The latest instalment of our weekly series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data tools to crunch some of the numbers on Britain’s cities.
Okay, we’re probably over-reaching by pretending that there’s even any debate about this. London has the tube, and two light railways, and a fledgling S-Bahn network, and buses and trains covering pretty much anywhere else. Not to mention boats and a cable car that nobody asked for.
According to the Institute of Public Policy Research, the British state spends £2,500 on transport infrastructure for every Londoner. In the north east of England, it’s just £5 per head. Of course London has the best public transport system in Britain. Of course it does.
Nonetheless, it’s always good to put some numbers on these things, so let’s fire up the ol’ data-matic.
This graph plots the size of British cities against the share of their commuters who take public transport to work. (The data is from 2011; the chart isn’t interactive, but don’t despair, the full data is available below.)
Click to expand.
There’s quite variation in how many commuters use public transport. In some cities – Edinburgh, Liverpool, Glasgow – it’s well over 20 per cent. At the bottom end, in Telford, it’s barely 5 per cent.
Perhaps surprisingly, there’s no clear correlation between city size and public transport use. Relatively big Birmingham and Manchester are in the middle of the range, while relatively small Brighton is near the top. Perhaps this is a reflection of decades of underinvestment in urban transport: most continental cities the size of Birmingham have an extensive tram or metro network.
Anyway. We’ve cheated a bit on that graph: we excluded London from the data. That’s because, when you add it back in, it totally wrecks the scale of the thing.
Click to expand.
Partly, of course, this is because London is nearly four times bigger than any other city in Britain. But its presence warps the graph in another way, too. In Edinburgh, its nearest rival in this particular category, 27.6 per cent of residents take public transport to work. In London, it’s 44.6 per cent.
Your taxes in action, one presumes.
While we’re crunching the numbers, here’s the top 10:
That looks to us like a three way split. Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle all have reasonably developed rail networks (albeit not on anything like the scale of London’s). Edinburgh and Brighton both have extensive bus networks.
Brighton also falls into the third category – London commuters towns where a large chunk of the workforce gets on a train to London every day, bumping up the figures.
For completism’s sake, here’s the other end of the table…
…about which, if we’re honest, we have less to say.
Last but not least, here’s an interactive map. Hover over a dot and it’ll give you the data.
