London's Drive to Work Day

Only about 2% of journeys into Central London are, I understand, with a destination of Central London. The rest are just passing through, sadly I can't find my citation for that.

You must be talking about car trips--of course, Central London is by far the main destination in London. :)

You may be thinking of some of the data from the cordon counts, or TfL’s Central Area Peak Count survey (CAPC), which are in the Travel in London reports, most recently:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloads/corporate/travel-in-london-report-4.pdf

From memory, about 6% of car trips originating in Outer and Inner London go to Central London, but I'd need to look it up to be sure. At any rate, the vast majority of trips into Central London are by public transport, walking and cycling. I think the split between public and private (the latter including cycling, although that stat is probably now muddled because of Cycle Hire) was 90%/10% in 2007. It's probably still something close to that.

I had an inkling about the central London figures, which I why i made the comment. but I never realised they'd be as low as that, that's quite remarkable. And one which perhaps the OP should have looked into before embarking on this escapade.

While the modal share of driving may be low, remember that it still has a disproportionate impact given the long trip distances covered. David's photos of today also showed the Inner Ring Road, the Congestion Charging boundary streets, which now takes some of the motor traffic that used to go straight through Central London.

I, too, think that motor traffic is a bit of a red herring here, though, as the main issue isn't driving so much as over-centralisation. If we had a London in which nobody drove except when they absolutely had to, and we had zillions of people commuting to Central London by bike because that's where all the jobs are, I'd still be very concerned (and would probably still be campaigning against that).

Also, I don't really understand what David is after, either, other than to imagine him gently rocking in his chair, chuckling to himself. :) I find the stunt pretty pointless and not worth the joke of saying afterwards 'thank you, great success' while showing business as usual. But seriously, the best case I can make for it is as a bit of role-playing. David's called it a 'thought experiment', and I suppose he just needed to slip out of his usual routine for a change. I would guess that understanding his motive is probably specific to doing so much [s]psycho[/] cycle training all the time. Perhaps there's something that he can see from a teacher's perspective that I can't see? I don't know.