If London is more spread out than Paris, why don't Londoners travel more than Parisians?

Abstract

London and Paris are two megalopoleis with much in common but one main distinguishing feature, their densities: London is considerably more spread out than Paris. Since so many of their other features are similar, such as their population, their household structure, their employment structure, their household incomes, their car ownership levels, their public transport systems, their road networks, this separating characteristic allows a good test of some of the current theories about the relation of travel to land use, and about the influence of travel on the expansion of cities and especially about the changing relation between the central city, the inner core and the outer ring.

In order to show more clearly the nature of the similarities and differences, the available data for London and Paris are presented in rings by distance from the centre, using the smallest available analysis units for each data set with the appropriate geographical coding and allocating to 2 km wide bands. This avoids all the problems caused by arbitrary political units.

Analyses are presented to justify the contention that many of their features are similar, as noted above, with the notable exception of density. Paris may, in fact, be characterised as having a population distribution equivalent to that of London forty years earlier, though, because Paris is now expanding faster than London was then, this time lag is diminishing.

The daily travel patterns of the inhabitants are then presented, using the same distance from centre basis, using both distance travelled and time taken, and separating travellers according to the modes or mode combinations used in the course of a day. These patterns are taken from the various travel surveys which, with the 1981 surveys, now span up to 20 years.

The contrast between the traditional land use transport model philosophy, as embodied in the models operated by both city administrations, and as represented in the continuous space, monocentric, radially symmetric conception of the city in Angel and Hyman's model, and the philosophy of Zahavi with his emphasis on time and money budgets as the starting point of such modelling is discussed in the context of the results presented. Some comments on the possible ways this might help to illuminate the question of the expansion of cities are given.