The recent publication of the results of Sadiq Khan’s discounted Friday fares experiment brought the Mayor some predictable stick: the 13-week trial last spring was branded a “flop” by the Standard and a “damp squib” by London Assembly Conservative group deputy leader Emma Best. An easy headline and the usual political knockabout perhaps, but it was an unfair attack.
Firstly, the “off-peak Fridays” period achieved exactly what it was set up to do, “to gather information and data on whether off-peak fares lead to increased ridership on London rail services on Fridays”. And secondly, it opened up debate on some big issues for Transport for London and the capital as a whole. Are we now in the “new normal” for commuting, and what does that mean, not only for the way our transport system is organised and paid for, but for the city’s economy as a whole?
The context for the experiment, which scrapped peak fares on Fridays between 8 March and 31 May 31 last year, was the sluggish recovery in tube and rail ridership after the pandemic, particularly at the end of the working week.
This matters because TfL, with little revenue support from government, is heavily dependent on the money it raises from fares to maintain and improve its network. That means it needs those passengers back. But things on that front haven’t been looking good. TfL bosses had forecast a six per cent increase in journeys in 2024/25, but that isn’t happening. Now, the forecast is for a 1.8 per cent increase this year, rising to just 2.1 per cent in 2025/26.
“We are anticipating lower demand growth,” Commissioner Andy Lord told the London Assembly last week. “Passenger income is still a risk.” A lower-than-expected increase – tube trips 20 million below target and bus journeys almost 30 million below, according to TfL figures – is denting anticipated fare income and threatening TfL’s target of continuing to break even on operational spending.
That raises the spectre of managed decline, with inevitable dips in service quality further affecting passenger numbers and making significant upgrades and improvements harder to justify or finance. It’s a vicious circle and, to some extent, the pattern over the recent period already, leaving TfL operating the oldest trains in regular service in the country. Earlier this month, London School of Economics professor Tony Travers said at the London Assembly that in another world Bakerloo line trains “would be in a museum” rather than bravely trying to keep going in autumn and winter conditions without modern braking technology.
There are wider impacts too, for businesses and destinations reliant on footfall. Before the experiment started, the worker count on Fridays in central London was 36 per cent down on midweek figures and more than 50 per cent down in the eastern City business district, Paddington and Whitehall. Business groups wanted action, and in a City Hall survey cheaper fares to “incentivise travel on quieter days” was the most popular option.
Worth a try then, even though, as we now know, the result wasn’t positive. There was “no noticeable difference” in the number of peak time journeys compared to the pre-trial period, “suggesting that there are factors other than price that influence our customers when deciding which weekdays to travel”. There was no boost to shopping transactions either.
So, if it’s not the cost of travel, what is it? As Professor Travers told Assembly members, more research is needed to identify precisely what is keeping people off the trains, and what might entice them back, and TfL is promising more analysis.
For now, the mayor seems focused on getting those workers back into the office – Khan has talked about commuters clocking up points for free coffees, and has challenged TfL to come up with more ideas. City Hall may also be welcoming recent big business moves to roll back on permissive working-from-home policies, as well as the pleasanter-sounding commercial developers’ talk of “earning the commute”, providing high-spec and facility-rich office spaces to woo the workers.
But it’s not all about the pandemic and its aftermath. Bus ridership peaked in 2016/17, and tube ridership was going down too. Dress-down Friday was already becoming work from home Friday, bus speeds were declining year on year as congestion was rising, and by 2018 Londoners had experienced a decade of seeing their disposable income flatlining.
And things aren’t getting better: those “economic headwinds” holding passenger demand back, along with new working patterns, are creating “recurring pressures” and risks, TfL warns in its 2025/26 budget submission to City Hall. The network still faces uncertainty.
TfL eyes remain on the prize of a long-term capital funding settlement from Whitehall. It could be a triple win – money for upgrades making existing services faster, more comfortable and therefore more attractive, and for projects such as the currently shelved Docklands Light Rail and Bakerloo line extensions, which will boost growth, support new housing, and bring more passengers to the network. The expectation-beating Elizabeth line shows this works.
But these prospects notwithstanding, some are beginning to think the unthinkable – that the old “central business district” fed by a daily stream of commuters may be in relative and perhaps permanent decline, and that a parallel “polycentric” way of organising the capital’s economy may be here to stay.
The Centre for London think tank will shortly report its work on a “broad-based polycentric growth model”, for the city, and Professor Nick Tyler at University College London has suggested it’s time to “figure out how to make the transport system fit with the people rather than force the people to fit the transport system”. For Tyler, that would mean a system that “actually enables people to be in and move around” outer London rather simply travelling in and out of the city centre.
Khan has made a start with his Superloop bus networks. But more is needed to address what Kat Hanna of property consultancy Avison Young, speaking at a Centre for Cities session at the end of last year, called the “difficult question” of “who and what our city centres are for, and if a decline in the relative importance of physical agglomeration for certain economic activities can be met with an increase in the relative importance and, indeed, attractiveness of agglomeration for other purposes, like living and leisure”.
Perhaps it’s now time to put more homes in the city centre firmly on the agenda as Khan develops his new London Plan, the development blueprint for the capital over the next two decades, as former Royal Institute of British Architects president Ben Derbyshire argues.
In a recent piece he compares Canary Wharf’s shift towards more housing with the City’s focus on new office towers, a big bet on the continuing “patience” of the commuter: “If Canary Wharf can bring people back to live in a dense urban context, surely the Square Mile can too – potentially, the definitive fifteen-minute city”. We’ll know in March, when Khan publishes his high level ‘Towards a London Plan’ document, what direction the Mayor, and the city, will be taking.
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Getting GLA staff, Civil Servants and City Workers to come into work on Fridays would be more effective than free coffee.
The scale of the problem facing the GLA (and City) as a whole, not just TfL, needs to be recognised. A former walking (i.e. public transport or taxis to service copiers/printers in central London) engineer recently told me that the last call he made before being made redundant (along with the rest of the team) was on a Friday to an office in Finsbury with 300 desks. Before Covid it was full on Fridays, including with staff from out-of-London, because Friday night was party night. It was empty. Even most of the emergency lights were off because he was the first human in the office area that day! We can see the private sector “encouraging” staff back to work for at least three days a week but … Mondays and Fridays!
In our department it is mandatory to travel into the office in Victoria on Fridays, and the station platforms are heaving with people all leaving between 17:00-17:15 from all the offices in the area. Past two Fridays, I had to wait for two District line trains to come & go as they were that rammed!
TfL should lead by example; instead many of its staff seem to live far away, one making the excuse (for not attending a local meeting) that she lived in Brighton and asking if she could join remotely.