Recognising, understanding and addressing the environmental, network and social impacts of the student commute to university in the UK

There are 2.8 million students in higher education (HE) at universities in the UK. Almost half of these – 47% (Kenyon, 2025) – are commuter students: ‘students who continue to live at home while studying, rather than moving into student accommodation’ (Kenyon, 2024a: 116).

Unlike residential students, commuter students continue to live at home, travelling to university for their lessons, or to access services, social networks and support.

This gives a substantial transport footprint.

The average student is timetabled to attend classes on three days a week, during term time. This equates to 1.3 million students commuting to attend taught sessions at university, three times a week, every week, equating to 3.9 million return journeys.

However, university students are largely invisible in transport planning. Local Transport Plans and development planning routinely exclude students from surveys, personas, strategies and models. The National Travel Survey (DfT, 2025) and the Census (ONS, Nd), which provide much of the data that we rely on to inform transport planning, present education data in aggregate, failing to disaggregate between primary, secondary and tertiary, so it is not possible for us to understand travel to university, or being a university student as an occupation.

This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of participation in HE today, across society, government and the transport planning industry.

There are three key impacts of this for transport planners, policy makers and practitioners.

• The first is the network impact of this transport footprint, which we need to understand, account for and mitigate, considering service use and service provision.
• The second is the environmental impact, which we need to understand, account for and mitigate, if we are to achieve a net zero transport economy.
• The third is the exclusionary impact of a transport system in which a substantial number of users are invisible and, therefore, likely to be underserved, which we need to understand, account for and mitigate, if we are to achieve an inclusive transport system.

As such, this paper aims to raise awareness of commuter students, amongst the transport planning community, in order that the negative network, environmental and social impacts of these invisible commuters can be mitigated.