Probably better defined as in the number of people living within about 30 miles of Charing Cross. I.e. if about 3m people live in the central belt in Scotland and about 20m people live in the Greater London urban area then you would expect there to be about 6x more transport capacity on any given rail line or bus service. I would say very very roughly the trains in London are 3x longer and twice as frequent as the trains between and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. Busses are probably up to 6x more frequent than in Glasgow simply because the buses can't get larger so you need to run more of them to cope with demand. Trains and busses are still more crowded in London than they are in Scotland, probably because it would be physically impossible to have the same modal share of car journeys in London as you have in the central belt; due to the greater urban density there is not physically enough space to park as many vehicles. Transport investment was neglected in London in the 80's and 90's by the then Conservative administration who thought everyone would drive everywhere in the future. This doesn't work in London and as a result the trains and buses were overcrowded, unreliable and unsafe. Examples: Kings Cross Fire, 1950's slam door trains with no corridors. My train to school was a slam door train that regularly approached the max crush load of 7 people per m² and was the most unreliable line in Britain for most of the late 80's and 90's. Overcrowding on lines around Manchester and Birmingham has probably been forecasted decades ago but the government will not have done anything about it in the last 12 years because the urban northern cities don't vote Conservative just like urban London doesn't.