This morning's commute and other commuting stories

What is this urgent panic folks have these days just to move forwards whether by foot, bike or vehicle?

It's a surprisingly interesting question. My answer, which sounds very abstract when stated baldly without a proper lead-in is that injustice is increasing at an alarming pace. One concomitant of increasing injustice is an increasing unevenness of land values, meaning that economic opportunities become very concentrated in fewer areas--just look at the immense increase in value that nonsense like Crossrail (a measure first conceived during the heyday of Underground lines and acquiring political traction in the 1970s, when Central London badly needed an economic stimulus) is now putting on land in Central London. As London First put it in a recent report:

London has seen uneven development across the city: the challenges of inclusion are particularly concentrated in some parts of the city and economic growth has been notably slower in the outer London “doughnut” than in the central business district [...]

Page 42 here: http://londonfirst.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/London-First-Report_FINAL_e-version.pdf

UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT ACROSS THE CITY

The challenge of inclusion is not uniform across London. There are pockets where the
challenges are more intense – particularly in areas with high concentrations of relatively
low-skilled workers and high levels of social housing. This reflects the fact that there is no
single story to describe London’s economic development; rather, London is a patchwork of
prosperous and deprived areas, sitting cheek-by-jowl, each with its own economic make up. There is enormous variation in economic performance between boroughs, but also at an even more granular level within individual boroughs. [...]

[...] on the one hand there are boroughs (typically in inner London and the M4 corridor, for example Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham) which have strong local job creation and correspondingly low unemployment rates: indeed they typically import workers from the rest of London. Equally successful are London’s core commuter areas (like Richmond and Bromley) – which have significantly lower jobs density but high employment rates because local people use strong transport links to commute to
other parts of the city for work

(I've cut some bits that refer to figures, go to page 47 to have a look at them if you're interested.)

I always wonder if the process of building public transport to subsidise Central London land values can go on forever, or if it might not at some point make CL more unattractive, e.g. TfL expect that with Crossrail opening, the footway space in Oxford Street will routinely be insufficient for the number of people walking there throughout the day. What effect will this have on people's perception of the area? I don't know.

For the time being, the pressure for more and more people to go to fewer locations in order to be economically prosperous is what leads to more conflict and adversity on commutes into Central London in particular, while other areas are more and more deserted during the daytime except for child carers with children. Central London has been re-energised for a long time since the population of London started to increase again, and it was already back to considerable vibrancy in the late 1990s, but now it's just overcrowded--not that it won't be possible to crowd it even more, which huge development volumes currently in the pipeline will ensure.

Also, uses become less mixed by the same process, which means that people have to travel further to buy more specialist goods--e.g., the number of food shops has increased in recent years in residential areas owing to population increases, but the variety of the offering has decreased. By contrast, in Central London there are now disproportionately more lunchtime sandwich/bad sushi/whatever junk food takes your fancy shops than before.

Joe and Josie Bloggs experience this partly as more competition for space in the process of even getting to where they have to earn their crust--on the Tube, feeling like tinned sardines would feel if they could still feel anything, or not being able to fall over when the bus lurches because many buses are stuffed to the gunwales, standing in non-moving crowds at train stations if there's any disruption, etc. Obviously, I'm over-dramatising for effect, but most corrective mechanisms, such as 'peak spreading' (people trying to avoid the crush by travelling earlier or later) are not an option for many people. I suspect cycling is still by far the best option in this respect, but may be getting closer to saturation point, too.

All of this is absurd in a city like London, which is now so dense that it should be easy to reduce people's need to travel by spreading things they need closer to where they live, as the local markets for these increasingly exist, and enabling people to only go into Central London when they really want to. However, it's only happening with a few kinds of shops, like food shops. As ever, London is still gloriously unplanned, which causes a huge cost to the public purse in providing mainly radial public transport (when what, if any kind of public transport is needed, are more orbital services).

Anyway, sorry for length. I can't seem to relax about these issues. :)