Why hubs are so valuable
Why getting transport hubs is so hard, but so valuable.
Customers rarely travel from A to B. They, for example, travel from A to D: cycle to a railway station, catch a train, change onto another train, then take a bus at the other end. Where someone switches from one mode or service to another is a hub. Hubs come in all shapes, sizes, and levels of complexity, but they all boil down to the same thing: interchange, the moment a journey stops being one continuous movement and becomes a handover from one system to the next.
That handover is the whole problem. The alternative most customers have in their back pocket is the car — a single, continuous journey in one vehicle, with their own music, their own space, and a strong sense of predictability. Even when the car journey takes longer, people often prefer it, because it offers certainty, comfort, and personalisation that a multi-leg public transport journey struggles to match. If something goes wrong on the road, it's still your car, your problem and in your control as you can choose different options . If something goes wrong on a connecting journey, you're stranded in someone else's system. Public transport isn't just competing with the car on time — it's competing with it emotionally, and hubs are where that competition is won or lost.
Why it rarely comes together
Given how much value is on the table, it's worth asking why joined-up journeys remain the exception rather than the rule. Part of the answer is structural: most hubs involve multiple providers — different train operators, tram operators, bus companies — each with their own commercial incentives. It's often unclear who actually benefits from investing in a smoother interchange, since the gains might accrue to a different operator further down the route. That ambiguity kills investment before it starts.
It doesn't help that most organisations are already stretched just running their own operation well, let alone integrating it with somebody else's. And despite years of apps, journey planners, and ticketing technology, the underlying experience often still isn't stitched together into something that feels like one journey. The technology has, in many places, outpaced the organisational will to actually use it that way.
Where this does work well, it's rarely by accident — it's the product of one organisation taking the lead and forcing the pieces to align. Major airports are the clearest example: hubs like Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt, Munich, or Heathrow have an enormous financial incentive to encourage transfer traffic, because filling planes on connecting routes is central to their business model, and a single controlling authority can harmonise how everyone else in the system behaves. Transport for London is another example of that same kind of coordinating leadership applied to city travel. What both have in common is that someone with authority over the whole journey decided to make the connection the priority, rather than leaving it to emerge from a patchwork of separate operators.
The deeper problem - nobody really asks the customer
Underneath the structural barriers sits a more basic one: most public transport infrastructure has historically been engineering-led rather than customer-led. It's designed around what's efficient to build and operate, not around what actually makes a connecting journey feel acceptable to the person making it. Remarkably little work has gone into understanding what customers genuinely want from a hub, as opposed to what's convenient to provide.
What they seem to want, in practice, is something close to what a good hub already tries to deliver: a function, not a size. A hub's job is to absorb the friction of moving between stages of a journey — shortening walking distances, aligning timetables, providing clear wayfinding, and integrating information so the transition barely registers. Done well, a hub is also resilient: it can absorb a delay or disruption without the whole journey unravelling, and it's simply a decent place to spend the ten minutes you're stuck in it.
Hubs don't just serve journeys, either — they reshape the places around them. Because they concentrate footfall, they tend to pull in retail, offices, and housing, and a major redevelopment can transform an entire district, as it did around King's Cross. Increasingly, planners treat hubs not as pieces of transport infrastructure to be tolerated, but as destinations and places in their own right.
The opportunity
The gap between where transport hubs are today and where they could be isn't really a technology problem — it's a leadership and understanding problem. The operators who've cracked it, largely in aviation, did so by having one organisation take ownership of the whole journey and by treating the connection itself as the product. Everyone else is still mostly guessing at what customers want from the moment they step off one service and onto another. Closing that gap — understanding, concretely, what makes a connecting journey feel trustworthy rather than risky — may be the single highest-value thing the industry still hasn't properly done.
