London Dashboard

The GLA have launched a ‘dashboard‘ of data covering a range of topics, to be updated at regular and frequent intervals. It includes a number of items on transport such as journeys by public transport and by cycle hire. The cycle hire data is broken down not just by month but by day so you can observe patterns over short and long timescales. When the cycle hire scheme was launched it was expected to generate about 40,000 trips a day (see paragraph 447 in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy here) but as of the latest data (to the 8th of July) this level had only been reached five times. TfL have since said that there were record numbers of hires during the Olympics period so it will be interesting to see what the next update shows.

Filed under: Cycling, Data, GLA, Historic, London, Modal share, TfL, Traffic

Bus passenger journey trends

The Department for Transport last week released new statistics covering trends in bus passenger journeys around the country. DfT’s chart sums up the trends:

Bus use in London rose increased rapidly between 2004 and 2008, levelled off during the recession and is now on the up again. In other English cities (the brown line) bus use has been more or less static since 2004 and showed more of a drop during the recession, consistent with other economic indicators.

Filed under: Bus, Data, DfT, England, Historic, London, Modal share

Long-run trend in commuting into central London

The first statistics on commuting into central London were collected in the 1850s (of which more later), but the first figures comparable to the present date from around a century later. The chart below shows the trend since 1956 in the number of people (in thousands) measured as entering central during the weekday morning peak, broken down by whether they used rail (national rail, London Underground or TfL), bus or private transport (car, coach, taxi, cycle and motorcycle). NB, walking isn’t included.

The number of morning commuters peaked at about 1.25 million in 1962 and then fell through most of the next twenty years. The pattern over the last thirty years is dominated by peaks and troughs linked to London’s economic performance, with notable booms and busts in the late 1980s, early 2000s and in 2007-08.

Rail is the dominant mode throughout this period, even more so in recent years, reaching 79% of the total in 2010. In fact the more interesting changes happened on the road and only really show up when you leave rail out. Detailed data on road traffic only starts in 1969 but the chart below interpolates back to estimates from 1961 to show the broad modal split of road commuting over a nearly 50-year span. It shows buses and cars twice swapping places as the dominant mode of transport for commuters, with bus ridership sliding throughout the 60s and 70s before shooting up again in the early 2000s. Interestingly, this latter shift seems to have started before the introduction of the congestion charge: the number of car commuters into central London fell by nearly a quarter between 2000 and 2002, before the C-charge was introduced in 2003.

The most notable trends in the last decade have been the continuing fall in the car share of commuting, and the rise in cycling. The chart below shows cycling’s share of road commuting into central London since 1969. In the early 1970s cycling accounted for just 1% of road commuting (and therefore a much smaller share of total commuting), but by 2010 this had risen to 12%. Given the combined motorcycle/cycle figure in 1961 was 13%, it seems fairly plausible that cycling now accounts for a higher share of central London commuters than at any point in the past. Also, if current trends continue (a big if) it won’t be long before more people are coming into central London on two-wheelers than in cars.

I mentioned at the start that these kind of statistics were first collected in the 1850s. This refers to a survey by Charles Pearson, who hired ‘traffic-takers’ to stand ‘at all the principal entrances to the city of London, to take their station from eight o’clock in the morning till eight o’clock at night’ and count the number of persons and vehicles leaving or entering the City over the twelve-hour period. The City was a much larger part of ‘London’ in the 1850s than it is now, and Pearson measured somewhat different flows and used a different methodology, but his results, shown in the table below, are still fascinating.

Estimated number of persons and vehicles going into and out of the City daily in 1854, counting them all both ways.

Omnibus	88,000
Other vehicles	52,000
River steamers	30,000
Via Fenchurch St and London Bridge rail	54,000
Foot passengers	400,000

Railways were still in their infancy and there was no Tube yet, but the most striking result here is how many people walked into Central London. That’s not so surprising, as London was much smaller and denser than it is today so most people would have been within an hour’s walk of the City. It’s frustrating that we don’t have comparable figures on walking today (at least, not that we could easily find) but as the city is so much more spread out you would expect walking’s share to be much lower, though still significant.

Filed under: Data, Historic, London, Modal share, TfL, Traffic

Travel in London Report 4 out

We’re a little late on this due to the holidays, but TfL published the 4th edition of their excellent Travel in London report just after Christmas. You can find the PDF here and hopefully it will be joined by some data tables soon as in previous editions.

Filed under: 2011, Cycling, London, Modal share, Noise, Report, Safety, TfL, Traffic

Measuring trends in cycling

How do you measure cycling in London, and its growth over time? The answers to these questions aren’t just interesting in themselves – they’re also important for measuring whether cycling is getting more or less safe. Unfortunately there’s no perfect way to measure the number of people cycling or the distance they cover, but there are a few decent attempts, which this post will describe.

One measure we hear mentioned a lot is Transport for London’s count of the number of cyclists on its network of main roads, the TLRN. The chart below, from a previous post, shows the quarterly trend since 2000. On an annualised basis this shows an increase of about 150% over ten years.

The good thing about this data is that it’s available quarterly and TfL keep it pretty up to date. The drawback is that it only covers a small subset of London’s roads. The map below shows all the TLRN count sites TfL use to measure this flow.

The Department for Transport do their own counts of road traffic in London and elsewhere, in order to construct estimates of the distance travelled by each mode in each region in a given year. They survey a huge number of roads, but only once a year for main road sites (of which there are nearly two thousand in London) and less than annually for minor roads. Here’s what the trend in DfT’s count of cyclists on major roads looks like in London. According to these figures cycling on major roads in London increased by ‘only’ 78% between 2000 and 2009, much less than the TLRN count would indicate.

As mentioned above, DfT use these figures to calculate the distance travelled by each mode. The resulting trend for cycling in London is shown below. This trend is even flatter, showing an increase of only 38% between 2000 and 2010. The reason seems to be that most of the growth in cycling flows has been seen in areas where the count sites are more closely packed together so each extra cyclist counted translates into only a small increase in distance travelled (see DfT’s note on how traffic counts are turned into distance travelled).

Lastly, we go back to TfL, who in their third Travel in London report recognise the issues with the simple TLRN count and come up with a new way to estimate the number of cycling ‘journey stages’ in London on a typical day. Using data from their TLRN counts, the DfT counts and from their London Travel Demand Survey they estimate that cycling journey stages increased by 61 per cent between 2001 and 2009 (see p. 56 here).

So what you’re left with is a range of different ways of counting how much cycling there is in London, each of which produces a very different figure for the amount of growth in the last decade or so, from 38% to about 150%. Which one you use has important consequences, most notably for deciding whether the accident rate (per trip or per km) is rising or falling in London. This report from TfL says:

Comparing 2010 with 2009, total pedal cycle casualties rose by nine per cent (from 3,669 to 4,007), while the number of cycle journeys increased at a faster rate, by 15 per cent, indicating that cycling is becoming relatively safer.

But that 15% figure refers to the TLRN count, so comparing it to the London-wide casualty total is not comparing like with like. Every other measure, including TfL’s own measure of journey stages, shows slower growth. DfT calculate their own statistics on casualties per 100 million kilometres, and they show an increasing cycle casualty rate in recent years – see this recent post at Cyclists in the City for the trend, and for the raw data go here for 2010 and for previous years table 2.5a in each edition here.

In summary then, measuring how cycling has grown over time is very important, but it’s also very difficult. It’s vital to keep in mind how the different measures are constructed and what they mean if the right conclusions are to be drawn.

Filed under: Cycling, Data, DfT, Historic, London, Modal share, TfL

Cars/vans per household by region

London is the only region where the average number of cars or vans per household has fallen (even if only slightly) since the mid 1990s.

(Click for a larger/better image)

This chart is based on data from the National Travel Survey (table NTS9902). Note that this seems to be a ‘London’ rather than an ‘urban’ effect: the trend is also upwards in ‘Metropolitan built-up areas’ and other urban areas outside London.

Filed under: DfT, Historic, Modal share, Regions

Modal share by borough (trips)

A three-year average of modal share for trips in each borough can be found in the Travel in London Report.

Currently, the data is available for the following periods:

– 2007 – 2010 p277

– 2006 – 2009 p72

– 2005 – 2008 p66

This is what it looks like for the 2007-2010 period.

We have created a .csv of the 2007-10 data which you can download here.

Note: this data will almost certainly differ from borough counts and and TfL’s screenline counts, for two reasons.

1. Unlike on-street traffic counts, the data in the Travel in London Report is based on the London Travel Demand Survey (LTDS), a survey of 8000 households about their transport choices.

2. This is a measure of trips rather than journey stages. Their definition (Travel in London Report 3, Page 5):

A Trip is a complete door-to-door movement by an individual to achieve a specific purpose (eg to go from home to work).

A Journey Stage is a part of a trip made on a specific mode of transport, eg a trip of 3 stages comprising a walk stage from home to a bus stop, a bus stage to central London, and a further walk stage to a place of work.

If a person cycles to a local station and then takes a train for the majority of the journey, this would be counted as a train trip for the purpose of the above data, and would not contribute to the cycling modal share.

Filed under: Boroughs, London, Modal share, TfL