Bus service decline is making life harder for poorer Londoners

Addressing shrinking demand for a public transport mode that is vital for the capital must be a top priority for TfL

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Table 2 on Page 9 of this document tells the tale pretty well. Forming part of the latest Travel in London Report, it shows that journey stages by London bus in 2024 were 39 per cent higher than they had been at the start of the century, yet 23 per cent lower than at their peak in 2014. Back then, an average of 6.7 million bus journeys were taken every day. Ten years on, the figure had fallen to 5.1 million, despite London’s population having grown by roughly half a million during that time.

London buses still carry a lot more passengers than either the London Underground or the London Overground and National Rail trains, and not massively fewer than the 6.7 million of the whole lot combined. It is also the public transport mode used most by Londoners on low incomes – nearly 70 percent of London households with incomes of less than £20,000 a year use a bus at least once a week compared with around per cent of all Londoners.

Yet just before Christmas, Transport for London Commissioner Andy Lord told the London Assembly’s budget and performance committee that unless ridership picks up, services will have to be cut. For a city where some of the highest poverty rates in the country can be found, but which prides itself on being a place of opportunity for all, that is a grave state of affairs.

At the heart of the problem lies the slowing-down of buses. The average speed at which they travel is reaching new lows, making them less attractive and more risky in terms of managing your time: I’ve found myself as never before debating if I might cover ground more quickly on foot when considering how to get around the capital.

A Bus Action Plan published in March 2022 noted that journey times had been increasing for several years, pointing to reduced demand for shopping and leisure trips, and new travel options such as improved and enlarged rail services and the growth of ride-hailing apps. These developments had “changed the role of the bus”, transforming it in some places from a “main mode” to a “feeder service”.

Even so, bus travel was described as having “a key role to play” in achieving a “mode shift” towards environmentally sustainable street movement options, along with cycling and walking. The plan said that bus services could be improved quickly by 2030,” and stressed their particular importance in outer London areas. The eleven Superloop express routes innovation has been a recognition of that.

All of this was to intended to contribute to avoiding a “car-led recovery” from the pandemic and to moving towards the Mayor’s target of 80 per cent of trips in London being made by the sustainable modes by 2041. But the new Travel in London Report estimates that target is slightly further away than it was in pre-Covid 2019 (page five) and that the number of daily car trips has fallen hardly at all (page nine).

A bus priority programme has been pursed under the action plan. In October, responding to a Freedom of Information request, TfL said that nearly 23 kilometres of new bus lanes had being installed since April 2021. It also acknowledged, though, that some bus lanes have been “permanently shortened” in order to provide other “safe and healthy streets benefits”. These were not specified, but presumably were cycle lanes.

In its FoI reply, TfL was unable to provide a figure for the amount of bus lane lost over the period concerned. There are getting on for 300 kilometres of bus lane in London in all. Whatever the size of any net increase – by definition, less than 23 kilometres – it will have made relatively little difference to the overall total. Meanwhile, TfL says its cycleway network stretches to over 431 kilometres and has almost quintupled since Sadiq Khan was first elected Mayor in 2016.

Comparing and contrasting bus and bike lane provision and respective demand for those travel modes gives pause for thought. Although TfL has chosen to hail a 43 per cent increase in cycle journeys compared with pre-pandemic 2019, the Travel in London Report puts that into perspective.

A daily average of 1.3 million journey stages were taken by bicycle in 2024 compared with one million in 2019 (page nine). For buses, the respective figures were 5.1 million and 6.1. Even though bus demand has fallen sharply, many more Londoners travel by bus than by bike.

Another part of the report, the Travel Demand Survey of 8,000 Londoners (which therefore excludes non-Londoners’ travel choices) shows bus use holding steady at nearly four times the level of cycling, whose popularity hadn’t changed since 2019 (page 14). Meanwhile, a section of the Travel in London Report devoted wholly to “active travel” confirms that the better paid you are, the more likely you are to ride a bicycle in London (page 16).

Encouraging cycling is a good transport policy principle, and the reasons for the drop in demand for buses will be various. But as things stand, considerable sums of public money are being spent on the transport lifestyle preference of a very small and affluent minority to not very much effect, while that of a much larger and poorer group is declining significantly, making their lives harder.

There is serious and sensible debate to be had about street transport options, resources and managmenet of road space. It could start by asking if the Mayor and TfL have got their priorities right.