Cities keep copying London’s transport. They’re copying the wrong layer. The lessons that actually transfer: fund transit on agglomeration instead of minutes saved, respect the availability trap, ask the question you can’t answer and treat governance as a question of power.
The thing worth taking home isn’t the Oyster card or the congestion charge. It’s the question London never stopped asking: not “how do we run our trains better,” but “what is this city trying to become.”
Picture a delegation of London’s largest employers walking into the office of the British Treasury, not to ask for money, but to offer it. What they were volunteering to fund was Crossrail, now the Elizabeth line: a £19 billion railway, two-thirds of it paid for locally. In American transit finance, this is science fiction.
It’s tempting to file that under “clever financing” and move on. That would be the wrong lesson.
The reason London could get its business community to fund a railway, the same reason it lifted sustainable mode share from 52% to 64% while peer cities slid the other way, the same reason it could price the center of the city and survive the politics, is not a financing trick or a piece of technology. It’s an institution.
Shashi Verma, who has spent almost 24 years at Transport for London, most recently as its Chief Technology Officer, calls it “the secret sauce that no one thinks about.” Cities trying to copy London take the visible projects on top, the congestion charge, the Oyster card, contactless payment, and leave behind the institution underneath that made all of them possible.
Today’s letter is drawn from my conversation with Shashi at Mobility Forum 181, alongside Jim Aloisi and Fred Salvucci, both former Massachusetts secretaries of transportation. I cover what “integration” actually means, the mindset flip it produced, and four moves US agencies can run without London’s structure.
Click here to listen to the full 52-minute Mobility Forum episode on Spotify.
What “Integrated” Actually Means
TfL runs the Underground, the buses, and the light rail; it runs traffic on the road network and regulates the taxis and the river services too. As Shashi put it, it’s easier to list what TfL doesn’t touch: aviation, intercity motorways and rail, and the small local roads. With those exceptions, when you move in London, you’re moving on something TfL either provides or regulates. Singapore, through its Land Transport Authority, is one of the few places on earth that comes close.
14 separate organizations were stitched together to create TfL in 2000, and the instinct of all 14 was to defend its own patch. The Underground, the largest, held out and didn’t join the family until three years later, on the assumption that TfL was a passing fad. The old identities lingered even longer. When I interned at TfL in 2006, I asked a staff member in a Tube station what he thought of the organization, and he corrected me: he didn’t work for TfL, he worked for London Transport, the predecessor TfL had replaced.
The barriers came down through successive reorganizations, roughly every four or five years, each one building stronger central functions. Have the silos fully disappeared? No. Shashi is candid that each mode still thinks of itself as running its own show. But the trajectory is clear.
And the results are not subtle. Sustainable mode share, the combination of public transport, walking, and cycling, climbed from 52% in 2000 to 64%: a massive change. For planners, that number should land like a slap. In most cities, nudging that number up even a single point would have us popping champagne. London moved up twelve points while the rest of the world was moving the other way.
TfL introduced the congestion charge in 2003, long seen as the most politically challenging policy in transport. New York became the first US city to follow, and only in 2025. Why is a congestion charge so hard to pull off elsewhere? Exactly this fragmentation. Pricing the roads requires control of enforcement and the road network; making it survivable requires giving drivers a real alternative, which means transit investment; the buses are a huge beneficiary of clearing the roads. In most cities those levers sit in three or four different agencies: the costs land on one, the benefits on another, and the coordination problem is unsolvable. London put them under one roof.
The list of firsts is long: the Oyster card (2003) and then contactless bank-card payment (2014); London Overground (2007) and the Elizabeth line (2022); cycle hire (2010); the Low Emission Zone (2008) and Ultra Low Emission Zone (2019); the Night Tube (2016); and one of the world’s most influential open-data programs.
An integrated body can also set ambitious goals a fragmented one cannot. The Mayor’s Transport Strategy now targets 80% sustainable mode share by 2041. That is more than a transport number. It is the city deciding what it wants to become, and only an institution that owns the levers can credibly chase it.
From Running Trains to Defining a City
The integration produced something less tangible than a payment card, and more important: a change in what the organization thinks it is for.
“We’re not here to just run trains and buses,” Shashi argued internally in 2005. “We’re here to support a productive economy.”
This reads like a cliché until you follow it all the way down. Read properly, it relocates the agency’s entire reason for existing. It is the difference between an input-oriented organization, one that measures itself by the trains it runs, and an output-oriented one that measures itself by what the city becomes.
The idea eventually compressed into a three-word slogan: every journey matters.
Shashi’s sentence eventually won. The point of public transport is to enable productivity. And that single shift is what later let London ask its businesses to fund a railway: if transport exists to make the city productive, then the firms that profit from that productivity have a stake in paying for it.
Four Moves US Agencies Can Run Without London’s Structure
Here is the part for Monday morning. You almost certainly don’t have a metropolitan mayor or a fully integrated, all-modes organization. You can still take these.
Lesson 1: fund on agglomeration, not on minutes saved.
The standard transport business case rests on a cost-benefit analysis driven by the value of travel time saved. It makes sense, but it “doesn’t resonate with anyone.”
The Crossrail case was built on a different foundation: cities exist to create productive environments, that productivity is constrained by transport, and so investment relieves the constraint and unlocks growth. Shashi commissioned the academic work to make agglomeration benefits respectable.
That intellectual scaffolding is what let Shashi make the pitch to London’s business community: “I can see a world in which you pay for Crossrail and you get it. I can also see a world in which you don’t pay and you don’t get it. I can’t see a world in which you don’t pay and still get it.”
Contrast that with Kendall Square outside MIT, where Google, Microsoft, and the biotech firms would be the largest beneficiaries of a transit improvement, but are never brought to the table. The American failure isn’t just that business won’t pay. It’s that we never made the productivity argument that gives them a reason to.
Lesson 2: watch the availability trap
Asked why London is more expensive to ride than New York, Shashi gave a three-part answer.
First, affordability starts with efficiency, and everyone in the public sector owes the system an honest hunt for it.
Second, how much riders pay versus how much taxpayers cover is a matter of fiscal choice, not economics: there is no correct split, and the UK has chosen low subsidy and high fares.
Third, and most important: affordability is a real issue, but availability is the bigger one. Lean too hard on tax expenditure and you eventually have to defend that money against every other public need, and when you lose that fight, the service shrinks. The affordability problem becomes an availability problem, and the city stops working. That failure is regressive: the people stranded first are the ones without a car.
Salvucci sharpened the American edge of this. We cannot simply drop operating subsidy; doing so would shut down US transit overnight, even in New York. But the subsidy treadmill absorbs every agency: when the general manager doesn’t know whether he can run next year’s service, he is in no position to advocate expansion.
As Salvucci asked, how do you grow mode share if the economy is growing but what you’re offering is shrinking? That’s impossible. You can’t borrow London’s fare-funded model. You can borrow its externality lens.
Lesson 3: ask the question you can’t answer
Salvucci’s most pointed observation was cultural, and it was praise for how Shashi worked. Most transportation organizations, he said, go to academics “to tell us that we’re right, so we can market it to others,” not to admit “we don’t know the answer to this, help us.” Shashi did the opposite: he didn’t hand the experts a fix to validate, he handed them the problem and asked for ways to deal with it.
In his first week running Oyster, Shashi asked a question nobody at TfL could answer: how much does it cost to collect our revenue? An MIT student spent months in the accounts and came back with a frightening number: nearly 15% of revenue, and, on benchmarking with other cities, not unusual. Riders don’t pay a transit agency to collect their money; they pay to get somewhere. Spending 15% of revenue on the act of collection is indefensible.
Let people pay for travel with something already in their pocket. A 2007 phone trial, run on a Nokia clamshell before smartphones existed, with help from MIT’s George Kocur, pointed the way, and the pivot to bank cards made TfL the proving ground for contactless payment, now a global standard.
And none of this was a one-off. It grew into fifteen years of unusually deep and wide-ranging collaboration between TfL and MIT. The transferable lesson isn’t “commission a study.” It’s to build a standing relationship with a research partner you trust to bring your hardest, least flattering questions to, and then to keep at it with sustained effort and resources.
Lesson 4: governance is a power question, not an org-chart question.
Jim Aloisi, who as Massachusetts transportation secretary in 2009 led a consolidation of the state’s transport agencies, reframed the conversation around a single word: power. Who has the power to plan, to decide, to implement, and to raise the revenue to sustain the decision?
Governance structure determines all four, and it varies wildly: a state-run agency like New York’s MTA or the MBTA behaves differently from a municipal operator like San Francisco’s Muni, a regional body like BART, or the hybrids in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
Aloisi tied this to the “abundance” debate now running through American policy, the argument that the 1960s-and-70s instinct to diffuse power away from the Robert Moses model may have gone too far, and that some recentralization is worth reconsidering. TfL, he suggested, is the live example of what concentrating power in a city-scale institution can buy you.
Shashi added a sharper version: organize around economic geography. American local governments are mostly not drawn at the scale of real economic activity. As he put it, “There are cities, but they’re not truly cities.”
London inserted a missing layer, the Greater London Authority, between the national government and 33 municipal boroughs, neither of which could solve a citywide problem alone. The lesson isn’t “copy the GLA.” It’s that the unit of governance should match the unit of the problem.
The Uncomfortable Caveats
I’d be selling you a fairy tale if I stopped there, and that’s not the voice of this letter.
London’s great structural advantage is also its exposure. Because TfL was created by an act of parliament, it can be abolished by one. Shashi was blunt that permanence is the real risk in a system with no written constitution: success breeds complacency about funding support, and London’s transport institutions have been reorganized and re-funded in painful cycles for a century.
And yet more telling is what hasn’t happened. In a system where TfL could be undone by the stroke of a parliamentary pen, it has instead survived three mayors, Livingstone, Johnson, and Khan, across the full political spectrum. The reason is quietly reassuring: once TfL works, every incoming mayor finds it in their own interest to keep it working. A transport system that visibly delivers becomes a platform a mayor wants to stand on, not a liability to dismantle. Performance, it turns out, is its own form of permanence, and that, more than any statute, is what an American agency should be trying to build.
There is also a harder objection, the one a sharp reader is already forming: maybe none of this is the institution at all. London is a dense, monocentric city with a congesting core, exactly the kind of place that posts good transit numbers under almost any governance. There’s truth in that. But it cuts both ways. Plenty of dense, monocentric cities share the same geography and still can’t price their core or get a railway funded, because the four levers sit in four agencies: pricing, enforcement, the road network, and transit service. Density creates the opportunity. The institution turns it into results.
Then there’s luck. Salvucci reminded everyone that London was lucky to get Ken Livingstone, a Labour rebel who happened to be the right radical at the right moment, and lucky to get Shashi. His teaching maxim: if God offers you the choice of being smart or being lucky, take lucky.
And integration doesn’t make the tradeoffs disappear; it just forces them into one room. Reasonable people disagree on the magnitude, but the point holds: a single integrated body still has to choose between priorities, and it won’t always choose the way you’d like.
The difference is that, when the power sits in one place, so does the accountability for that choice.
Finally, the structure itself doesn’t travel. Massachusetts integrates at the governor’s level and lacks London’s intermediate metropolitan mayor. Chicago’s recent stabilization leaned on a governor with national ambitions who couldn’t afford to let the CTA collapse on his watch, and as Salvucci noted, the jury is still out on whether even that holds.
The Question Worth Taking Home
You cannot import Transport for London. You don’t have its mayor, its act of parliament, its fare-funded operating budget, or its quarter-century of reorganizations. The Oyster card and the congestion charge are the souvenirs everyone brings home.
The thing actually worth taking home is the question London never stopped asking: not “how do we run our trains better,” but “what is this city trying to become.”
— Jinhua
For more of my Mobility Letters: actionable insights on mobility, AI, and cities. https://zhaojinhua.com/newsletter/