What happens next will depend on choices being made now, often in rooms most of us will never see. The next twelve months, almost everyone agreed, will be decisive. The data tells part of the story. Over the past eighteen months the figures have roughly doubled, and early numbers for this year suggest the curve has not flattened. The rest of the story is harder to measure: a change in mood, in what people say they want, and in what they are willing to pay for.
Experts say the most important thing is to watch the small signals: the opening hours that quietly extend, the new routes that appear on the map, the conversations that move from the margins to the mainstream.
How we got here
Still, the people we spoke to were broadly optimistic. Many described a sense of momentum they had not felt in years — a feeling that, for once, the direction of travel was in their favour.
The numbers are interesting, but the stories behind them are what keep me up at night.
Omar Haddad, reporting
It started, as these things often do, with a handful of people who noticed something the rest of us had walked past. A few years later the numbers are impossible to ignore, and the people who were early are now being asked to explain what comes next. None of this happened by accident. Behind each of these changes is a long chain of decisions, experiments and, occasionally, happy mistakes — and a small group of people stubborn enough to keep going when the early results were disappointing.
The view from the street
Officials are cautious about calling it a trend. “We have seen spikes before,” one analyst told us, “but what is different this time is how broad it is. It is not one city or one age group. It is everywhere at once.”
There is also the question of who gets to decide. Local councils, national governments and private companies all have a stake, and their interests do not always line up. The result is a patchwork of rules that can change from one street to the next.
