Travel in London Travel in London

11. Spotlight: How has travel by Londoners changed – insights from 10 years of the London Travel
Demand Survey (LTDS)
11.6 Are changing working patterns affecting travel demand?
Introduction
Travel to/from and in the course of work is the most significant reason for personal
travel, accounting for 28.8 per cent of all trips made by Londoners on an average
weekday (2014/15). Key features of work travel, such as a focus on the morning and
evening peak periods, are well known – for example it is peak demand that drives
the requirement for capacity on the transport networks. However, it is also evident
from the wider literature that working patterns are changing rapidly, with increasing
flexibility of working hours, increasing home or remote working, and the impact of
technology on business travel. While all of these trends have been apparent for
some time, it is not clear that they have fed through to significant differences in
travel patterns at the aggregate level. This section looks at what LTDS can tell us
about changes in work-related travel over the past 10 years.
Work-related travel – overall trip rates
Table 11.1 shows the total number of trips and associated average trip rates for
work-related travel by London residents. The most striking observation is that there
has been a clear fall in the average number of trips made per person per day to or
from a usual workplace (ie commuting trips). This equates to 3.4 per cent over the
10-year review period, or a reduction of about 0.4 per cent per year.
The trend for trips made in the course of work, typically on employer’s business, is
however not so clear. If the first year of the available series (2005/06) is omitted as
being atypical, the trend would be best characterised as broadly stable over the
review period. Therefore, there is evidence that people on average are making fewer
regular commuter trips, but there is no strong evidence of a trend, either positive or
negative, in work-related employer’s business travel (all on a per capita basis).
A feature of interest is the change during the years affected by the economic
recession. While there was a relatively sharp fall in commuting trip rates at this
time, they have not recovered correspondingly as the economy has improved –
suggesting that the recession may have been a catalyst for embedding new working
practices as the economy has recovered.
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