This is a great ideal, but there are often good reasons why we often don’t live where we work (and vice versa). Often, the things we value at the workplace (and make us productive) are different from those that we value where we live. For instance, at work, we often need to be close to and interact with our colleagues to produce whatever we produce (and to be close customers, etc). This means there can be large benefits from co-locating the production of certain goods and services (even different firms and companies of the same industry/profession co-locating, e.g. the City of London which has highly concentrated numbers of bankers, stockbrokers, fund managers, lawyers, insurance specialists, etc). So there significant economic forces pushing toward concentration and agglomeration of production - and this means that property prices/rents are going to be high in these areas. At home, we may value amenities such a peace and quiet, access to parks, good schools etc. This means that some commuting is necessary - as the places where we live and work are likely to be different (whether its achievable under 20 minutes I do not know). Obviously advances in communication technology, Skype, etc have made huge inroads in requiring less commuting (and more working from home), but they are unlikely to eliminate the need.

A complicated question! While there are certainly opportunities to reduce commutes through coworking and cloud commuting, the fact remains that London and other cities are what they are because of their ability to compress dense social networks of people together in space and time to share ideas. All of our lovely ideas about innovation spring from that.

That said, I think the notion of commuting daily to the same office (which only achieves a 40% peak utilization rate) is rather outdated. It will be interesting if neighborhood work hubs catch on (right now, they're called coffee shops), and I know that in Manila, Regus wants to open hundreds of new locations so that when the freeway traffic becomes unbearable, you can exit and work from the near branch.

People want more reliable, frequent service. Period. You can keep your WiFi-equipped buses.

But I agree with Chris that reducing uncertainty and anxiety should be a primary goal. Maybe Uber's greatest innovation wasn't making it possible to summon a car with your phone, but being able to watch the car drive to your location — people find that proposition overwhelmingly appealing. People would be more inclined to use public transport if you could reassure them ahead of time that the system will get them where they want to go on time.

Also, the great selling point of "mobility-as-a-service" or other multi-modal subscription schemes could be the availability of cars in the network. I think people would also be inclined to rely more heavily on public transport if they know there's a car for them when they need it. It's a security blanket for commuters.

Better integration of services - so that people don't have to work so hard to plan their journeys and join up between modes. At the moment it is down to the individual to act as the integrator between different services...

As an example of this - the oyster card in London led to an increase in use of public transport across London and at Heathrow because it made it easier for people.

One of the things that our research has shown us is that many commuters do not seem to optimise their commute and that they should experiment more with different modes of transport and routes.

Following anecdotal evidence that some people discovered new (and better) ways of getting to work following the February 2014 tube strike, we decided to find out whether people were optimising their commutes. The strike only resulted in a partial closure of the Tube network and not all commuters were affected by the strike. Therefore we could make a comparison between those people that we know were forced to find new ways to work during the strike and those that were not. This enabled us to see whether people chose to go back to their normal commute once the strike was over, or if they found a more efficient route and decided to switch.

We found that of the regular commuters affected by the strike, either because certain stations were closed or because travel times were considerably different, a significant fraction – about one in 20 – decided to stick with their new route once the strike was over. Assuming people vote with their feet, this suggests a significant proportion of consumers were not taking their best route to work.

We also looked as to why people were previously not taking their best route to work. We found that the London Tube map. In many parts of London, the actual distances between stations are distorted on the iconic map. By digitising the Tube map and comparing it to the actual distances between stations, the researchers found that those commuters living in, or travelling to, parts of London where distortion is greatest were more likely to have learned from the strike and found a more efficient route. Additionally, since different Tube lines travel at different speeds, those commuters who had been travelling on one of the slower lines were also more likely to switch routes once the strike was over.

Public transport is more critical than it's ever been, and perhaps more in danger. It's taken thirty years to evolve from the judgment famously (though falsely) attributed to Thatcher that, “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure ,” toward Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa’s assertion that “an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport." My biggest fear is that autonomous cars (which will happen because the the tech is maturing and the social mandate to save lives lost in traffic collisions will demand it) and private mobility services will fatally undermine public transport in favor of private mobility services. Public transport operators need to think of themselves as the managers of cities' total mobility systems, rather than the people who make the trains run on time. (Although that's still important!)

Sheer physics means cities like London will always need excellent train and bus service — there's simply no way to replicate their capacity. That's also true for Tokyo, New York, and a few hundred cities with the density and land-use that works hand-in-hand with public transport.

Public transport will continue to play an important role in major urban areas, however the private car - and one which can drive autonomously - currently has, and will continue to deliver, huge benefits to those living in rural areas, or for those who find access to transport difficult. Public and private transport solutions need to combine and work together for the benefit of everyone.

Where there are high volumes of people, there will always be a role for mass public transport. That is why we are committed to improving rail access to Heathrow - with new routes to the north, south, east and west connecting to some of our key catchments. We can't ignore new forms of road transport, and these can help to make more efficient use of individual vehicles and the current infrastructure on the road network.

“Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time,” Joel Garreau wrote twenty-five years ago in his book EDGE CITY. Back then, it was the cutting edge combination of cars and PCs that spawned the suburban edge cities of Garreau’s title. Today, the state-of-the-art in transportation is the smartphone, meaning the ability to discover and coordinate modes is more powerful than any single mode on its own, as reflected in Uber's $68 billion market cap. How will cities and transport agencies like TfL respond?

Globally speaking, I think the biggest change will be: more cars. A LOT more. I'm not excited by this prospect — in fact, I feel the opposite — but having recently studied trends in cities like São Paulo and Manila, the combination of rising middle class incomes and the separate of jobs and housing are driving unprecedented rates of auto ownership. New car sales in Manila nearly doubled between 2013-2015. Nairobi has seen the number of cars on the road double every six years, and so on. (And then there's the autonomous car hype.) So, that's the challenge.

The merging of private and public transport with the advent of driverless cars and uber type riding hiring/sharing technology. It could see the end of buses and taxis as we know them. It could also eliminate the need for car ownership.