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
Matt Elliott writes a newsletter called the City Hall Watcher. And one of his features is something called Intersection Inspection. It is where he does a deep dive into traffic counts and modal splits for intersections across Toronto. This week, he covered Yonge & St. Clair in midtown, and so I thought it would be interesting to share it on the blog. (Thanks to Canada Record for the tag on X.)
Here are traffic counts for the intersection going back to 1984:
What seems clear is that Yonge & St. Clair is fairly evenly divided between cars and pedestrians. And it has been this way going back many decades. At the same time, though, the volume of cars seems to be declining. According to the above data, cars haven't seen a count above 20,000 since 2014. There does also seem to be a slight spike in bike usage recently (this is broken out further in Matt's newsletter).
Data is crucial to good city building and I don't think it is leveraged nearly enough. For example, take the intersection of Baldwin St and Kensington Ave in Toronto's Kensington Market. If you look at the traffic counts (which can also be found in the above newsletter), you'll see that 88% of traffic tends to be from pedestrians (79%) and bikes (9%). Only 12% of traffic is from cars.
With this data in hand, you might, then, ask yourself: Should Kensington Market be mostly pedestrianized? And in my opinion, this is a lot easier to answer when you have numbers in front of you telling you how humans actually occupy the area.