- Oh, and that is transportation.
And you know,
this is a picture of a lot of people using transportation,
but this isn't what it looks like
on a two platform here in London on a regular basis,
or probably not on a New York city subway platform
or anywhere else where you are in the world
where there is public transport.
It's about this with about one 10th of the people,
because people are frightened
to get back to London transport.
That's the biggest problem.
People are scared to go back again
because the campaign of fear was overdone.
There was a disproportionate response
to what should happen to the actual danger.
There's no science when it comes to making the decisions
of people going on the tubes and that's a real problem.
And there's also a complete lack of leadership
and a lack of communication when it comes down to it.
And so I think it's really important
to actually show you
what's actually happening with transportation.
So again let's go back to the numbers.
I'm a scientist and an engineer by trade.
The numbers always give you the answer
and that's the prob of politics today.
They don't stick to the numbers.
It's all about opinions and posturing and criticism.
I don't believe that's the way to go into politics.
I believe in a data based approach.
And so, again back to my graphs again,
where we're at a hundred percent here in March,
where everything is as you would expect.
And again, these are some great sources,
again from Google to Apple to city mapper,
to even the TFL bus and the tube schedules
to tell us what people are doing.
And we've got five different ways here.
And again,
we see everything at around a hundred percent
with a bit of fluctuation in March,
and then we see the lockdowns happening.
So again,
right around here is where we had
social distancing measures, schools, pubs,
aren't locked down here,
self isolation right before that.
And then we see everything dropped
to just really dangerous proportions here.
And again,
this is really the public transport usage.
So down here,
according to the TFL tube,
this is down here between two and 3%
of when that was being used.
Now I know this is true because I was on the tube,
pretty much every day through this entire crisis
I was on the tube.
And I was taking pictures.
A lot of you saw me post them on Instagram
and I was the only person on the tube.
So I can agree and confer that these numbers are right.
And we started to see them slowly coming back,
as some workers were returning
as the schools were opening.
But again,
it was pretty much past the calendar year
and some of the houses opening.
But if you look at these numbers,
they're still very, very, very low,
dangerously low compared to what we saw
bouncing back in some of the grocery and pharmacy sectors
and some of the retail sectors.
And we're getting back up to here where the tube is now
even this week being reported
as somewhere around 40% usage on the tube.
40% usage on the tube
that is not enough to sustain
the economy of a city.
Again,
the backbone of a city is its transport infrastructure.
Look at cities like New York city.
Look at London,
the oldest underground system in the world.
It needs to be working and it needs to be full
or there's no way we're ever gonna solve this problem
of the economic issue.
And so this shows me massive alarm.
And until we can get this public transport
back up to 60, 70, 80, 90%,
there's probably no way
we're ever gonna save this city
when it comes to an economic perspective.
And this is something that I really need to stress.
And unfortunately,
we're getting mixed messages from our governments
about what to do.
On one hand,
I see the mayor disinfecting his hands,
when he goes into a subway station,
I don't see him riding alongside fellow passengers
to show them that we can travel safe in groups.
That's what we need to do.
I don't see that message happening.
I don't see the leadership.
Again,
the campaign of fear went too far
and there's no science based decision making
happening right now.
And there's no leadership and that's the problem.
So people just have fear,
but it goes even further than that,
it's not just the tube,
it's, what's actually happening on our city streets.
And I spoke with a cab driver yesterday
and I asked him, I said,
what are you happening?
What it's experiencing as far as revenues?
And he said something similar
to what the comments said earlier.
He's like, I'm down 50% on what I was before.
And he said, let me tell you something.
He said, six months ago,
I asked someone in my cab
and they said I would do five meetings a day.
He said now I can only make two meetings a day
because the roads are paralysed.
They are blocked down because of these supposed COVID 19
social distancing measures.
And you've all seen it here in London.
And I don't know if other cities
around the world are doing it,
but they've taken our sidewalks,
which no one's using because no one's coming into London
and they've extended them into the streets
to give people more room to apparently social distance
when they walk past each other,
which they're not doing.
And this has actually caused massive congestion in the city,
which means people aren't even
able to get around in the city,
which means retail suffers.
Anybody trying to spend money is not able to spend it,
business suffers
and this is a massive problem.
And this is a short clip of a video of me yesterday
speaking with a taxi driver here in London,
and him explaining the frustration that he's found
with this massive congestion happening
because of these social distancing traffic measures
that are not based in any type of science
that are not based on any type of thought.
And here's a clip of me speaking with him.
All right, I'm in the back of a black cab here,
and I'm just asking this driver,
what's your name?
- Steve. - Steve.
Asking Steve,
why there's so much congestion in London
and why it's a struggle for him
to get his revenues back to what they were last year.
And we're looking at these social distancing pieces.
So they're trying to extend the sidewalks
to give more people the walk,
but there's nobody on the sidewalks.
And that makes you,
makes your job harder to do.
Is that right?
- Yeah.
- And that means they're closing streets down.
- The streets to make them it's the fuels.
- Right.
So it's like someone had a policy idea.
They went and did it,
but they're not watching it or seeing if it's practical
and it's actually hurting business and hurting transport,
which hurts the economy more.
Wow.
What would you do right now?
If you could just jump in the mayor's office
and make some changes,
how would you do it to get more Londoners
back to work?
(mumbles)
- Yeah.
- Who was someone else he was,
but that he needs to be tied to people back to work.
- Yeah, exactly.
I mean, that's all I see city doing.
He always seems to complain about something that they know
Bores isn't doing
And it's always someone else's fault,
but where is he on the front line saying hey,
let's get London back to work.
Let's encourage these businesses in the city
to get workers back here.
It always just seems he's you know,
sanitising his hands and telling you not to do something.
That's frustrating right.
- What would he want us to do is to come to we say Dunkin?
- Yeah.
I need some leadership.
And I mean look,
you have more business experience than he does.
It's true though.
I mean you've run a business.
You understand, you know what it takes to do that,
but he hasn't run a business.
For him it's just you know,
let's throw some money at the problem.
Let's do a regulation.
Let's ask for more handouts.
But then unless the city get, everybody loses.
Right.
- Yeah that's just gonna be an ongoing circle.
He's gonna come back to the government you know
and ask for more money
for the church there's not one back to
And what happens in January,
Does he do that again?
Just keep going. Just keep forward and forward
(mumbles)
- Yeah.
And I always find that those cab drivers
have a wealth of knowledge.
And again,
if he is frustrated,
just trying to get people from point to point in London,
think of all the ancillary economic ramifications of that.
So if I can't actually move around,
how can I spend money.