Peak fares on a Friday will be suspended temporarily on London Underground to encourage more people into the office at the end of the week. The policy – recommended in Centre for Cities’ Office Politics report last May – will begin in March. This raises the questions: how is the return to the office going, and how much are Fridays lagging behind?
Picking out Bank and Moorgate – two stations that very much serve the office market (so as to remove as much as we can ridership for leisure, such as tourism and late-night revelling) – serves as an illustration. And there are a number of things that emerge from the latest data.
Firstly, it’s fair to say that the figures are a far cry from the predictions in 2020 that remote working was here to stay. In line with ridership on the whole network, exits from these two stations hit a post-lockdown high last December, with 134,000 exits on Thursday 7th. That was 96 per cent of the equivalent day in 2019 (see Figure 1). On this basis it would suggest Thursday working, at least in the heart of the City, is almost back to pre-pandemic levels.
Figure 1: Thursday exits from Bank and Moorgate stations are almost back to 2019 levels, but Fridays are well behind
Secondly, there have been three phases to this recovery so far. The first, throughout 2022, saw a strong recovery in ridership. But this flatlined in 2023, with little change between January and September. The recovery picked up again though until December, with exits up by 10 per cent by the end of the year (4th-15th December) than 3 months earlier (last two weeks of September). Data for January 2024 suggests that office working is down slightly in the year to date, but still well up on last September.
Thirdly, patterns of hybrid work mean that some days are more popular than others. Figure 1 also shows that Thursday is consistently the busiest day, followed closely by Tuesday and Wednesday. The table below shows that Fridays are the quietest day, with the number of exits on a Friday being around 64 per cent of the number of Thursday exits in the weeks before Christmas (and this figure is boosted by a surge in pre-Christmas Friday journeys, perhaps as a result of Christmas parties). This helps explain why the Mayor has decided to suspend peak fares on a Friday.
In the communication of the policy, the Mayor appears to be concerned that the lack of Friday office working is having on spending in pubs, cafes and restaurants. This is of course an issue for those businesses. But the larger concern that Centre for Cities has raised is the impact on productivity of reduced face-to-face interaction with colleagues and clients.
In order for the policy to address this it will need to increase the number of days that people go into the office rather than people shuffling the days around. To avoid this Centre for Cities’ recommendation was to only offer the reduced fare on a Friday if commuters had travelled during peak time a number of other times in the same week. This is though more complex both to carry out and to communicate.
The question now is whether the policy will work in increasing time spent in the office. Time will of course tell, but the good news is that we will have the data to see.
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