Why the Standard is wrong about Londoners 'ditching green transport'
Plus renting homes, floating homes and war homes
On Monday the Evening Standard ran an article with the headline Londoners ditch ‘green’ transport in favour of cars during Covid pandemic. Now, any Standard headline with inverted commas around some of the words automatically raises alarm bells with us, so we thought we’d take a closer look.
Unfortunately for us, the Standard’s Ross Lydall seems to enjoy being as obtuse as possible when it comes to the basic journalistic practice of clearly identifying your sources. Eventually though we tracked the numbers down to last Wednesday’s TfL board meeting, during which an update to the Mayor’s Transport Strategy was presented1 (rather speedily too, as the board had already spent three and a half hours talking about funding issues and everyone was probably busting for a pee).
Here’s the full 57 pages of analysis and commentary if you want to take a read for yourself (it starts on page 129), but for now we’re just going to focus on answering the question: is the Standard’s article misleading twaddle or not?
To do that we’re going to have to show you a bar graph. We apologise for this, and promise to try and never do it again:
The bar on the far left there is showing the whole of 2019 broken down by the proportion of journeys made in different ‘modes’: walking and cycling (green), public transport (blue), and cars (red). The other five bars show the same breakdown for the four quarters of 2020 and the first quarter of this year.
What this chart basically says is: use of public transport fell off a cliff during lockdown (duh!), and the proportion of journeys made by car went up slightly.
But the paragraph underneath the chart states that the number of car journeys actually went down… by quite a bit:
Data from the DfT suggests that total traffic in London fell by 18 per cent in 2020, with car traffic declining by 20 per cent.
Meanwhile, the proportion of journeys made by walking or cycling shot up and, crucially, so did the number of those journeys:
Walking and cycling benefitted from the pandemic… On the best available estimate, cycling trips exceeded normal demand during the summer and autumn of 2020, with the latest data through to March 2021 showing typical weekly net increases of between 5 and 20 per cent on prepandemic values. DfT data also suggests a large increase in cycling on London’s roads overall in 2020.
So when the Standard tweet that “the number of journeys walked, cycled or made by public transport has fallen,” or they write a headline that says people “ditched” those modes of transport in favour of driving, they are either being deliberately misleading or they just don’t understand how numbers work:
Why are we banging on about this?
Some might say that spending an entire newsletter pointing out the semantic nuances of a TfL board report is a bit petty. And those people would definitely have a point. But there’s a bigger issue at stake here, and it’s one of the reasons we started writing this newsletter in the first place.
Because, even if you try and avoid the Standard like the plague, their stories still get syndicated across Yahoo News, MSN, Apple News, Google News… And a lot of the time they’re the only major newspaper reporting on stories like this one.
Essentially people have one source for this kind of information (unless they want to wade through a 200 page board meeting report) and that source is deliberately slanting its coverage, putting a cynical sheen over the facts in an attempt to attract clicks and comments from the kind of people who think we shouldn’t be spending “millions of pounds a year on 2 wheeled peddle pushers” because “not everyone wants to wear Lycra” (actual comment).
We don’t think that’s good enough for a city as large and as diverse as London, so every now and again we might have to make you look at a bar chart in order to prove a point. We promise to balance it out next week with some more stories about dogs and ice cream :)
And the rest
As we’re writing this, the details of the independent report into the 1987 murder of the private investigator, Daniel Morgan are just coming out. The big headline is that the independent panel has accused the Met of “a form of institutional corruption” for concealing their failings over the investigation; and commissioner Cressida Dick, has been personally censured “for hampering an inquiry into police corruption.” We’ll keep an eye on this as it develops over the next few hours and days.
This week marked the four year anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster. A lot of the conversation in the media was around the question of whether our buildings are any safer now, and the general consensus seems to be no, not yet. The Independent looked at the other big topic: the “hundreds of thousands of leaseholders” who are facing financial ruin because they “are trapped in unsellable, potentially dangerous homes.” Meanwhile the conversation of what should be done with the Tower itself has started, with engineers warning it “must be carefully dismantled before May 2022,” and one survivor suggesting it “should be converted into a high-rise memorial garden”.
For the first time in four years it’s cheaper to to rent in London than it is to own a home. According to a study by Hamptons, “the average private sector tenant in Britain spent £71 per month less in rent than if they were servicing the repayments on a 10% deposit mortgage”. The biggest shift was in London where “a buyer putting down a 10% deposit on a property in the capital will have gone from being £123 per month better off buying in March 2020, to spending £251 per month less on rent in May 2021.”
Sticking with homes for a second: the Guardian has covered the recent protests by ‘boat dwellers’ on the River Lea who fear new plans from the Canal and River Trust “to trial ‘water safety zones’ will lead to a big reduction in mooring spaces” and drive them out of their homes.
To a slightly different real estate story: Seven years ago the luxury hotel brand Raffles purchased the Old War Office building in Whitehall for £350m, and they’re now five years into a massive transformation project that will create “125 hotel rooms, 85 private residences, nine restaurants and bars, a spa and retail space,” all of which are due to open next year. The reason we’re telling you this now is that the private residences have just gone on sale (including two ‘turret residences’). Apparently “the jump-off point for the two-beds will be £5.8m”. If you can stomach it, Prime Resi has all the pictures and details.
Let’s finish with a slightly more ‘accessible’ development story: London’s first “permanent venue dedicated to LGBTQ+ artists” is going to open later this year in the Greenwich Peninsula's Design District, after a successful crowdfunding campaign. The venue will comprise of “a main gallery, a library and project spaces that will host a programme of exhibition commissions and collaborative, paid artist residencies for LGBTQ+ artists.”
We especially like the bit at 3:48:10 where Sadiq lets slip that he still thinks Tweets are limited to 140 characters. Bless.