This Is Not London

London is one of the greatest cities in the world. It is vibrant, dynamic, multi-cultural and for better or worse, the economic engine of the United Kingdom.

But behind the glitz, the glamour, behind the wealth, this heart of the Remain campaign, so seemingly distant from the rest of England, London has more than its share of problems. It may be unspoken, but something needs to be done to stem London’s increasing inequality and suburbanisation of poverty.

London's wealth generation is broadly in its geographical heart, a function of the physical structure of its transport network that funnels employment, work and opportunity into the hot house. This reality masks that there remains a shortage of high value jobs in London's outer boroughs. I am under no illusion that we can see a migration of financial services roles into the suburbs, but I am confident that there is opportunity to grow the professional, IT, arts and entertainment sectors if we create a new kind of connected, local London.

To do so, to improve access, to redistribute London's 'common wealth', we have to enable the our boroughs - that means addressing the lack of inequality in connectivity between suburbs versus the relative ease of access into the centre.

London's Challenge

In the first instance, we need to look at how we can improve connectivity between the outer boroughs – rail, roads, cycle, while redefining the boroughs so they have clarity and focus as hubs that will feed off each other, whether in the arts, the sciences or IT. People move, companies rise and fall and we will need to build critical masses of people and skills, but to do this, we need to recognise why people want to work in central London, why they do not want to work in our boroughs and change this fundamental premise.

At this stage, this may be a circular argument, but at some point will need to start to change. Outdated premises, both office and retail, unplanned, legacy mixes of housing, commercial, retail and leisure spaces compete to present a mish mash of messaging for those coming to the capital. To change this, to create identities in our outer boroughs, will need investment and - bizarre though it may seem for an established city - masterplanning, because London today is a paradox.

The London Paradox

We are fighting not just the perception of where people believe they want to work, but also an industry, culture and planning process that bypasses many of our boroughs.

London accommodates more than 3 million commuters a day with a journey experience - even setting aside the trials and tribulations of Southern - that is often horrendous. Simply put, London needs more capacity on its primary routes on the morning and evening peaks.

But what London needs is not necessarily the same as what Londoners need.

Commuting Into London - ONS Data (2011)

Our overground rail network has never been truly structured to serve the needs of Londoners, but has been designed to serve the needs of the city itself. Today, we are ever more focussed on fixing the capacity constraints coming into London and in doing so we are losing sight of a key objective of transport investment, the creation of wealth in the form of vibrant communities as much as in direct economic growth.

Network Rail is working to fix capacity constraints coming into London. The Digital Railway programme is studying how, through modern train control technology (ETCS), they can significantly increase capacity on existing routes into London. They are almost certainly correct - I have every confidence in their ability to find the right technical answer. These bigger ‘pipes’ will in many locations, probably be the right solution, but I can guarantee that they will not be the complete answer for London.

The problem with 'heavy' railways, unlike with light rail or urban underground networks is that they will always suffer from their inherent nature. Heavy trains, accelerate and brake more slowly still versus their smaller counterparts and with ever more a focus on journey speed, rather than the journey experience (predictability versus timetable frequency), these matters often combine to miss the potential for multi-stop services that trams and buses can adapt to.

Vast sums of rail investment often do not directly benefit Londoners – but rather they facilitates the city and its associated economic microcosm. Perhaps it is time to think of how we can build an Intelligent Infrastructure and not just a Digital Railway, focused on how we would like to use our cities, rather than just how we would like our cities to best exploit our citizens.

I do not pretend to have all the answers, but if we carry on trying to address just direct rail traffic into London, we need to realise what this means for the city and those that live here - an ever increasing disparity of wealth between those who work in the centre of London and those who remain in its boroughs.

Connecting London with an Orbital Railway could be one such step. Indeed, LOROL already provides an orbital solution of sorts, connecting 20 out of 33 boroughs, but this seems more happy circumstance than design, failing to provide fast easy movement around the city as a whole - more investment and new strategies for connectivity must be found.

Greater direct capacity into London will only result in more challenges for the tube and bus networks of central London – a second level of transport has to emerge that enables a more balanced city, with the peak loading challenges that we see today dissipated. This could easily be a true Orbital Railway or even better, more fluid connections through the emerging world of Mobility as a Service and a distributed travel network with far greater resilience and natural, organic perturbation management across road, rail and tram.

Either development could help people control their own travel and stimulate opportunities for job creation in the boroughs, but as an industry we still need to do some work to understand if this is genuinely needed, if it is the right answer for London. One way to consider this is to look at how our current strategy exposes the city to disruption.

The coming of Digital Railway will maintain single points of failure on routes (e.g. track, OLE) that cannot be acceptable for a modern city like London. Shared infrastructure inevitably means all our eggs will be in one  basket, something that Traffic Management Systems can only do so much to ameliorate. When rail infrastructure fails or when industrial action hits, the cost to our economy is in the millions, because people do not have a choice in how they travel. It's time for us to recognise where these risks have left us.

Flexible working, working from home, all have made some minor inroads into changing how we commute into central London, but fundamentally, we need to work out how we can change the mindset to make people work outside the centre of London, shifting our psyche by creating more vibrant, wealthier boroughs that help address the triple challenge formed from people, productivity and poverty. Only when we have that vision for a different London, will we start to see the benefits of targeted investment in the right areas:-

• Digital Railway - Because we need the increase in capacity it can bring now and because our economy demands it, intelligently applied, to address known constraints and to keep the central powerhouse of London running.
• Orbital Rail Extensions - Building infrastructure not because of the demand we see today, but because of the London we want for tomorrow, even if this is far more likely to be tactical connectivity schemes – probably light rail.
• Mobility As A Service - Because we are concerned about the solution, of easing travel, of the instant journey to break down barriers, rather than the infrastructure itself in order to help drive growth and prosperity.

And for those who are wondering why I have passed by autonomous vehicles and the potential they have for disruption, well, they have their place, but today I think I'll leave resolving the challenges of resolving morning peak demand and efficient utilisation of our crowded roads until tomorrow.

*** This is a personal opinion piece, but any thoughts and comments are welcome. If you've enjoyed reading it, please feel free to share ***