Commuting | Home again, home again | The Economist

Correspondent's Diary
Commuting
Home again, home again
Feb 2nd 2009From Economist.com
Getting from one place to another in four cities
IT SEEMS odd to be talking about the daily grind of commuting on a day when most of London stayed at home. There were no buses running, many trains werecancelled and if The Economist’s Monday morning conference was anything to go by, people whose presence is normally regarded as essential phoned in instead.But as it happens my train from Cambridge ran only a few minutes late, and although I had to walk my bike much of the way from King’s Cross to The Economist’soffices in St James’s (why are London’s roads not gritted in preparation for snow that has been forecast for days?) I got to work only a little later anddamper than usual.
I moved out of London for the same reason as thousands of others: I became a parent. I was no longer getting any benefit from the good stuff (theatres,galleries, shops and so on) and suddenly the bad stuff—the dirt, the lack of space, the cost and above all the schools, so many of them depressingly dreadful—startedto matter. I was working a day or two a week in Cambridge at the time, so in 2003 I traded one three-bed Victorian semi-detached house for another. Mynew house was almost identical to my old, but it was within a short cycle of one of the world’s most beautiful town centres, on a quiet street, with ahundred-foot garden and facing a park. It was cheaper, too.
So two years later, when The Economist offered me a job in London, I was not keen to move back. Instead I acquired a folding bike and an eye-wateringlyexpensive yearly season ticket (every year the price goes up by more than retail-price inflation; it now costs £3,500), and became one of around 700,000people who commute by train into London every day.ReutersShut it all down
My trains come and go from King’s Cross, one of London’s biggest and busiest stations, which is undergoing seemingly interminable renovation. The platformson the underground get dangerously overcrowded during the morning rush hour as people change between the six lines that stop there, so one of the entrancesto the underground station is closed, forcing my fellow commuters who need to use the tube for their onward travel to queue at the other entrance in singlefile. Many of them will already have endured a cramped and uncomfortable journey: the line from Cambridge to King’s Cross is Britain’s most overcrowded,with figures published last August showing that it had four of the six trains with the highest ratios of standers to sitters in the country. I am lucky:I can work varied hours and mostly miss the worst of it.
I lived in London for a spell in the early 1990s. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was experiencing London at almost its most depopulated in 50 years.In 1939 8.6m people lived in Greater London, but that fell to a low of 6.7m in 1988. Since then the population of London has risen by almost 50,000 a year—anincrease largely fuelled by immigration. Around 7.5m people now live in the city.
In the past year or so, however, net migration has turned negative, and there is a great deal of churn: last year around 150,000 people come to London fromabroad, and around the same number from other bits of the United Kingdom—most of them young and childless. Roughly 380,000 Londoners left, many of themolder, or parents.
Modern travel patterns poorly suit an old, crowded city, and much of London’s infrastructure is crumbling. London’s underground was the world’s first (theMetropolitan line opened in 1863), and in recent decades repairs on the ageing trains and escalators were often let slide, creating a huge backlog. Otherdevelopments over that period: the congestion charge, introduced in 2003, without which London would presumably face total gridlock; “bendy buses”, anincomprehensible waste of precious road real estate; and unpredictable diversions due to Thames Water’s constantly shifting upgrade-works on London’s Victoriansewers and water mains.
Among the biggest changes in commuting habits has been the increase in cycling. In 1992 it was an eccentric habit I had picked up while studying in Cambridge—bya wide margin Britain’s most cycle-friendly city. Now lots of Londoners do it, which is good—other road users are more aware of us—and bad—now that theynotice we exist, they almost uniformly hate us. Ask them why and most will say it’s because cyclists break rules, which they do—but no more frequentlythan pedestrians or motorists. As I leave behind the morning hordes queuing to go underground at King’s Cross, or sail past a bendy bus straddling threelanes and blocking a busy junction as it tries to turn a corner, I know the true reason is jealousy.
When I came back from maternity leave after my second child our editorial manager asked if a BlackBerry would help me to manage my time. I turned the offerdown on the grounds that I needed somewhere to get some real work done. In the mornings, the 50-minute journey is perfect for sketching out an article;in the evenings I read, usually something work-related, or muse over a story lead or title, or (on Wednesdays) sleep. I feel sorry for commuters I seereading newspapers, or emailing: they are wasting the best bit of the day.