I suspect any post-covid mass habit-changing from cars to other modes will not happen. People will forget very quickly, and go back to what's convenient for them. Many people who "rediscovered" cycling will rapidly undiscover it when the level of road traffic increases again and they are breathing diesel fumes and getting sideswiped between buses and cars.
I think there will be some long-term changes of habit.
- More people will work from home more of the time. The limiting factor previously was generally around employers and trust. They have had no choice but to 'run the experiment' and it has not failed. There are now various incentives to retain it. Partly it saves money (less office space and associated costs), partly it is environmentally friendly to reduce travel. Employees also like the flexibility - not everyone wants to work from home all the time but on balance, given the choice, you end up with more hours worked from home than before. There are also some other factors (see below) which will embed it still further.
- We are not back to normal. If you take Boris' big announcement of the restart and analyse what actually happened, the only changes so far between 'full lockdown' and now are that garden centres are open, you are allowed to exercise more than once a day (not that anyone could have identified this in reality) and that you can sit in the park with your family. Practically, you are less likely to get prosecuted for travelling somewhere because it is not possible to identify how long you intend to spend there relative to the travel time but that doesn't actually make it particularly different. There was no real restart to business - those businesses which are allowed to be open now have actually been allowed to be open throughout. It was far more symbolic than actual, although it does seem to have had an effect on businesses which didn't know what they could or could not do, so shut just in case. The big shift will be if retail and schools re-open, although the school problem is very far from resolved and is key to availability of a lot of the workers needed for retail - expect some significant delays in resolving that one so roads will remain pretty quiet for some time to come.
- Travel will necessarily remain altered for an extended period of time, realistically until sometime next year at best. Social distancing and public transport do not mix - TFL can run at only 13% capacity on a full service if social distancing applies. There are various measures in place to address this - continued working from home, staggered starts, only being in the office for part of a working day. All of these reduce the burden on the roads on a long-term basis.
- The mix of travel also alters - the obvious (and greatly feared) is that people switch from using public transport to using cars. To prevent this, some measures are already being introduced using a 'carrot and stick' approach. Stick - greater number of cycle lanes, more pedestrianisation, reduced lanes for cars. This is not because they are specifically needed, more to stop cars from being used as an alternative to public transport. Carrot - likely to see government subsidies on electric cars and DoT is already pushing through trials on electric scooters which unless there is a major issue will also be allowed to use cycle lanes.
It's impossible to predict the eventual outcome of the above, but I am pretty confident that things will not go back quite to how they were before, ever.
One positive shift I have seen from a few more cars on the roads is that the people who have now gone back to work seem to be the ones who drive more sensibly. It is now quite common to see queues of cars going down our main road, the one at the front observing the speed limit. This is an improvement.
Alec
Author
Topic: Coronavirus: after-effects (Read 8898 times)
