Poor public transport explains the UK’s productivity puzzle

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.

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/...).

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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).

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.

"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...

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...

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.

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

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