An alien monitoring life on planet Earth over the past few months would have struggled to spot what’s been going on: Covid-19 is invisible, and its symptoms hardly distinctive. But what would have stuck out—even from space—was that a vast proportion of the world’s people and traffic had stopped moving.
It has been remarkable to witness because until this spring, for as long as anyone can remember, the world was becoming ever-more mobile. Give or take the odd minor blip for a recession, decade-on-decade there has been more international travel, and over the last generation trains have become more packed. Up until the start of this year, Britons were travelling abroad at the highest rate on record, taking almost twice as many holidays as we did only a couple of decades ago. And it’s not just in Britain: across our heating planet, the number of flights taken increased by 4 per cent between 2018 and 2019.
There was always a political row about some new transport brainwave—an extra runway for Heathrow? HS2 or not?—and in the background, a nagging sense grew that our hypermobility might not be sustainable, as experts warned that aviation emissions could wreck the Paris climate targets. And yet, in our globalised pre-Covid age, study, leisure, business, family and love created more ties around the world. We somehow came to regard the dispersal of people as being natural and inevitable. The serious options for cutting back on flights, and saving the planet—like taxing air fuel in the same way as car fuel, or more radically rationing them—were controversial in the extreme. An industry survey in 2019 found that 47 per cent of British people didn’t believe anyone should be discouraged to fly, even if it might have a negative impact on the environment.
As in other areas of life, however, the arrival of the first new deadly globetrotting pathogen in a century has turned the unthinkable into fact. Come March 2020, and suddenly cars were parked for weeks on end. Trains grew less frequent and rumbled along virtually empty. Planes were grounded. Emissions plummeted. We darted out of our homes for less than an hour at a time; in some countries, people couldn’t even do that. The American expression was perhaps the most apt: we sheltered in place.
Now, we stand at a crossroads. Once this pandemic is “all over” (whenever that might be) will we race back to rail, road and sky, eager to catch up on the holidays we missed? Perhaps. But it is also possible to imagine a second future, in which the pandemic and the resulting strain on transport and travel industries create a lasting change. Some airlines, airports, and routes will, without intervention, close for good. Having been forced by circumstance (and enabled by technology) to work from home, many more of us are likely to continue doing so. The business model of public transport could be forever changed. And something more fundamental may have changed in our own minds: we may have a new fear of enclosed carriages and cabins, or perhaps do a little soul-searching about how much of that travel was necessary in the first place.
*** So exactly how damaging would less travel be to our society? That depends, of course, on whether our perceptions of its benefits in the pre-Covid world stack up. And it’s important to ask whether they are about snobbery—or something more.
The template for our current approach to holidays was formed by the upper classes during the 17th and 18th centuries, when young men and women, usually in their late teens or twenties, would travel to Europe on a “Grand Tour” to see the sights, study art and culture, eat and drink, and then show off about it afterwards, not least through expensive souvenirs displayed in their homes. From at least the 18th century, travel has been seen by those with the resources to do it as a way to broaden horizons—touring the continent, perhaps to study the Old Masters, as artists like Turner and writers like Shelley and Byron did.
The idea of travelling to broaden the mind became practically a prerequisite of a refined upbringing. As historian Lisa Colletta writes in The Legacy of the Grand Tour, “a tour of the continent was seen as the ideal means of imparting culture, taste, knowledge, self-assurance, and polished manners.” But it’s hard to disentangle such claims from the cruder use of travel as a status symbol: if overseas tours achieved nothing else, they demonstrated that you could afford them. Until the second half of the 20th century, leisure travel of any kind was hugely expensive, and also slow—and so involved taking a break from earning money that none but the elite could countenance. (Summer bank holidays gave British seaside towns a shot in the arm from the late 19th century onwards, but until the Holidays with Pay Act 1938, most leave was taken unpaid.) In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, the Dorrit family come into some wealth and embark on a tour of Europe to confirm their new status as people of refinement. Travel was aspirational—it existed in the popular consciousness as a sign of wealth, worldliness and education.
Back then, it was impossible to experience many aspects of art and culture without making tracks, but is that still true now that screens can provide a window on the world? At the very least, high-minded lectures from trustafarians about lessons learned on their “gap yahs” have become harder to stomach.
And yet, research seems to confirm that foreign travel enriches. Social psychologist Adam Galinsky has shown, variously, that fashion designers who had lived abroad were more creative, and that when students were asked to remember an experience overseas, they displayed better problem-solving abilities. Galinsky told the Atlantic that travelling abroad even boosted participants’ “faith in humanity.” A study on Chinese tourists led by Tony SM Tse found that those who travelled abroad felt a greater sense of purpose in life.
But this good news comes with caveats. Across his studies into the subject, Galinsky has found that the associations with positive outcomes are much stronger for those who have lived abroad, and engaged fully with other cultures—a fashion designer working overseas is a different proposition from going on a stag do, or making a brief business trip to a faceless conference centre. The benefits of travel seem to come from dedicated cultural engagement, rather than the simple act of stepping onto a plane.
So the question becomes how much of the sort of travel we do is of the engaging or enriching type. Almost a fifth of British visits overseas in 2019 were to Spain, where those who grandly imagine themselves as “travellers” rather than “tourists” might argue travel is often done for the “wrong reasons.” Sure, some will visit the Alhambra or the Guggenheim in Bilbao, but—as there has been since the “lift off” of package holidays in the 1970s—there will be many more sun-worshippers heading for beaches but staying in hotels that provide English breakfasts and English newspapers.
After the 1990s, the budget airlines boom—both EasyJet and Ryanair were established in 1995—took things up another notch. They created a situation where a flight to Europe was cheaper, in many cases, than a train ticket to another part of the UK. And the cumulative growth in foreign travel became mind-boggling: whereas in 1960 only 8 per cent of the population travelled abroad, in the 12 months to July 2019, 64 per cent of us did. Each of us is also travelling more often, on average, but for shorter periods of time. Whether it’s a loved-up long weekend in Prague, or a hen night in Tallinn, the brevity of many trips implies that the ratio of cultural benefits to air miles is probably getting worse: there isn’t time to properly engage.
While tourism snobbery certainly persists—“cultural” trips and package holidays are still viewed differently—it is now much more about quality than quantity. Across the social classes, we now share the idea that overseas travel is a part of our lives and that it is a good thing: that it allows us to relax in a way we wouldn’t at home, and perhaps “broadens the mind.” And pre-coronavirus it was something we were deeply reluctant to cut back on: a 2019 report from Deloitte notes: “Many consumers prioritise holiday spending over other leisure categories, above all, presumably, when their budgets are tighter: 39 per cent said that they would prefer to save for a holiday rather than spend money on other leisure.” If Covid-19 jolts us into taking a different and more sparing attitude to travel, then that will represent a fundamental resetting—which could turn out to be one of the most enduring legacies of the virus.
*** Should we really expect that? Travel has always been intimately connected to disease. Humans and their movements are the vectors for infectious illnesses: we are, as much as the viruses themselves, the cause of epidemics. Just as trading routes spread plague-ridden fleas in earlier times, the 1918-9 Spanish Flu was turbo-charged by the mass movement of troops at the end of the First World War. Back then, however, there was no retreat from travel: sun-seeking holidays were looked on by the upper classes as a way to purge the after-effects of the virus.
Is there any reason to think it will be different this time? Well, in the 21st century, it is possible to point the finger at travel in much more forensic ways. The movement of Covid-19 from country to country can sometimes be traced to particular places, for example ski resorts, or trips taken by individuals—one so-called “super spreader” Steve Walsh, Britain’s first confirmed case, had travelled back from Singapore via a French chalet and was linked to a further 11 cases.
None of this is good for the allure or the image of travelling, and—more than that—there are tough immediate implications for its economics. To put it simply, most areas of transport beyond cars and cycling are under huge threat. BA plans to cut 12,000 jobs, EasyJet will let over 700 pilots go and abandon three of its UK bases, and Virgin Atlantic will axe up to a third of jobs. Ryanair, EasyJet and BA have all received hundreds of millions of pounds through the Bank of England’s Coronavirus Corporate Financing Facility to help them weather the pandemic.
The business models of airlines and public transport rely on putting a lot of people into an enclosed space. Decisions about social distancing stipulations—whether they remain at “one-metre plus”—will have an enormous impact. Some budget airlines haven’t been enforcing distancing, though the EU recommended at the end of May that they should. When EasyJet recommenced flights in mid-June, passengers were occupying full rows—Michael Fonso, the airline’s chief medical adviser, said: “Social distancing is simply not practical on a plane.”
The fact that flights operate between different countries, which may have vastly different infection rates and rules around quarantine, is an added complication. John Lennon, Dean of the Glasgow School for Business and Society, told me that this crisis could spell the end of the budget airline model altogether: “These airlines are all pretty much out of cash, they can’t continue. It’s not that there won’t be any flights but there will be less flights, less routes and they’ll be more expensive, and there will certainly be a lot fewer budget deals.”
Public transport, falling more directly under government control, is being instructed to enforce social distancing guidelines, a tricky prospect financially given the cost to run the services has remained largely the same. Christian Wolmar, a transport expert, said the continuation of the two-metre rule would have pushed the railways to a point where they couldn’t function, running at a maximum of just 10-15 per cent of usual capacity. While the new one-metre rule makes a “big difference,” it still only allows for about 40 to 45 per cent capacity. Meanwhile, there is the looming threat that the easing could be reversed if infections rise again.
Wolmar believes that the pandemic could threaten the future of public transport altogether if government does not act quickly to establish safe ways to use it, and support the industry where necessary. He points to data from France and Japan, where restrictions eased earlier and public transport is being used to a much greater degree, yet no new “clusters” of infections have been traced to trains and buses. Yet in the UK, rail use still stood at a vanishingly small 10 per cent of previous usage at the end of June. Car use, meanwhile, is as of 22nd June back up to 72 per cent of previous use, recovering from a low of 27 per cent at the beginning of lockdown.
The government has effectively nationalised the rail industry until at least September, suspending rail franchise agreements and taking on any potential losses. This seems remarkable given that this is a government of Conservatives who mostly came of political age in the Thatcher years, and yet it may need to be extended if line service closures are to be avoided. After all, with more home working now a habit, will passenger numbers ever reach pre-March levels again?
Across all modes of transport, there are, then, pressures on costs that could easily translate into prices going up, just as the recession hits consumers’ pockets. Without some kind of intervention, a future of less transport, accessible to fewer people, looms. Government decisions in the next few months could determine whether these industries can continue as they were—or, indeed, continue at all.
These are not easy calls to make. Budget airlines are bad for the environment and already rely on generous fuel tax policies to survive. Yet they are also big employers, and the air lobby is influential in Westminster. Is helping them out the best use of the government’s money? Public transport is a vital link for many, but some smaller bus and train services were already hanging by a thread. Can they be saved? Should they be?
The real question here, which government will need to consider carefully in the months and years ahead, is this: why do we travel in the first place? Why do we value it? And what moral imperative is there for it to be open to everyone?
This pandemic may remove any element of choice from the equation, if flight prices increase. It seems conceivable that within a few years elites will be travelling to space on commercial flights, while a sizeable proportion of the British population can no longer afford to fly. Depressingly, fewer flights may not even benefit the environment. Under a UN deal, airlines had agreed to pay to offset carbon omissions above a baseline, which was set as the average of emissions in 2019 and 2020. In June, the EU announced it would be backing international plans to change that baseline, given that this year’s figures will be unusually low. We wanted to cut emissions, but now they are nose-diving it seems we can’t “afford” to let them.
Even for some staunch environmentalists, the prospect that travel could be off the cards for many of us is hard to swallow. Roger Tyers, a research fellow at Southampton University specialising in public policy around climate and transport, has given up flying himself, but still sees enormous value in overseas travel: “Travel is innate—as humans that we like to explore, we like to wander, and we like to see new things,” and hopes that we may develop methods of doing so in a “sustainable way.” Of course, travel isn’t merely about flying. Tyers points out that before the pandemic, trains were having a renaissance, with plans for new overnight services across Europe.
*** When historians look back on Britain in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, they may see the era of mass travel abroad as an aberration caused by a combination of an aggressive business model and governments keen to increase connectivity at any cost. But that doesn’t mean that the future of travel has to be shaped purely by necessity, or by the fallout of this pandemic. It is possible, I think, to reimagine travel—to make it work better for us and for the world, and to keep the best parts while discarding the most damaging.
What that would look like would depend on your point of view, but it seems hard to argue that every bit of travel we took last year was strictly necessary. Videoconferencing will put paid to many of the business trips or conferences that were deemed essential in the past (along with carbon-heavy business class flights to get there). Quick group trips like stag and hen dos in Europe may be harder to justify with potentially higher flight prices and less connectivity to parts of the UK outside London.
Just as holidays were revolutionised by the introduction of a paid holiday law, businesses could contribute to a changed landscape for travel. If taking three weeks’ or a month’s holiday was seen as normal, a more expensive flight may be worth it—and it could replace what we might have spent on a handful of shorter trips in 2019. Some smaller employers were already offering extra days of leave if people travelled by train or boat rather than flying, including through a scheme called “Climate Perks,” dreamed up by British climate charity 10:10.
Public transport operators, too, could work with whatever “normal” comes to look like rather than fighting it. Wolmar points out that the idea of flexible ticketing, and offering discounts to those commuting a few days a week, had been discussed by rail companies for a long time but had never quite happened.
If this pandemic leads to long-lasting change, then transport will have to adapt. Indeed, many of these problems were already on the table before the pandemic struck. We were already facing an intractable conflict between our desire to fly and the threat of climate change. Changing patterns of work and demography were already threatening the current model of public transport. The solutions might be difficult, and might take time to find, but perhaps we needed a crisis to start the engines.
