Lowri Griffiths on the annual ritual of London transport price increases, the philosophical question of what ‘value for money’ means when the Elizabeth line is delayed, and why she still cannot afford to drive
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
It is fare increase season again, which in London is every January with the reliable certainty of Christmas and the damp, and I have run out of polite ways to respond to it. Every year I do the same things: I read the press release, I calculate what the increase means for my monthly travel card, I have a brief internal debate about whether the Elizabeth line, which is genuinely brilliant when it is not suspended between Paddington and Hayes, justifies the price of using it, and then I buy the travel card because the alternative is either not going to work or spending twenty-three minutes looking for parking in a borough that has been strategically designed to make parking either impossible or twelve pounds an hour.
This year’s increase of 4.6 percent, framed in the TfL press release as “below inflation and reflecting our ongoing commitment to delivering value for the investment Londoners make in their public transport network,” represents an additional thirty-eight pounds per month on my zone 1-3 travel card. Thirty-eight pounds is, depending on your income and your relationship with money, either a negligible rounding error or a meaningful constraint on what is available for everything else. For a significant number of the people who depend on TfL because they cannot afford the alternative of driving in London, it is the latter. The press release did not include income data on TfL’s ridership. The income data would be uncomfortable for a press release about a price increase.
The Value Proposition, Examined
TfL’s fare increase communications invariably include language about investment, improvements, and the enhanced service that the funding enables. This language is not dishonest. Transport for London does invest the money it collects in operations and infrastructure that produce a better service than London would have without it. The Elizabeth line is a genuinely extraordinary piece of infrastructure that transformed east-west travel across London in ways that the buses and the District line could not replicate. The Overground extension to Barking Riverside will meaningfully improve access to housing in an area where housing is being built. These things are real and worth funding.
The relationship between fare increases and service quality is, however, more complicated than the press release implies. TfL’s operating budget is funded through a combination of fares, government grant, and commercial revenue. The government grant has been reduced multiple times over the past decade, and the funding gap that creates has been partly closed through fare increases that shift the cost from general taxation to individual users. The surfer who caught the Elizabeth line this morning paid more partly because the Department for Transport reduced its grant to TfL, a redistribution that is neither acknowledged in the fare increase press release nor particularly legible to the commuter consulting their bank balance. The fare increase is visible. The grant reduction that necessitated it is not. This visibility asymmetry is not an accident of communication strategy. It is a feature of public transport funding politics that allows cost transfers to occur with minimal political accountability.
What It Costs to Not Have a Car
I do not own a car. This is partly a values position — I live in an inner London borough with excellent public transport connections and adding a car to London’s traffic seems like a contribution to a problem rather than its solution — and partly an economic calculation: parking in my area costs more per month than my travel card, before insurance, fuel, or the existential cost of the Archway Road at eight in the morning. The calculation is rational. It is also a calculation that requires sufficient income to treat a monthly travel card as a manageable fixed cost rather than a significant variable in a tight budget, and I am aware that the rationality of my transport choices reflects my income in ways that do not apply to everyone making similar journeys.
The bus, which is TfL’s most socially inclusive service because it is used by people across the income distribution and requires no Oyster card top-up beyond the pay-as-you-go cap, has not received the same investment attention as the rail network. Route frequencies on several North London bus corridors have been reduced in successive rounds of efficiency savings. The routes that have been cut most are, with some consistency, the routes in the areas of the city with the lowest car ownership rates and the lowest average incomes. TfL serves all of London, but it does not serve all parts of London equally, and the parts it serves least well are the parts where the alternatives to its services are most limited. The annual fare increase is a cost that falls across all users. The service quality that the cost is supposed to reflect does not fall equally. This is worth saying each January, even when saying it achieves very little, because the alternative is treating the annual ritual as normal and normal is precisely what it should not be.
Lowri Griffiths writes from North London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths.
Also delayed at The Daily Mash | NewsThump | The Poke
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/tfl-raised-fares-again-run-out-polite-ways-to-react-lowri-griffiths/
