A quarter more vans, fewer buses: how travel in Britain has changed

On 12 November 2026 the Department for Transport updated its daily figures on how Britain travels. We downloaded the raw file and averaged the daily values by week. The result explains what has actually changed on the roads over six years.

How to read these numbers

The department publishes not journey counts but an index against the pre-pandemic level. One means the same as before 2020. 1.25 means a quarter more. 0.87 means 13% less.

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Below are the averages for the latest full week, which we calculated ourselves from the daily values, with the same week a year earlier for comparison.

Vans are the one unambiguous winner

In the week of 3 to 9 November 2026, light commercial vehicles — vans — held at 1.25, a quarter above the pre-pandemic level. A year earlier it was 1.24, so the rise continues.

Heavy goods vehicles stand at 1.09, against 1.07 a year ago.

Cars, by contrast, have never come back: 0.97, 3% below the 2019 level, and 0.97 a year earlier too. All motor traffic together comes to 1.02 — and stays positive purely because of vans and lorries.

That is the real shift: there are no more people on the roads, there is more delivery.

Buses outside London are losing passengers

Here the numbers are unpleasant. Buses outside London sit at 0.87, or 87% of the pre-pandemic level. A year ago it was 0.92.

Five points down in a year is the steepest fall of any mode in the set. And what is falling had not recovered in the first place.

London: Tube and buses are standing still

London figures arrive with a lag, so we take the latest full week, to 6 November.

The Tube: 0.85. Exactly what it was a year earlier, 0.85. No movement at all over twelve months.

Transport for London buses: 0.83 against 0.85 a year ago. Slowly downward.

So London's public transport carries roughly a sixth fewer passengers than before the pandemic, and has settled there.

Rail has "recovered". But there is a detail

The latest full rail week runs to 1 November. The headline index is 1.03 — slightly more journeys than before the pandemic.

But since September 2023 the department publishes a second series: the same figure excluding the Elizabeth line. It was introduced precisely to keep the comparison honest, because the new line absorbed some earlier services and distorts the overall picture.

That second series reads 0.92.

A gap of 11 percentage points. Put another way, the "full recovery" of Britain's railway rests on a single line. Without it the rest of the network is still 8% short of 2019.

What about cycling

The dataset contains a cycling series, but its latest values date from 7 April 2023. The series stopped being updated, so there is simply no current national cycling measure here. If you meet a fresh cycling figure credited to this data, it did not come from this file.

In one line

A quarter more vans, fewer cars, buses outside London falling, London transport frozen at 85%, and a railway that looks healthy only with the Elizabeth line included.