Experts warn that slower buses risk driving passengers away: research cited by Transport for London (TfL) suggests a 10% fall in speed leads to a 6% drop in demand.

Passenger journeys in London have already fallen by more than 300m a year, or 16%, since 2013, despite the city’s population growing by almost a million people.

The city’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, does not play down the issue. “We’re really concerned about bus usage. One of the reasons, when you speak to commuters, is a lack of reliability. And why is it they lack reliability? Because of bus speed.”

A congested city, with ever more demands on road space, has left London facing difficult choices over which modes of transport to prioritise. But when passengers turn away from slower buses, the service frequencies and even routes are liable to be cut.

The fear is, as one industry figure puts it, “a vicious circle of decline”: slower buses; fewer passengers; and increasing pressure on services.

Recent research has also pointed to this trend being recorded in other global cities such as Paris, Brussels, Lisbon and beyond.

The growing wait for the London bus – in data

Guardian analysis of data from TfL, which runs London’s road and rail public transport network, reveals several indicators that the capital’s bus services have slowed, become truncated or less reliable. The Covid-19 pandemic had a sharp and obvious impact on the data, but there are clear downwards trends cutting through that period.

Across the network as a whole, the average speed in 2025-26 stood at 9.18mph – the lowest speed since comparable records began in 2013-14, and a 4.8% drop over this period.

Bus timetables have long been adjusted to reflect London’s traffic. A snapshot of routes analysed by the economist Alexander Jan, a veteran of transport planning in the capital, found scheduled journey times are now, on average, 30% longer than they were 50 years ago.

Yet even with that extra time built in, buses are increasingly failing to meet expectations. Delays have worsened: on high-frequency routes – those running more than five buses an hour – passengers now wait 22% longer than expected, up from 18% in 2018.

If unreliability is, as Khan argues, deterring passengers, the latest ridership figures are concerning.

Last year saw the first fall in bus journeys since the post-pandemic recovery. Between 2010 and 2019, annual passenger numbers consistently exceeded 2 billion; in 2024, they fell to 1.8 billion.

At the same time, the size of London’s bus network has shrunk. Between 2010 and 2019, TfL buses travelled an average of 487m km (303m miles) a year. Over the past three years, that figure has fallen to about 460m.

Across the network buses are slower, passenger numbers are falling, services cover fewer miles and waiting times are rising.

Those slower journeys come with a financial cost. Because drivers’ wages account for the largest share of operating costs, slower buses mean more vehicles and more staff are needed to provide the same level of service.

According to analysis by the Confederation of Passenger Transport, making London’s buses 10% faster would bring in an extra £70m a year in fares and cut operating costs by £214m.

Delays and cuts also hit the poorest in society, who are more likely to rely on buses for shift work, lower costs or lack of a car. In London, a bus into the centre costs less than half the peak tube fare, and housing costs increase with proximity to underground stations.

A global trend

London is far from the only city whose buses are slowing down.

A 2026 report by the Transport Strategy Centre (TSC) at Imperial College London found a “persistent decline in bus speeds” in the past decade in 15 networks in Europe, Asia and North America.

London’s slowdown is modest compared with other cities: in Paris, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, bus travel is more than 10% slower than before the pandemic.

Local factors vary, but the TSC report identifies a pattern: growing traffic and congestion and less space for buses, “diminished in part to the expansion of road space for cycling and walking”.

In Barcelona, the redevelopment of Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes pushed traffic on to surrounding roads, at lower speed limits, with no priority for buses. Journey times rose by more than 25%.

In New York, widening the protected cycle lane on Sixth Avenue reduced general traffic lanes from four to three; morning-peak bus speeds fell by 8% over the following year.

When buses are fast and reliable, as the TSC report concludes, passengers “respond with increased use, strengthening the viability of the system; when speeds decline, ridership suffers, undermining sustainability goals”. In other words, making buses better is, the TSC says, “a primary lever for achieving equitable, low-carbon, and resilient cities”.

Why are London buses getting slower?

In London, the persistent slowdown comes despite successive London mayors championing buses and bringing in better technology and vehicles. There was a great leap forward in bus performance in the early 2000s through Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge and investment in infrastructure such as GPS tracking, which massively improved reliability.

Livingstone’s fleets of new bendy buses were phased out by his immediate successor, Boris Johnson, a self-professed enthusiast – even if his signature New Routemasters proved controversial.

Since then Khan, famously the son of a bus driver, has brought in the Hopper fare, allowing multiple bus connections for the price of one journey, and is aiming for a fully electric bus fleet by 2030. Passengers on many routes now enjoy cleaner, quieter, cheaper buses, not least on the electric doubledeckers pioneered on the 63 route with better seats, skylights, wood-effect flooring and charging points – a nicer environment, at least, to wait in traffic.

Again Khan does not play down the issues: “We’re really concerned about bus usage. I’m fully aware that it’s poorer Londoners that rely on buses because they’re cheaper.”

Geoff Hobbs, TfL’s director of public transport service planning, says travel patterns have changed since Covid, with more home working, fewer trips to high streets and shifting demographics reducing demand in some areas. The growth of online shopping has also brought more delivery vans on to London’s streets, adding to congestion.

“School rolls in some parts of London are getting smaller and some schools are even closing. And it’s youngsters that make heaviest use of buses,” he says.

There is also “the double whammy of many more deliveries and delivery vans: you make less trips to town centres; and those same vans stop at places we’d rather they didn’t, blocking traffic”, Hobbs adds.

A Guardian reporter’s journey on the 22 bus was slowed – and often stopped – by many of these obstructions. On the 1 hour 47 minute journey, long single-lane queues around Putney and various lane and road closures from roadworks in Mayfair kept the bus still for 40 minutes in total.

But TfL and operators identify two factors above all others: growing pressure on road space and the sheer volume of roadworks.

Graham Vidler, the chief executive of the Confederation of Passenger Transport, says: “There are too many vehicles wanting to use the roads at popular times. You can account for that in timetabling.

“But what you can’t account for are unplanned and uncoordinated roadworks. And that’s probably the biggest thing that’s moved the dial. The number of roadworks seems to be mushrooming.”

Seb Dance, London’s deputy mayor for transport, agrees: “The biggest impact is roadworks and particularly unplanned roadworks. We’ve got a problem in London where we’ve got old infrastructure, whether it’s sewage, water, electricity, gas.”

A post-pandemic rebound in utility works, alongside road redesign projects and repairs to weather-damaged roads, has left more than 1,000 roadworks obstructing London’s streets on an average day.

Roadworks impinge on an increasingly limited road space, with five times as much of London now covered by cycleways as a decade ago – 450km compared with 90km. The conversion itself has meant lengthy works to build separate lanes – as well as move pavements and relocate bus stops – for surging cycling and e-bike use.

Hobbs says bus performances has had to come second to other considerations, including safety and the general city environment: “There are trade-offs to be done … London has become a more walkable city. There are more cycle lanes. There have been all sorts of schemes that make London, a better place to live. You go back far enough, Trafalgar Square was a sort of giant roundabout.”

Pedestrianisation of that square, once a key bus interchange, will be followed at Oxford Street, another important bus route.

Operators believe buses are at the raw end of such trade-offs. Vidler says the cycle lanes built in recent years “serve a really important purpose – but if the politicians decide to give more space to one mode it follows that others will get less. And if you’re putting in more cycle lanes, it means it’s harder for bus passengers to travel.”

Dance resists this interpretation. “Mainly there are just too many cars. So moving people out of cars to more efficient spaces such as public transport, buses and bikes is part of that solution,” he says.

Demand from other types of vehicles is growing, whether Lime bikes, e-scooters or the embryonic robotaxi fleets from the likes of Uber. But technology can also help buses find a way through. The next wave of TfL’s Fusion programme – “basically computers on all the traffic lights across London”, says Dance – will link the capital’s thousands of signals to speed up flow and give more buses priority where possible.

A lane rental scheme, charging companies by the day for the roadworks they carry out, was pioneered on TfL’s roads and is being extended to boroughs, incentivising work to be coordinated and completed quicker.

“We’ve got to make our buses more reliable,” says Khan. “Which means them going faster.”

The hot summer of 2026 is likely to have further affected bus performance. The mayor told bus drivers to take breaks and even to stay in the depot rather than operate a vehicle without functioning air-cooling systems. Contractual penalties for poor performance will be suspended during extreme heat, which is likely to be more common.

And for speed as heat, safety remains priority. Road speed limits across London are decreasing, with more 20mph routes and the 50mph on major suburban roads planned to be cut to 40mph before 2030 – potentially affecting even the express Superloop buses established by Khan.

For now, those orbital bus routes in the outer boroughs, rebranded and remapped under Khan, are seen as a success story. Instead of a doom loop of slower buses and fewer passengers, he says, “the Superloop has shown we can increase bus usage. If you provide a good product, people will use it.”

Claire Wright, TfL’s head of streets performance, says that despite the “marginal decline” in speeds, the bus network remains the most popular form of public transport in the capital, “helping people get around affordably while also delivering public health and air quality benefits from fewer people driving”.

She adds: “We’ll continue to closely monitor network performance to ensure the bus network serves Londoners as effectively as possible.”