Nov 13, 2019 1:00 AM

How to fix London

Overcrowding. Climate crisis. Housing crisis. Facial recognition. London has a lot of problems, but there are ways to fix the city for future generations

Mattjeacock / WIRED

Cities are becoming more crowded. The climate crisis threatens floods and high temperatures, while air pollution chokes residents. Public transport is overcrowded, and so are roads. But things are exaggerated in London, which has its own set of challenges.

The capital also faces stratospheric housing prices, the creep of surveillance tech, rising inequity, and the knock-on, distracting effects of Brexit.

There are no simple solutions, but there are plenty of wild ones – planting a million trees, making roads for everyone but cars, slashing working days to four – that have yet to be fully explored. Here's a few ideas for the current, or next, London mayor to fix the capital.

Plant a million trees

London is already a green city, in leafiness if not by environmental standards, with green space making up 47 per cent of our landscape. But more trees are needed to help battle rising temperatures and flooding. That's why the mayor is giving away 55,000 trees and funding further planting and parks – but, as some activists have suggested, we can aim higher.

"It’s difficult to say exactly how many trees or green spaces would be needed in order to produce beneficial effects on city microclimates and their inhabitants," says Heather Alberro, a social sciences researcher at Nottingham Trent University. "However, the general rule of thumb is, the greener the better." A million is a nice round number, though Alberro says we shouldn't stop with trees but also add green roofs and facades, and open more parks and gardens.

"The benefits of green spaces on air quality and temperature in urban spaces has been well documented, but they don’t stop there," she says. "Immersion in and even close proximity to green spaces has been known to boost physiological and psychological well-being, and crucially, provide vital refuges for rapidly vanishing wildlife."

Switch to a four-day work week

And what if we had more time to enjoy all that green space? There's long been talk of shifting to a four-day work week – it's even in Labour's election manifesto – and such a shift would reduce pressure on transport networks as well as give those who could work shorter weeks more time to spend in their local neighbourhoods.

Such a shift isn't easy, says Richard Brown, research director at the Centre for London think tank. This is especially pertinent given the cost of living in London. "People working at the top of their professions might be working all the hours that are sent because the market for their services is huge," he says. "But people with lower-paid jobs might need to work every hour just to live in London," Brown adds.

Londoners already work longer hours than the rest of the country, on average, adding up to an extra three weeks a year in the office, according to the Office for National Statistics – however, that agency pins the blame on there being more full-time work in London than other regions, rather than any real difference in working culture. Separate ONS stats suggest about a third of working Londoners would like fewer hours, with two-thirds expecting to be paid the same.

Perhaps to start the shift to shorter weeks, let those one-in-three employed Londoners lead the way, and encourage anyone else who can work from home one day a week to do so. They may inspire some of the rest with their joy of commuting one less day a week and follow suit, helping to ease the strain on transport systems, save cash on child care, and spend more time at the homes we all pay so much to rent or buy. And those who do work longer hours to pay the bills need help via a real living wage and lower living costs, rather than more hours.

Give buses priority

London's buses move too slowly. According to Transport for London (TfL) data, buses have an average speed of just above 9mph; during rush-hour, it falls to about 8mph; the worst routes are below 5mph. Simon Jeffrey, policy officer at Centre for Cities, says research suggests that a ten per cent reduction in speed leads to a ten per cent reduction in passenger numbers. "It just becomes less attractive," he says.

What can be done? "Prioritising the bus is key to improving reliability and punctuality," says Darren Shirley, chief executive at the Campaign for Better Transport. "We're seeing a decline in bus use in London, which is expected to be due to increases in journey times and reduced reliability. You wouldn't choose a bus to get somewhere on time in far too many parts of London due to problems caused by roadworks, congestion and delays in services."

TfL has made a solid start with its bus priority programme – more bus lanes and tougher enforcement, priority at signals, and so on – but it needs to go much further. Just as cyclists rightly call for segregated, dedicated lanes, so too should bus riders. Known as busways or bus rapid transit (BRT), separating buses from other traffic helps increase speeds making them more useful for commuters. The design of some, such as the Guided Busway in Cambridgeshire, lets the wheels lock into place for even higher speeds. Done correctly, BRT is like building a train line without rails; figures from the US Transportation Review Board suggests BRT costs $3 million (£2.3m) per kilometer versus $70m (£54m) for light rail.

The most famous examples aren't in Cambridgeshire but Latin America: Curitiba, Brazil's network is considered the first BRT, and has since been followed by similar ideas in Bogata, Colombia and Guayaquil, Ecuador. Brown points to points to Mexico City. "They have buses that run between the roads with platforms, much like a tram system," he says. "But then they can run on normal streets in urban areas – they've got that flexibility."

London does have something similar to BRT: on the East London Transit line running via Barking Riverside; it was initially supposed to be a tram – we should build more of those, too – then a BRT, but ended up being rolled out as a standard bus route with a few segregated sections.

To properly make use of the benefits of BRT, London will have to ban cars from some lanes or roads; putting people first means putting buses first. Sorry (not sorry) drivers, but at least shuttling more people about on buses means fewer cars on the road elsewhere.

Pedestrianise Oxford Street… and beyond

While we're kicking drivers off the roads, it's high time that Oxford Street and Regent Street were pedestrianised. The debate whether to close the two central London shopping streets to cars has been rumbling on for decades, and nearly happened last year, before Westminster Council dropped the plans amid local complaints. (Vehicles are already limited to buses and taxis between 7am and 7pm on all days except Sundays).

There are good reasons to close Oxford Street in particular to drivers, with nasty air pollution levels and reportedly high collision rates between buses and pedestrians. There's also more subjective reasons: London has no pedestrian boulevard to compare to Paris' Berges De Seine, Copenhagen's Strøget,, or large sections of Prague, and that means London lacks the cafe culture of such cities. It doesn't always work – the National Gallery has long been frustrated at the pedestrianisation of the road between it and Trafalgar Square – but the days when roads are cleared for festivals, Christmas shopping or even Extinction Rebellion protests are a delightful glimpse at a more relaxed, car-free future.

But London shouldn't stop there – and isn't. Various councils are trying small, limited pedestrianisation schemes, with Wathalmstow banning cars in its village and Crouch End trialling blocking off roads in the town centre after congestion from school runs.

For inspiration, we should look to Barcelona's pedestrianised superblocks, where cars have been not banned but deprioritised in favour of bike lanes, playgrounds and cafes. "Walking, cycling and mass transit are the cleanest, safest and most accessible options," Alberro says. "We need to reclaim our cities from the car and re-orient them around human and ecological well-being."

Ban facial recognition and other surveillance tech

Smart technologies have the ability to help cities manage everything from traffic to waste pickup, but in London there's too often tradeoffs with privacy, such as the development north of Kings Cross that used facial recognition without actually telling anyone and the repeated criticism of the Met Police's use of the technology.

Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, pins some of the blame for the spread of facial recognition on the distracted nature of parliament and the climate of austerity allowing public authorities and public companies to be effectively "off leash", running trials and installing tech that they may not get away with normally. "I think it makes us look like an anomaly on the global stage," she adds. "The adoption of facial recognition and other really intrusive surveillance techniques doesn't make us look progressive or innovative, but I think makes us look quite thoughtless and dangerous."

There are ideas that could, in theory, allow citizens to benefit from smart ideas without building a surveillance city – like Barcelona knowing when full bins need emptying or how Bristol can spot a tipsy reveller tripping into the water – but London should follow the lead of San Francisco et al and ban facial recognition, in order to encourage the development of smart technologies that can help manage the city without invading our privacy.

Go green

The cars that do remain on London's roads should be electric or otherwise low emissions; that's already being targeted via the Ultra Low Emissions Zone, but electric cars have an added benefit of being able to store energy – however, that's not enough to clear our air. "Switching to electric vehicles on a mass scale wouldn’t suffice, as the tyres and brakes of electric vehicles are still sources of pollution, and this wouldn’t eradicate the issue of gridlocks," Alberro says. "Moreover, the electricity used in order to power electric vehicles still often comes from fossil fuels."

Besides, there's more to energy than cars, and London needs a resilient, green power source. Such a big city may never be able to go totally off the national grid, but adding solar panels and battery storage to existing and new builds could help power micro grids, an idea trialled in Brooklyn.

Solar isn't the only renewable energy source. Small projects already exist in London to harvest heat from the tube and use it to power homes. New housing developments and office blocks should all be required to be at least partially self-powered in these ways, giving London cleaner, greener energy, as well as power resiliency. (Glass skyscrapers should be banned).

More density

Speaking of new builds, no list of ways to fix London could ignore the housing crisis. There's a long list of ways to address the high prices for rent and ownership, from the mundane and obvious to the more creative: build more, even if it's on the green belt; introduce rent controls; reduce landlord power and introduce longer tenancies; allow councils to borrow to fund more social housing, and get architects involved to make sure they're fit for living in.

There are more creative ideas, too. Brown suggests the idea of borrowing against the guaranteed income of housing benefits to fund new buildings rather than chucking away public money by placing social tenants in private rentals. He also points to trials of income-based rent, which ties monthly charges to what tenants can actually pay.

But Jeffrey at the Centre for Cities has another solution: tear out Victorian terraces and build five-story housing blocks. Not all the pretty streets need to go, but London has a glut of old houses that are poorly carved up for flats that aren't fit for purpose. That means the centre doesn't have as much density as it should – it may feel crowded, but at 4,542 people per square kilometer in London versus 10,194 people/km2 in New York or 21,498 people/km2 in Paris, it's practically desolate.

"London is one of the most sparsely populated major cities in the world – it's bloody empty when you fly over it," Jeffrey says. "We need to break this 1930s [building] pattern and go back to what London used to be like, which is much more dense… we've got incredibly valuable land and loads of it is taken up with semi-detached houses with big gardens." Suburban design means longer commutes, higher costs for public transport and roads, and fewer people can walk or cycle to work, he says.

To boost density, councils and developers are slamming in big towers on any small slice of land they can find. It'd be wiser, Jeffrey argues, to rip out some older housing stock and build five or six storey, purpose-built blocks, providing more housing that's purpose built, rather than crowding renters into buildings that aren't fit for purpose.

"It's not money, it's just culture – if we could get people to open their eyes to the fact that a semi-detached house is not a really appropriate way of housing people within five or six miles of the single most productive part of the entire European continent and most highly paid labour market," he says. But good luck convincing Londoners we should bulldoze even a small bit of the suburbs for cheaper housing and shorter commutes.