Conclusion and recommendations
With an ever intensifying pace of change, London’s roads and streets are facing a series of challenges and opportunities, from harnessing the potential of new mobility services, to enabling efficient movement of goods and services across the city. The recommendations proposed by this report, summarised below, will help achieve the Commission’s vision for London.
London faces a number of chronic problems that it has to address if it is going to retain its position as one of the worldís leading cities – with all the benefits this brings, not just to London, but to the UK as a whole. It needs to address its severe housing shortage. It needs to continue to extend its rail services. But it also needs to tackle the problems facing its roads and streets.
These latter problems might look particularly daunting.
If the city is not going to ground to a halt in a welter of polluted air and dirty streets, we will have to adopt quite different approaches to car ownership and use, freight and services.
More of us will have to give up the car parking space right outside our homes in favour of shared solutions. We will have to drive less and use trains, buses and bikes more. Businesses will have to develop a more coordinated and efficient way of moving goods around.
The Commission recognises that these changes won’t go unopposed, but does not believe that moving the city on in the way we have set out here is as difficult a task as it might seem. London has already made large strides: car ownership and use has declined, more of us are cycling and many more of us are using public transport. As the city grows and low density areas of the city become more populated so local public transport services will improve and local high streets and town centres will flourish, hence reducing the need to travel. Cycling infrastructure and wider, attractive pavements will encourage more of us to walk and cycle. New technology will make it ever easier to move around the city without a private car.
Achieving our vision for London will involve brave, skilled and farsighted leadership. But it is eminently achievable.
The following table lists the recommendations proposed in this report, highlighting the governance structures they are primarily targeted at, and the time by which they need to be achieved: short-term (present-2020) and medium-term (2020-2024).
| Recommendations | TfL | Mayor | Borough | Timescale | |
| 1 | TfL and the boroughs should continue to reallocate space in line with a clear road space hierarchy, using intelligent street design to prioritise the most efficient and appropriate modes by providing a combination of: adequate pedestrian space, new segregated cycling lanes and Quietways, priority bus lanes and rapid bus transit services, and consideration of where emerging shared mobility services sit in this hierarchy. | x | x | Short-term and medium term | |
| 2 | The Mayor and TfL should commit to developing a pan London, pre-pay smart road user pricing scheme by 2020. The scheme needs to reflect the internal and external costs and environmental impacts of journeys, while being fair, and easy to understand and administer. | x | x | Short-term and medium-term | |
| 3 | TfL should investigate short term changes to the existing scheme, including removing the exemption from PHVs, incrementally reducing the resident discount, introducing variable charging periods to better match demand, and exploring the introduction of additional zones in areas with high congestion. | x | x | Short term | |
| 4 | TfL should seek to develop its road network control systems to maximise the benefits of real-time data exchange with external partners, and review its strategic road network management objectives, to improve journey time reliability and manage air quality hotspots. | x | Short-term | ||
| 5 | The Mayor and TfL should develop a new London Movement Code and an accompanying public awareness and training campaign to guide interaction between different road users, with both existing and new traffic rules enforced by a dedicated enforcement body. | x | x | Short-term and medium-term | |
| 6 | Boroughs and TfL should continue to roll out different traffic management and restriction measures – such as filtered permeability, road closures, school streets and encounter zones – using local trial interventions to fine tune final designs, to meet the objectives of improving safety and encourage modal shift. | x | x | Short-term and medium-term | |
| 7 | TfL and the boroughs should agree new kerb space hierarchies to govern parking and kerb space allocation and undertake regular local reviews. | x | x | Short-term | |
| 8 | Boroughs should adopt residential parking policies as part of their Traffic Reduction Plans. These should include a charging regime that limits residential parking permits at sustainable levels; limits on the number of permits per household, with escalating charges for additional and more polluting vehicles; removing automatic parking permit rights when properties are sold; incentives that encourage households to give up their parking permits, such as Oyster card credit, discounted car club memberships or credits for mobility services; minimal residential parking provision on new developments. | x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 9 | Boroughs should consider introducing variable charges for non-residential short-stay parking with the aim of achieving 85-90 per cent occupancy. | x | Short-term | ||
| 10 | Using the kerb space hierarchies, boroughs should develop a robust cycle parking strategy including the reallocation of kerb space to cycle parking. TfL must ensure that the cycle parking strategy is a condition of eligibility for boroughs’ LIP funding and actively monitor delivery. | x | x | Short-term | |
| 11 | Boroughs should encourage off-site consolidation by utilising assets such as underused car parks to provide micro-consolidation and last-mile delivery capacity for SMEs, establishing zero-emission delivery zones around certain business districts, and leading by example by consolidating procurement practices. BIDs and business estates should also coordinate onand off-site consolidation. | x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 12 | Alternative commercial models, including a TfL-led scheme, should be thoroughly investigated for a freight consolidation network, with a view to developing a trial on a strategic corridor. | x | Short-term | ||
| 13 | Boroughs should encourage the take-up of cleaner fleets by considering exempting vehicles with higher FORS accreditation, low noise and emissions from the London Lorry Control scheme and allowing them access to TfL and borough-managed EV charging facilities in the daytime. | x | Short-term and medium term | ||
| 14 | The Mayor should introduce a cashback scrappage scheme as part of the ULEZ to target the scrappage of the most polluting vehicles and encourage the use of alternative modes of transport. | x | Medium-term | ||
| 15 | London’s traffic authorities should plan for the rollout of intelligent vehicle charging infrastructure as part of their kerb space strategies, and should develop financial mechanisms to spread grid infrastructure costs fairly across each additional charging point. | x | x | Medium-term | |
| 16 | The Mayor and central government should place more focus on particulate matter (PM) emissions in their anti-pollution strategies, and expand research and development activities to include non-tailpipe emissions. | x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 17 | Spatial planning and urban design policies for densifying places, and especially Opportunity Areas, should apply a set of strategic principles to actively promote non-car-dependent and healthy lifestyles from the outset. | x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 18 | TfL and the boroughs should ring-fence budgets and coordinate public realm investment through a design-led implementation programme, while LIP funding is allocated on condition of consistent street design manuals that set out long-term plans to restructure the streetscape, and using annual design review audits of major public realm schemes and maintenance activities. | x | x | Short-term and medium-term | |
| 19 | Good growth and design principles need to be championed at borough leadership level, with better integration between local authorities’ planning, architecture, engineering and design functions. As part of the good growth agenda, the Mayor’s Design Advocates should champion a series of exemplar public realm schemes to showcase good design filtering down to everyday streets and spaces. | x | x | Short-term | |
| 20 | TfL should progress with Smart Ticketing and create a form of mobility credits for MaaS to be available on existing payment platforms (Oyster and contactless) that enables users to purchase mobility services across London on a subscription and Pay-As-You-Go basis. |
x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 21 | TfL should trial the provision of a mobility services subscription as an extension of the Travelcard, initially targeting lower income key workers travelling at night. | x | Short-term | ||
| 22 | TfL should identify a low density test area to trial the replacement of a scheduled bus route with a demand-responsive transport service, and evaluate the impacts on operational costs, service quality and social inclusion |
x | Short-term and medium-term | ||
| 23 | The Mayor and TfL should develop an appropriate framework for governance of connected and autonomous vehicles, and in doing so develop a full automation strategy for transport in London. | x | x | Short-term and medium-term |