Economic and financial impacts of working from home and Covid-19 on the British public transport system

The Covid pandemic from 2020 has affected transport systems worldwide. This paper examines the British case, drawing on extensive publicly-available data to describe not only impacts on ridership, but also changes in service output, public expenditure, and some indicators of productivity, with particular emphasis on the rail system, and local buses within England outside London.

Expectations that the peak would ‘flatten out’—resulting from the pandemic and working from home—are not supported in the bus case and only partially in the case of rail. Following very large increases in public expenditure to enable continuation of services, that in the bus industry has returned to a broadly pre-pandemic level, while that for rail remains substantially higher. Whilst the pre-Covid cost structures result in a higher degree of short-run escapability for bus, it is also the case that bus has proven to be more flexible in the medium-term, notably in returning to the level of bus-kilometres per member of staff found pre-Covid. Implications for future policy are discussed in this paper.