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Everyone’s got some sort of gripe with London transport. But depending on where in the city you live, some people have it far worse than others. Now, there’s solid data to back that up. TfL has revealed exactly where in the city has the best and worst access to public transport.
TfL’s huge annual report includes a map that shows the Public Transport Access Level (PTAL) across the city. An area’s PTAL is calculated based its proximity to bus, tube, train and tram services and how frequent services are.
Each area is graded between zero and 6b, a score of zero indicating very poor access to public transport, and 6b meaning excellent access to public transport, with each score given a different colour. The best-connected areas are shaded dark red while the worst connected are grey, dark blue or light blue.
Unsurprisingly, the city centre and most of inner London is a big fat blob of red. Further out most of the map is blue or grey but places like Croydon, Romford and Kingston-upon-Thames, which are all on on major railway lines, are coloured red. Harrow, which is served by the Bakerloo line, Metropolitan line, Piccadilly line and Lioness line, and Wembley, which is served by the Bakerloo, Jubilee, Metropolitan and Lioness lines and Chiltern Railways are both in the red too.
As of autumn 2024, which is TfL’s most recent data set, 32 per cent of London’s population lived in areas with a PTAL connectivity score of four or above. That’s ever so slightly lower than the 33 percent in autumn 2023. TfL’s report said: ‘This reduction in part reflects some reduction to bus services, but also some methodological improvements to the indicator to improve the spatial precision of PTAL scores in relation to the River Thames.’
Elsewhere in the report TfL revealed that buses across London travel at an even slower pace than they did last year, moving at an average of 9.17mph (but there are efforts being made to tackle that). It also showed that Londoners are travelling across the city far less than they were pre-pandemic.
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