Connecting or dividing London? Evaluating the impact of the Elizabeth Line on job accessibility and spatial equity

• Accessibility is evaluated using two scenarios constructed from a single recent public transport timetable, created by removing the Elizabeth Line while keeping all origins, destinations and other timetable information constant. • In the scenario with the Elizabeth Line, job accessibility increases substantially across Greater London, with some outer London neighbourhoods experiencing travel time reductions of more than 40 per cent to key employment hubs. • A gravity-based accessibility metric and a modified Palma-style ratio show that accessibility gains are uneven but the scenario with the Elizabeth Line includes a modest redistributive effect. • Despite improvements in the with-Elizabeth-Line scenario, significant variation remains across socio-economic groupings, underscoring the need for complementary policies alongside major transport investments. In London, where a large share of employment opportunities is concentrated in the City of London and Canary Wharf, the public transport system plays a key role in connecting people to these jobs. With the opening of the Elizabeth Line in May 2022, parts of East and West London have seen improved travel times to these employment hubs. In this paper, we compare spatial accessibility to employment opportunities using two scenarios constructed from a recent public transport timetable: one representing current conditions with the Elizabeth Line, and a counterfactual scenario created by removing the line while keeping origins, destinations and all other timetable information constant. Using the r5r package for R, we generate public transport travel times and use these to calculate a gravity-based accessibility metric, allowing us to compare job accessibility across the two scenarios. We find that the Elizabeth Line improves job accessibility across Greater London, with the largest gains in Outer London boroughs such as Newham, Ealing and Redbridge, and travel times to the City of London and Canary Wharf reduced by more than 40 per cent for some neighbourhoods. In addition, a Palma-style ratio signals a meaningful redistributive effect in the modelled accessibility gains, although overall accessibility remains slightly higher in the least deprived neighbourhoods in both scenarios. However, as the analysis is based on a single recent timetable, it does not incorporate wider adjustments to other public transport services, and results should be interpreted with this in mind.