
Poor public transport explains the UK’s productivity puzzle - hunglee2
https://www.citymetric.com/transport/birmingham-isn-t-big-city-peak-times-how-poor-public-transport-explains-uk-s-productivity
======
barrkel
This smells a lot like using correlation to hypothesize causation. You could
tell a different story about richer cities being able to afford better public
transport.

Subjectively, most UK cities feel less dense than many continental cities,
with less apartment living and more urban streets with two story terraced
houses. Could tell a similar story about that.

UK laissez-faire local government combined with tribal politics making the
ruling party incentivized to starve those local governments of funding -
especially transfer funding when Tories are in power and Tory local government
is usually restricted to rich areas not needing transfer funding - more
material for storytelling.

IMO the UK political culture is toxic, education is particularly poor.
Everything is centered on London and yet all the elite live outside in the
green belt, while crime driven by inequality is rising and police numbers are
continually cut, and legal aid is also being cut, leading to mistrials and
slow cases due to self representation, and free movement is attacked by all
sides.

I'm looking for the exit. This place is sick. The next domino will be
something even more extreme, and it's chance whether it's left or right
extremism.

~~~
lewis1028282
I think you’re making the UK to sound a lot worse than it is. The crime rate
is still relatively low and on par with most Western European countries. And I
don’t see how education is poor the UK has some of the best universities in
the world, and decent schools. In fact the number of people with degrees has
been slowly rising.

The UK is a great place to live and work, don’t let this comment tell you
otherwise. Everyone on the internet seems to catrophise things

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Yet in 8 years of mythical "austerity" the Tories have managed to gut every
service to breaking point. Education is so broken that tertiary education has
become an exercise in marketing and delivering least for the £9k a year.
Schools are so starved of funding that 80% report being in crisis, as do
Police, NHS, libraries, well everything really.

Local government funding is more centrally funded that at any point in UK
history, and the last 8 years have brought an _insane_ skewing of an already
heavy skew in favour of London and the South East. The North-South divide is
2:1 for pounds spend by government now.

8 years to destroy every achievement of inclusion and protection since the
war. 8 years to put a third of UK children into poverty and a welfare system
actively designed to get people to choose to give up. The bastards even knew
that whilst rolling it out.

I'm also looking to leave. I really, really don't want my retirement here any
more as we abolish everything that was once worthwhile about the country and
rush to public services that work as well as the US (ie not at all).

The UK has become, surprisingly quickly, a terrible place to live and work,
with widespread poverty and low wages, and a job market devoted to zero hours
contracts for all.

~~~
lewis1028282
> he UK has become, surprisingly quickly, a terrible place to live and work,
> with widespread poverty and low wages, and a job market devoted to zero
> hours contracts for all.

I wouldn't say 2.8 % [1] of UK works on zero hour contracts mean the job
market is 'devoted' to zero hour contracts. Just because it is in the news a
lot doesn't mean it happens all the time.

Honestly your post makes it seems like the UK is this corrupt, broke country
when it couldn't be further from the truth.

All I see is posts against the tories online but every election they've been
the majority.

[1]
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/contractsthatdonotguaranteeaminimumnumberofhours/april2018)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The UK _is_ a broke corrupt country. It has levels of inequality and
institutional corruption the US can only dream of.

There has been no public service ethic in government since the 80s. Government
has become a tool for leveraging policy for personal and corporate wealth
extraction and the promotion of privilege. Promotion of common welfare and
social investment are currently absolutely taboo.

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/07/mp-owen-
pat...](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/apr/07/mp-owen-paterson-
lobbied-government-for-firm-he-worked-for)

The reason the Tories keep scraping through election wins is because the UK
media are institutionally right-wing. The Tories rely on a base of confused
pensioners and - increasingly - dog whistle racists. Latterly, BBC editorial
has been obviously compromised, with BBC News failing to challenge or question
government policy in any way, and selective reporting making dissent seem
either small or irrelevant.

The result is that British voters are probably some of the least educated and
informed in all of Europe.

None of this is good. I left the UK last year, and I genuinely fear for the
future of the people I left behind. Historically, the next step in this kind
of post-imperial malaise is traditionally a military dictatorship. I hope the
UK can pull itself together and avoid that, but I worry that it's going to be
a very close thing.

~~~
sgt101
Well thanks for bailing, and thanks for the advice to those you've left
behind. Your hopes are greatly appreciated and I am sure that if we do manage
to avoid military dictatorship we will all be very grateful for your help and
assistance in avoiding this dire situation.

------
smcl
I'm not sure how I feel about this article. I agree overall that UK public
transport is generally pretty bad - it gets even worse when you're travelling
inter-city and it's poor value for money. But I feel a little bit like this is
nicely presented data and a compelling narrative being used to come to a pre-
determined conclusion.

When the case for Transport=>Productivity is introduced they talk about the
GDP vs Population graph in France and indeed start presenting a neat little
example that tells the story they want:

> For example, Lyon, the second largest city in France, is more productive
> than Marseille, the third largest city, which is in turn more productive
> than Lille.

Nice and easy, right? However that was a very interesting choice of city to
stop at, because the next largest city - Toulouse - has a higher per-capita
GDP than _both_ Marseille and Lille. Then the fifth largest - Bordeaux - is
higher than Lille and is mere a whisker shy of Marseille. Only after we skip
over a number of tightly bunched cities do we see a bit of a cliff where St
Etienne, Toulon and Montpellier are smaller and also relatively poorer. You
can definitely see _something_ if you squint your eyes and look at the graph,
but to me it just looks like the French cities are more equal overall than the
British ones. But we know that already if we compare GINI coefficients of the
countries as a whole ([https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...)).

Most interesting is the massive outlier in the main graph - Edinburgh. It has
no metro system to speak of (save for a single expensive and much maligned
tram line) and an OK-but-nothing-special bus network. It's certainly not a
sprawling city, but it's not compact either.

The poorer British cities definitely need some love and investment, and
improved public transport will undoubtedly be needed. But this article
presents an oversimplification that makes me a little uneasy about accepting
any of their conclusions.

~~~
tialaramex
I too suspect a pre-determined conclusion. That said:

Edinburgh, like London, has a single integrated transport authority (Transport
for Edinburgh) albeit legally it's much less powerful than London's. I suspect
that might be relevant.

As a tourist (I've never lived there, only visited) Edinburgh certainly _felt_
like an integrated system where I shouldn't expect every journey to involve
negotiating new obstacles, unlike in my own city where any substantial journey
is likely to involve understanding how the different bus and train companies
have different ticket policies.

------
Reason077
There are many possible factors that explain the UK's productivity gap. But
ultimately, productivity is mainly an inverse function of labour cost.

In economies with a high supply of labour and thus (relatively) low wages,
there is less incentive for businesses to invest in labour-saving plant and
technology. Why make the risky investment in automation when you can just hire
more workers cheaply?

The car wash business illustrates this: where there is a good supply of cheap
labour, you'll find "hand" car washes with multiple attendants ready to wash
your car by hand at any time. But when labour is more scarce and expensive,
washing cars by hand isn't really viable. Businesses will instead invest in
automatic car wash equipment - and productivity per unit of labour is
therefore higher!

In (higher productivity) France, automatic car washes are everywhere.

In the (lower productivity) UK, there are an awful lot of hand car washes.

~~~
konschubert
So, it’s not an inverse function, but rather positively correlated.

~~~
Reason077
Yes, that's what I meant to say. Sorry for the "thinko".

------
zone411
I think a much more likely explanation for Birmingham's low productivity is
that it has the highest share of people with no qualifications (education) in
the UK and the gap is becoming wider
([https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/train-attract-
retain-...](https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/train-attract-retain-
increasing-birminghams-skilled-workforce/birminghams-skills-profile/)).

~~~
jimnotgym
I don't think they are mutually exclusive. I had people with cars turning down
a job with me because they couldn't face the 7 mile commute on the edge of
town, on a motorway, because it could take them more than an hour.

------
richardcrossley
If the headway between buses is greater than 15 minutes, then few people are
going to chose it as their transportation option. If one bus fails to show,
often enough for me not to bother and walk instead, then you have a 30 minute
waiting time at an open bus stop in cold driving rain.

Now I live in Asia and the buses are extremely frequent headway is less than
10 minutes, and I have no need for a car.

~~~
falcor84
>Now I live in Asia and the buses are extremely frequent ...

Where in Asia? Being home to over half the world's population, it's extremely
diverse and my impression is that the average Asian person had much worse
access to public transport than the average UK resident.

~~~
akgerber
The plurality of Asians live in China which has built dozens of metros with
thousands of miles of track in recent years:
[http://www.thatsmags.com/shenzhen/post/19044/china-s-
breakne...](http://www.thatsmags.com/shenzhen/post/19044/china-s-breakneck-
metro-system-growth-in-one-gif)

~~~
robjan
Yes, if you add China, the Four Tigers and Japan then you are already covering
1.6bn people. All of these countries/regions have fantastic public transport
in the urban areas.

------
cimmanom
Every politician and transportation decision maker in the US needs to read
this one. That goes double for the collection of clowns who are letting New
York’s transit systems rot.

~~~
kingosticks
Weirdly the caption above the first graph states:

> Big cities are more productive! In France (and Germany and the USA)

But then exclusively talks about, and provides data for, only French cities.
In addition, their statement really goes against my experience of public
transport within the big US cities I have visited.

~~~
nkoren
Public transport in the US is, as a rule, wildly inferior to public transport
in the rest of the OECD. But still, all things are relative, and the quality
of public transport in the US is more or less on a gradient, with bigger
cities generally better than smaller ones.

Another factor is that car ownership is much higher in the US (with the sole
exception of NYC), so poor public transport impacts a smaller population. (In
car-dependent societies, however, poor infrastructure and traffic congestion
can have a similar impact -- limiting the effective "size" of the city -- so
it's not like relying on cars lets one escape from this problem). Whereas in
the UK, the low quality of public transport (outside of London) is _not_
compensated for by comparably high levels of car ownership.

My company is working on urban-accessibility metrics that should make it much
easier to have data-driven discussions about the correlation between transport
networks and economics. Can't wait to show that off in a few months.

~~~
kingosticks
What are we counting as high levels of car ownership? I always blindly assumed
it was pretty high throughout the UK, for exactly the reason you give. I've no
data, look forward to reading yours - thanks!

~~~
nkoren
76% of UK households have a vehicle, as opposed to 91% of US households. More
than vehicle-ownership, however, significantly higher petrol prices in the UK
inhibit usage by a fair amount (2018 averages: $2.50/gal in the US, $7.00/gal
in the UK). Finally, most US cities have much better-developed intra-urban
motorway networks, rendering the car relatively more effective for commuting.
UK urban roads saturate at lower volumes, on average.

So the net result is that the while the UK population has moderately lower
rates of actual car _ownership_ \-- actual _spatial accessibility_ via the
car, in generalised-cost terms (travel time * value-of-time + monetary cost),
is substantially lower than in the US.

------
Theodores
Birmingham is a motor city. You don't get a bus, you drive. It is as simple as
that. The infrastructure was built for cars and the leafy suburbs have plenty
of parking. People drive in and don't get the bus.

I use the term 'people' to refer to people with proper jobs, if you work in
the NHS as a nurse or if you do cleaning, work in a shop or anything else
serving customers then you are waiting an extremely long time for a bus and
having quite a walk at the other end. Things may have changed recently but
from what I remember you had absolutely silly waiting times after 6.30 p.m.
Stay at your desk one minute past 5.30 and you have that thirty minutes of
walking and waiting before your bus comes along if you are lucky.

There are other factors such as the cost of living in the city. Although not
London prices, if you want to 'get on the housing rope-ladder' then you are
going to be off the bus route and driving in.

People do like their cars in Birmingham, for religious reasons a lot of young
men don't drink. This leads to a lot of them taking a lot of pride in their
motors to therefore never take the bus.

There is a large pedestrianised area in the centre however there are also
roads that are as big as motorways going through the city. Things like the
exhibition centres and other things alluding to Birmingham's status as second
city were very much built with the car in mind.

I cycled when I lived there and my experiences of the bus was gained after I
got run over by a car from the other carriageway collecting me on his bonnet.
The bike didn't take it too well so the bleak misery of the bus was not my
choice. The waiting was definitely bad for productivity.

There was one other cyclist at that workplace of sixty or so other people and
only the receptionist got the bus, starting at 6.30 a.m. from Lichfield to be
there before 9. Everyone else drove.

I did have reason to drive there once, it was on work business and I made the
mistake of taking the wrong exit from 5-ways roundabout. A mile later stuck in
the slowest traffic ever in Halesowen I was ready to abandon the car and set
light to it. Luckily it wasn't my car so I spent the best part of an hour
trying to get back to the right exit of the roundabout. That was not
'productive'.

~~~
collyw
I am interested in your definition of "proper" jobs after you exclude NHS
nurses, cleaners and shop workers. You sound like a snob from that statement.
Perhaps "well paid jobs" would have been a better way of phrasing it?

~~~
esotericn
I mean, he did define it.

A job that supports the worker in taking an efficient, stress free form of
transport in to work is a "proper" job.

A job that pays so little that they'll skimp on their commute every single day
is not a "proper" job.

I know people in London who take multiple buses in to work in the morning
rather than using the tube. It takes them significantly longer. It's cheaper.

They do it because they don't have "proper" jobs; their employers don't care
about them.

------
danielfoster
I would be curious to apply this to U.S. cites. Even New York must lose
aglomeration benefits because of its unreliable transit structure.

~~~
fsloth
The article suggests a causation, but points out only a correlation without
proving it. There are lot of other ways in which French and UK cities are
different - there might very well be some other reason why there is a lower
'churn' in UK cities and the lower public transport variable might just be
accidentally correlated.

~~~
toyg
Anecdata: UK elites don’t like living in city centres. Anybody worth anything
runs from English city centres as soon as they can afford it. If France is
anything like Italy, they take the opposite approach.

This might compound the public-transport issue to the point of significance,
but such a cultural element won’t be eradicated by simply providing more “poor
people’s transport”.

~~~
timomax
That's completely wrong. UK elites love living in city centres. They also love
the countryside. They don't live in the suburbs.

~~~
toyg
_> UK elites love living in city centres._

That definitely does not tally with my experience in Manchester and Liverpool.
Nobody worth any real money lives in the city, they're all in big Cheshire
villas.

The young professionals might like to play Friends for a bit, but as soon as
they spawn or make real money they're off in a blast.

I'd be surprised if Birmingham were any different, considering that city
centre in practice is almost non-existent.

London and Edinburgh are the only places with real elites living in cities,
but they are the exception to the rule.

------
lordnacho
Interesting read, but I have some issues with it.

What's the rationale for not including capitals? Why are they on a different
population/productivity scale from 2nd cities?

Also I'm not sure I believe the lines. As in, they seem a bit sensitive to me.
If Lyon wasn't there the France line would be much flatter. And there's plenty
of deviation from either line, there must be significant other factors
involved.

However I've spent some time in Birmingham and other 2nd cities, and there's
something to be said about the argument presented. Particularly in Birmingham,
the area is more like a bunch of loosely connected suburbs. Not a lot of tall
buildings, lots of separate houses, by the looks of it. A fair few big box
store malls. Loads of buses, not much else. You're better off in a car, which
presents similar problems.

~~~
tazjin
> What's the rationale for not including capitals?

London's infrastructure is not really comparable to other cities in the UK, so
it skews the image for the point that the authors are trying to make.

~~~
toyg
And the same goes for Paris in France.

------
dankohn1
Compare to this 30 second time lapse of subway growth in China:
[https://kottke.org/18/01/the-astounding-growth-of-chinas-
sub...](https://kottke.org/18/01/the-astounding-growth-of-chinas-subway-
system-1990-2020)

------
esotericn
Almost all of the analysis done in this article falls flat on its' face
because London has been excluded.

The UK effectively doesn't exist outside of the South East from the
perspective of most individuals with significant wealth or power (central
government included).

------
lucasverra
really enjoyed the paper.

Super clear data viz that strikes a point quickly and makes it easy to join
the hypothesis.

I found it so clear and easy that there is probably some scientific bias that
makes it non valid argumentation. If someone could point that out, would be
great.

~~~
joshvm
One counter argument is that they probably applied a basic linear least
squares fit to the data. Simple linear regression, using the L2 loss i.e.
(y-f(x))^2, is extremely sensitive to large outliers (like Birmingham and
Manchester). Without more medium-size cities in the 1-2M range it's hard to
say for sure.

If you didn't have those data points, the story would be that the UK has much
more productive cities (per size) than France. The trend line with those two
cities removed is far steeper; practically vertical! And in fact if their
analysis of Birmingham is correct - that it's effectively a much smaller city
and should be placed further left on the graph - then it would also support a
much steeper line.

This is what the plot looks like without Birmingham and Manchester:
[https://imgur.com/a/yhT5VoD](https://imgur.com/a/yhT5VoD)

I suspect you'd get a similar result if you used a more robust estimator like
the Huber loss:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huber_loss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huber_loss)

What does that tell you? Probably that the population size of British cities
is not a good feature to use to estimate productivity. Or that Birmingham and
Manchester are outliers - they are huge cities compared to most of the rest of
the UK, for a start.

That's not to say that the article is wrong. Public transport in large cities
is pretty poor outside London. I don't doubt that if Birmingham had a decent
mass transit system, it would be more profitable.

They also avoided the issue of Manchester, which _does_ have a dense public
transport system (similar to Liverpool), but is also punching below its
weight.

Never mind that they're assuming that France is the benchmark (despite drawing
a trend line on the UK), they included Edinburgh which is a capital ...

------
keithpeter
Quote from OA

 _" The first journey is a bus from the south of the city, Stirchley to,
Birmingham. This 3.5 mile journey takes about 20 minutes between 6am and 7am,
and about 40 minutes between 8am and 9am."_

That would be the school run. To test my hypothesis, I'm going to try to run
the results during a school holiday in a bit.

Very pleased someone has actually done what I have often thought about (but
done nothing about) while standing at the 97 bus stop in the rain early in the
morning... getting the data from the departure system. I wonder how I can get
my hands on a sample of the data...

------
gok
I'm increasingly frustrated by transit-related articles like this that
completely overplay the data they have.

If you look at the US metro areas with the highest productivity (defined in
this article as GDP/capita) [1], they are definitely not the ones with the
best or even extant transit.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/248112/per-capita-us-
rea...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/248112/per-capita-us-real-gross-
domestic-product-gdp-by-metro-area/)

~~~
closeparen
The highest average commute times in the us are under 40 minutes in spite of
that [0]. We have enough cars and car infrastructure that only a few % are
stuck with buses; their poor performance has little impact on overall journey
times.

The average is about 25 minutes and it goes up by only a few minutes in
especially congested places. (If a 5 minute traffic jam is existentially
distressing, wait till you see what waiting for the train is like).

[https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650061560/stuck-in-traffic-
yo...](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650061560/stuck-in-traffic-youre-not-
alone-new-data-show-american-commute-times-are-longer)

------
oliwarner
Say people selling public transport.

To anybody living outside London, hyper-centralisation is the obvious problem.
Govt has done little in the past two decades to stop every new HQ making
London just that little bit more essential.

Whole industries need to pull out and other cities get a crack at fresh,
planned-ahead growth.

Rebuilding London every few years to deal with the latest calamity isn't
practical.

------
sgt101
Another factor is the density of England vs France; Birmingham is virtually
halfway between London and Manchester, both are a fair bit closer to London
than Lyon. London is a huge leech pulling economic activity out of the rest of
England, and HS2 will make it worse.

------
karmakaze
What kills me about public transit is the variance. One trip in or home can
often take 70% longer than another. It kills whatever motivation I started my
trip with and I have to work up to it again.

~~~
sanxiyn
Subway provides less variance because it is not affected by traffic.

~~~
karmakaze
I would think so. Unfortunately I'm speaking of a single subway train ride.

------
thewhitetulip
If UK public transportation is poor then Indian public transport doesn't exist
(excluding the truly epic Delhi Metro)

------
infinity0
What about Manchester??

------
timomax
Sounds like bs to me. What about countries with no mass transit?

~~~
izacus
Which ones would be that?

~~~
timomax
Most of them.

~~~
izacus
I'd really like to have a list since most developed countries do have mass
transit system. Can you provide an actual example?

------
socks
Why did they include Edinburgh in the British non-capital cities list? There
are four British capital cities - Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London.

------
baybal2
My suggestion for improvement:

UK needs more 20M+ people cities, and more density.

What about relocating northern cities population to the South and building new
cities there?

