Experts warn that slower buses risk driving passengers away: research cited by Transport for London (TfL) suggests a 10% fall in speed leads to a 6% drop in demand. Passenger journeys in London have already fallen by more than 300m a year, or 16%, since 2013, despite the city’s population growing by almost a million people. The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, does not play down the issue.
One of the reasons, when you speak to commuters, is a lack of reliability. And why is it they lack reliability? Because of bus speed.” A congested city, with ever more demands on road space, has left London facing difficult choices over which modes of transport to prioritise.
But when passengers turn away from slower buses, the service frequencies and even routes are liable to be cut. The fear is, as one industry figure puts it, “a vicious circle of decline”: slower buses; fewer passengers; and increasing pressure on services. Recent research has also pointed to this trend being recorded in other global cities such as Paris, Brussels, Lisbon and beyond.
Guardian analysis of data from TfL, which runs London’s road and rail public transport network, reveals several indicators that the capital’s bus services have slowed, become truncated or less reliable. The Covid-19 pandemic had a sharp and obvious impact on the data, but there are clear downwards trends cutting through that period. Across the network as a whole, the average speed in 2025-26 stood at 9.18mph – the lowest speed since comparable records began in 2013-14, and a 4.8% drop over this period.
Bus timetables have long been adjusted to reflect London’s traffic. A snapshot of routes analysed by the economist Alexander Jan, a veteran of transport planning in the capital, found scheduled journey times are now, on average, 30% longer than they were 50 years ago. Yet even with that extra time built in, buses are increasingly failing to meet expectations.
Delays have worsened: on high-frequency routes – those running more than five buses an hour – passengers now wait 22% longer than expected, up from 18% in 2018. If unreliability is, as Khan argues, deterring passengers, the latest ridership figures are concerning. Last year saw the first fall in bus journeys since the post-pandemic recovery.
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