The City of London, also known as the "Square Mile," is the financial district of London. Some 678,000 people work in the area, nearly 9,000 people live in it, and millions visit it each year. So it's an intensely used square mile (~1.12 square miles or ~2.9 square kilometers). Given this intensity, do you think that it would be reasonable, or even possible, for all 678,000 people to drive their own car to work and not experience crippling traffic congestion?
Obviously not, and the data reflects that:
Motor vehicle usage within the City of London is nearly a third of what it was in 1999. This is a result of moves like the city's Congestion Charge (introduced in 2003) and new Cycling Superhighways (introduced between 2015-16).
Cycling increased 57% from 2022 to 2024. Personal bike usage increased 36%. Shared dockless bike usage increased 4x and now makes up 17% of all people cycling. During daytime hours (7am to 7pm) cycling represents about 39% of all on-street traffic, which is nearly 2x the amount of cars and private hires. And based on current trends, cycling is forecasted to become the dominant all-around mode of transport within as soon as two years.
People walking, wheeling, and cycling now make up three quarters of all travel, up from two-thirds in 2022. This is a huge percentage.
For more data, check out the City of London's City Streets 2025 Summary Report.
Cover photo by Frans Ruiter on Unsplash
As I understand it, there is now something called hybrid work. The way this works is that on some days you go into the office and on some days you work from home, or from some "third space" near to your home. As a result of this, there are now more people, at least for the time being, that seem to be willing to live further out from large urban centers. And this is reflected in the data that the Financial Times recently published in an article about "how the pandemic transformed Britain's commuter towns":
In-person spending in the City of London has yet to fully recover. It remains below 2019 levels. Whereas a number of places that I am generally unfamiliar with (see chart) are now above where they were pre-pandemic. This, again, makes intuitive sense: more decentralization, more time at home, and less time in the City of London. Though we could also be seeing some low base effect here. Either way, my gut continues to be that a lot of people are still underestimating the stickiness of cities and the importance of in-person interactions.
Most of us are aware that most of our cities have traffic cameras, which are setup to photograph us doing bad things and then to send us bills in the mail. I can't say I've ever wondered how effective these camera systems are or how much they actually collect, but in case you're curious, here is one example from the City of London.
The camera is setup in the busy Bank Junction, which from 7AM to 7PM on weekdays has been off limit to any vehicles other than buses and cyclists since 2017. If you disobey the restrictions, you're hit with a £130 penalty, although if you pay within 14 days, the penalty drops to £65.
Between 2019 and 2021 (so during COVID, when traffic volumes were less), total penalties paid were £15.2 million. I don't know how many people paid on-time or paid late, but based on these numbers, the number of delinquent incidents over the past three 3 years was anywhere from 116k (everybody paid late) to 233k (everybody paid on-time).
I also don't know how many repeat offenders there where, which is why I said incidents and not drivers, but I'm guessing that there were more than a few repeat offenders. I wonder how many were taxi and Uber drivers.