Empirical Studies of Journeys to Work by Modes of Transport in Greater London: 1966 and 1971

Abstract

With the use of 1971 journey-to-work census data for London, the spatial distributions of home and workplace locations at different distances from the city centre were analysed for the main modes of transport. The relationships among the fundamental quantities such as density, trip length, modal split, and level of car ownership were also investigated. These analyses were compared with those of corresponding 1966 data. The comparisons show that although the home density in 1971 within the first 2 km from the city centre decreased by approximately 21%, while the workplace density decreased only by approximately 4%, the actual number of workplaces within this range of distance fell by about 2·5 times that of the homes. The overall decrease in homes and workplaces resulted in a 9% drop in the total number of internal trips for London as a whole. Resolving these trips by modes of transport shows that rail, bus, and walk trips had decreased while car trips had increased. As a result, the most common mode of transport to work switched from bus in 1966 to car in 1971. This also contributed to the overall increase in the average trip length in 1971. The analysis on the level of car ownership for 1971 shows that more than 50% of the households located more than 12 km from the city centre had at least one car. On average, the number of cars per household in 1971 was approximately 0·64.