Chapter 1: Introduction

At the beginning of the previous book,¹ I opened by emphasising the sheer scale of Transport for London’s (TfL) current operations in the context of British public transport provision, and celebrating the rise and reinvention of London’s transport as safe, clean and modern in the context of the capital’s wider reinvigoration after the 1980s. Those achievements still stand, and TfL remains a considerable player even on the world stage, but what I did not mention in the previous introduction was that after 2016 that seemingly inexorable rise had faltered. Customer numbers and revenues which had risen more or less continuously for over 30 years plateaued. At the time of writing, it is too early to decide definitively what the long-term effects of the arrival of the Coronavirus and subsequent lockdown might actually be, but it seems unlikely that they will significantly boost mass transit. So, the theme this time is quite different from the last which charted a decades-long episode of sustained exuberance that created the original unified system. Instead, this book asks what happens when systems and institutions decline and fail. It might turn out to be even more apposite for the present day than I had thought when I first began considering it in 2019.