The pandemic has accelerated a shift to remote working, starved train and bus operators of revenue, and undercut the central reason for the design of many transport systems: taking millions of people to and from their offices.

However, at the same time, public transport is a critical tool in reducing urban congestion, carbon emissions, and air pollution — by cutting the number of cars on the road.

Grant Klein, partner and public sector transport leader at professional services firm PwC, says it is too early to tell how many people will return to commuting following the pandemic.

“Much will depend on how people will settle into new work and travel patterns in the long term, partly because some changes will happen in a longer wavelength, such as changing jobs or moving house,” Klein says.

Ultimately, the future of mass public transport networks will be inextricably linked to the future of the city.

According to a 2018 United Nations report, the number of people living in the world’s urban areas is forecast to grow by 2.5bn by 2050 — to two out of every three people on the planet.

With rising numbers of people living in and near urban areas, they will still need the infrastructure to move around, even if it is used less to commute to and from the office.

They will encounter the traditional rail, bus and tram networks, some parts of which, today, are new or being built. Crossrail, the London railway that opened in May, has stations designed to last a century — although these may be retooled to carry fewer peak hour commuters and more leisure passengers as remote working takes hold.

If policymakers in some of the world’s leading cities have their way, there will also be significantly fewer private cars in urban areas, reversing more than a century of planning which has shaped our cities by prioritising the motor vehicle.

In Paris, authorities aim to ban private cars from its historic centre by 2024. Barcelona is planning large car-free “superblocks” around the city. And, in London, the mayor is consulting on expanding a ban on particularly polluting vehicles.

“At the end, it is a fight for space in cities . . . do you want to have 75 cars or one bus or do you want to have 500 cars or one commuter train?” says Christian Schreyer, chief executive of UK-listed bus and train operator Go-Ahead.

“For me, the car is not an enemy, but you need to smartly combine public transport with car usage and, in downtown cities, you don’t need cars, you have bicycles, you have good public transport,” he explains.

Many cities are encouraging people to walk and cycle more — so-called “active travel”. London’s transport authority has set a target of 80 per cent of journeys being taken on public transport, or on foot or bicycle by 2041.

Several studies — including one by University College London, for Transport for London, the local government body responsible for most of the capital’s travel network — have found that ­redesigning car-clogged streets to better accommodate cyclists and walkers brings economic benefits, such as an increase in office rental values.

To service this shift away from cars, some experts believe public transport needs to harness new technology to provide passengers with better information, journey planning and ticketing, allowing them to seamlessly skip between different forms of transport.

Andy Bland, head of sales for Southeast England and London at Enterprise Holdings, a car rental company, says there needs to be “integrated thinking about the future of mobility in our towns and cities”.

“People will need to have convenient, reliable and affordable forms of transport, particularly as an alternative to private car ownership,” he argues.

In the past 10 years, a number of transport technology companies have emerged, driven by advances in data science and new ways of travelling. These transport-on-demand companies combine public and private options into single journeys, such as suggesting a user takes an Uber to the nearest station and gets a train, before riding an e-scooter to complete the journey.

Youssef Salem — chief financial officer of Swvl, a Dubai-based multinational booking platform founded in 2017 that offers tech-enabled ride sharing services — maintains that technology companies will not cannibalise public transport’s passengers and revenues. Rather, he argues, they can be “complementary”, and even drive more people into mass transit.

“There is always going to be a large-scale core infrastructure network that the government backs, and we can support that . . . the private sector is best suited to provide a more agile, demand responsive network to support [public transport],” he says.