The tube is back to 50% of its pre-pandemic weekday usage levels

 "For some, this is alarming, threatening to repeat past spirals of decline: fewer trains means many journeys become less viable, and rail less attractive. Ominously, industry sources say the areas most likely to suffer service cuts are subsidy-reliant branch lines in the north of England and rural areas – the very areas the government has pledged to invest in. Government figures show private car usage has already surpassed pre-Covid traffic, while public transport wanes. Chris Page, the chairman of the campaign group Railfuture, says: “The rail industry needs to control its cost base to deal with the realities of the pandemic, but cutting services will lead to lower rail usage and declining revenue.”

London, where weekday tube usage is now about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, up from a nadir of 5% in 2020, has fought to restore virtually a full timetable, despite heavy financial pressures. With fare revenues of about £5bn covering almost three-quarters of TfL’s budget, it depends more than most cities on effective public transport – for funding and to function without congestion, says Vernon Everitt, TfL’s managing director for customers, communication and technology."

Source:  The Guardian, 29th August 2021

Dockless bike sharing schemes in Shenzhen have led to a 13% fall in petrol consumption

"Before the advent of dockless bike-sharing in Chinese cities cycling accounted for 5.5 percent of transport miles. It has now more than doubled to 11.6 percent. This is according to White Book of Shared Bike and City Development 2017, a Chinese-language report from the Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Innovation Institute, an urban planning consultancy.
According to the Chinese State Information Center's Sharing Economy Research Center there are now 16 million dockless bicycles in the country, and each was used an average of three times a day.
The release-by-app GPS-trackable modem-equipped bikes are cheap and simple to use, attracting newbies to cycling. A report from Shenzhen's Transport Commission said that the city's 500,000 bike-share bikes had replaced nearly 10 percent of travel by private car, and 13 percent of petrol consumption."

Source:  Bike Biz, 26th January 2018