Is public transport really the answer to our congestion woes?
The government's official road traffic statistics have just been released. In among the screeds of tables is the information that 27 per of the trips made by people living in London were by public transport. That's the highest proportion of all regions by a long way. And they made fewer than half of their trips (43 per cent) by car, compared to the national average of 64 per cent.
Yet workers in London had, by far, the longest mean travel to work time, taking 43 minutes compared to the average in Great Britain of 26 minutes. Ten per cent of people working in London took longer than 90 minutes to travel to work.
Now the capital is a bit of a special case, with eight million people crammed into a relatively small area, and with almost everyone within reach of some form of public transport. But if it's such a good idea, why isn't there more of it, and why isn't it faster?