Traffic
Source: Canva

Meet Amara. She is 17, lives in Camberwell, and just landed her first job in Covent Garden. It should be a 40-minute bus ride. Instead it takes over an hour. She arrives flustered, occasionally late, already wondering if the journey is worth it. This is not a story about one teenager. It is a story about what London's bus network is doing to its economy, and why Sadiq Khan's nationalisation plan will not fix any of it.

Khan's proposal to take buses into public ownership sounds bold. It is not. It is a multi-billion pound ideological fantasy wearing a hi-vis jacket.

London's buses are the lifeblood of working Londoners: young people entering the workforce, shift workers, cleaners, caterers, people who cannot afford for the city to grind to a halt. When the buses fail, it is not an inconvenience. It is an economic drag on the entire capital.

The situation is already troubling. Average bus speed dropped from 10.27 mph to 9.17 mph in four years. In parts of central London, you could jog faster. London TravelWatch found that just 1 mph more could save TfL between £100-200 million annually and generate £80-85 million in additional revenue.

None of which answers the obvious question: how does changing who owns the buses make them go faster?

It cannot. The problem is not ownership. The aggressive rollout of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and cycle lanes has pushed traffic onto main roads, clogging the routes buses depend on. Changing ownership does not unclog a single junction. It does not get Amara to Covent Garden on time.

Now here is the part that should make every Londoner laugh, or cry, depending on their disposition. Facing falling speeds, the Deputy Mayor for Transport, Mr. Lord, has announced that buses are to be cut in Westminster and central London. His reasoning? We have too many of them. That, apparently, is why they are slow.

This would be a reasonable argument if it had not already been tried. Between 2017 and 2023, London cut 22 million bus miles, roughly 35 million kilometres, from its network. Passenger numbers fell. Speeds kept falling. The roads stayed gridlocked. Perhaps the Deputy Mayor missed that chapter.

The buses are slow because the roads are gridlocked. The roads are gridlocked because of decisions made by the same administration now proposing to cut services and nationalise what remains. It is the political equivalent of responding to a leaking roof by selling the furniture.

The Government already subsidises London's buses to the tune of £1.2 billion a year. Khan wants to go further: take on every depot, every fleet, every pension liability, and hand the
whole lot to the public sector. That is not a plan. It is a reliable way to cut investment and stifle the competition that keeps operators honest.

Andy Burnham, no free-market ideologue, looked at the evidence and chose franchising. His Bee Network delivered a 14 percent year-on-year increase in bus ridership in Greater Manchester. If nationalisation were the answer, Burnham would have pursued it. He did not.

One more risk worth naming. Right now, if one operator walks out, London keeps moving. Under a single publicly owned company, one industrial dispute shuts every bus simultaneously. We have all lived through Tube strikes. Why would we hand that fragility to our buses as well?

Amara does not need City Hall to own her bus. She needs it to arrive.

Fix the roads. Restore the routes. Nationalisation is not a transport policy. It is a distraction from the real work that needs doing.

About the author: Festus Akinbusoye is a former Police and Crime Commissioner, and local election candidate for Abbey Road Ward on Westminster Council.