Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

The inverse commute

For the last week or so I've been working in Egham, Surrey (a place which has not one but two Ferrari dealers - this tells you just about everything you need to know about Egham), which means that for a change I'm commuting away from London rather than towards it.

It's a fairly pleasant journey - a brief trundle on a Guildford-via-Weybridge train, then change at Weybridge for a leisurely and, in parts, even slightly picturesque meander along the Up Chertsey to Virginia Water and Egham. After several years of commuting towards Waterloo there's something vaguely - no, very - surreal about finding myself standing on the down platform at Surbiton looking across at the crowds of besuited, Daily Mail-wielding souls lined up three deep on the other side of the line. I keep getting the urge to wave at them or throw things. Or, at the very least, to stick two fingers up at them and shout "Ha! Suckers!".

The continued reluctance of employers and, to some extent, workers in central London to wholeheartedly embrace flexible working and home working wherever possible confuses me. I know some people always need to be in at a particular time for operational reasons or whatever, but if people staggered their start and finish times over even an hour or two the quality of their journeys into work would increase enormously. Instead more or less everyone still works 9-5, maybe with some laughable version of flexitime allowing half an hour's leeway at either end, which means a bazillion people stuffing themselves into the transport system more or less simultaneously. They then complain that the transport system is busy at this time.

A lot of people like to think that overcrowded trains are a peculiarly British thing. Wrong. Every urban transit system I've ever used has been a nightmare during the peak. You'll be very lucky to get a seat on the Munich S-Bahn at 0800, and I've seen trains on the Paris Metro which made rush hour Northern Line trains look half-empty. The reason for this is the same everywhere - too many people trying to use the system at once. In most cases it's not physically possible to run any more trains than are already being run over the infrastructure, it's not possible to make the trains themselves any longer as they have to fit in the platforms, and double-decker trains aren't really feasible in the UK as our restricted loading gauge means they wouldn't fit through tunnels. This means that short of massively expensive infrastructure work and enormous (and I mean enormously enormous) amounts of money there's physically no way to fit any more people into the system.

It's the same on the roads. Most urban centres grind to a halt during the rush hour due to sheer weight of traffic because, surprise, everyone's on the road at the same time. Add the school run factor to that and you get the traditional 0830 gridlock of cars with one occupant and people-carriers being used to ferry little Johnny the half mile to school. They've tried building more roads but they just fill up as well.

What to do? I don't know. The debate is a difficult one anyway as most people have little interest in transport policy other than a) refusing to change any of their habits, but expecting other people to change theirs, b) seeing congestion as somehow the result of incompetent management rather than simply the result of too many people trying to use the same infrastructure at once, and c) thinking that lots of money needs to be spent, so long as they aren't asked to contribute any of it themselves. In other words, too many people demand that improvements have to be made so they can continue acting exactly as they do now. They see it as somebody else's - anybody else's - problem.

One thing that people urgently need to do is to start thinking of transport policy as something which affects everyone. For many people there are major quality of life issues at stake, and employers who fail to recognise that flexible commuting and remote working are things worth encouraging are just setting themselves up for higher rates of absenteeism and stress-related illness. The daily benefits of having people arrive at work in something other than a bad mood are also worth considering, right?

Posted by mpk at August 19, 2004 10:20 AM | TrackBack