Is going from streatham to Bromley or the equivalent in other parts of London unusual? I wouldn’t have thought so. All I’m saying is that public transport is often quite poor around the edges of London. It shouldn’t take an hour and 15 minutes to go from Streatham to somewhere in Bromley.
It’s very unlikely you can do it in an hour on public transport. An hour and 10 minutes is probably the quickest. Yet it’s now showing as 27 minutes in the car. I’m honestly not saying this to be picky. I, like a lot of people, have family and friends in other outer London boroughs and public transport is often rubbish for that. And it doesn’t have to be.
The fact that something is quicker in the car, at a quiet time of day, does not necessarily mean that the public transport option is "poor".
It's an 8 mile journey. It's about the same distance as Covent Garden is from Streatham Common, and it's going to be going on for an hour to get there by public transport too. Most people who live in London will recognise the phenomenon that if you want to go anywhere outside of your local area, it somehow always seems to take "about an hour".
If I'm looking at a journey to judge how good public transport provision is, then the things I look at are things like journey frequency and whether there are multiple routes so that if one connection fails you aren't stuck. For the journey you describe, even if I wanted to travel just now, at 11pm there are options about every ten minutes, taking between 56 and 75 minutes, using a number of alternative routes. Mostly you just have to make one change. After about half past midnight it looks like you have an option every half hour or so and this carries on throughout the night. This is not actually too bad. It's not "rubbish".
Could this be improved? Probably, but I don't see that there are things that you could do that would dramatically shrink the journey time. When you are dealing with travel across a big city, some journeys are just going to take what they take. There will be some point to point journeys that are very fast relative to the distance, because they happen to have their start and end points near (for example) a relatively fast rail line with direct services. And there will be some that are slower. When you average out all these journey times, you might find that they can start to be quite similar to driving times or better.
It's not valid to look at the journey time by private car and then deem the public transport infeasible or unreasonable if it takes longer. Of course many journeys (given a clear road) are going to be quicker by car because the journey can be totally optimised for the benefit of the car's passengers and no-one else (not just in terms of time but pollution and safety as well). And that's why people like their cars. But this only works when a relatively small proportion of travellers are using that method. As soon as you try and scale it up it doesn't work, as we see in rush hour congestion. In that rush hour scenario the small proportion trying to do it by car are messing it up for everyone else.
Anyway, my point is looking at this from the angle of a response when someone living in zone 3/4 London tells me they simply have to have a car because public transport is so poor. It's (in most cases) nonsense. Public transport is pretty good. It's not as good as it is in central London, but it's nowhere near bad enough to argue that relying on public transport is some kind of great hardship or unreasonable ask. After all it's what millions of Londoners do every day - get by without a car, while having to listen to those car drivers who are slowing down their bus services complain about how awful it would be if they had to spend 1hr getting to their friend's house instead of 40 minutes.
And the context of this is the argument you hear so often, that
well I'm not against LTNs but you know we really have to do other stuff first like making the public transport better. That might hold up in some places, places where there really aren't viable alternatives so you can't expect any significant transfer to other transport modes as a result of making the car option less convenient. But for the most part zone 3&4 London really isn't one of those places.
Please note that in all this I am not arguing to ban anyone from having a car. I am making the argument that it is reasonable to take measures that will inconvenience some car drivers on some journeys.
