Travel Times to Five Major English Cities
Published:
Communter rail plays an important role in land-value uplift, house prices and therefore household residential relocation. Below are commuter stations serving five major English cities within 45 minutes. Destination entry stations (in red) outline the main employment centres of each city region:
| City | Station names | Station owner |
|---|---|---|
| London | Peripheral stations within Zone 1 and Zone 1-2 boundary | National Rail only |
| Bristol | Temple Meads station | National Rail only |
| Birmingham | New Street, Moor Street and Snow Hill stations | National Rail, Transport for London, future Crossrail |
| Manchester | Manchester Piccadilly, Oxford Road, Victoria, Cornbrook and New Islington stations | National Rail, Metrolink |
| Newcastle | Newcastle Central, Haymarket, Monument and St James stations | National Rail, Tyne and Wear Metro |
Identifying stations on the periphery of the employment centre of London involved manually sifting through 71 spatially mapped stations within London’s Zone 1 & 1-2 to identify 26 entry stations. The next step was to identify plausible stations serving that travel centre, by designing a purpose-constructed isochrone algorithm. Firstly, this identified all potential departure stations for trips into London based on national rail mobility data from Association of Train Operating Companies, Tfl’s general journey planner Tranxchange timetable for tube lines and existing Crossrail timetables. Secondly, the fastest direct trip time from each point (given the same input day and arrival time) was retrieved sequentially using the Google Maps API service. As travel times are relative, i.e., specific to a day and time, the trip lengths within this analysis were calculated for peak-hour travel on a workday. The exact workday set was Monday 15.07.19, with arrrival to the first zone 1 station on an incoming rail travel line set to 9.30 am.
The scheduled travel times for the most outlying (measured in Euclidean distance) commuter stations were manually validated against National Rail’s traveller-facing Online Journey Planner. Where possible trains, which would not be suitable for working commutes (e.g. services which have only one fast train service per day) were also manually excluded.
These results are used in the policy report ‘Homes on the right tracks’ (Cheshire and Buyuklieva, 2019).