City Life, Transport and Change
Learn 20 B1 English words for city life and transport - rush hour, congestion, high street, regeneration, get around - plus by car vs on the bus.
Describing where you live, how you get to work and how your town has changed is guaranteed in a B1 speaking exam. This lesson gives you the British words for it – high street, roadworks, outskirts, season ticket – and fixes the two things that trip everyone up: traffic has no plural, and you go by car but on the bus. Twenty words, then what a bypass did to the town I grew up in.
20 words to learn
The 20 words
/ˈrʌʃ aʊə(r)/
The busiest travelling times, morning and evening.
Avoid the ring road at rush hour.
/kənˈdʒestʃən/
Too much traffic for the roads to carry. Uncountable.
Congestion was the argument for the whole scheme.
/ˌpʌblɪk ˈtrænspɔːt/
Buses, trains and trams. British. American: transportation.
Public transport there is two buses an hour.
/feə(r)/
The money you pay to travel. Not the same as a fee.
The fare went up twice in one year.
/ˈsiːzn tɪkɪt/
A ticket for unlimited travel over weeks or months.
A season ticket costs more than my first car did.
/pəˈdestriən/
A person walking. Pedestrianised = closed to cars.
The top of the street is pedestrian only now.
/ˈsaɪkl leɪn/
A marked part of the road for bicycles.
They painted a cycle lane that stops at the junction.
/ˈrəʊdwɜːks/
Repairs being done to a road. Always plural.
Six months of roadworks finished half the shops.
/ˌəʊvəˈkraʊdɪd/
With far too many people in one place.
The 7:42 is overcrowded before it leaves.
/ɡet əˈraʊnd/
To travel from place to place within an area.
You cannot get around that town without a car.
/ˈaʊtskɜːts/
The outer parts of a town. Always plural.
The retail park is on the outskirts.
/ˈhaɪ striːt/
The main shopping street of a British town.
The high street has eleven empty units.
/ˈlændmɑːk/
A building or feature that is easy to recognise.
The clock tower is the only landmark we have.
/ˌgriːn ˈspeɪs/
Parks and open grass in a built-up area.
There is more green space than there was in 1990.
/ˈderəlɪkt/
Empty and in very bad condition.
The mill stood derelict for nineteen years.
/rɪˌdʒenəˈreɪʃn/
Improving a run-down area with money and building.
Regeneration is a word that means different things to different people.
/dɪˈmɒlɪʃ/
To knock a building down deliberately.
They will demolish it in the spring.
/pʊt ˈʌp/
To build something. Informal but very common.
They put up ninety flats where the mill was.
/əˈfɔːdəbl/
Cheap enough for ordinary people to pay.
None of it was affordable for anyone from here.
/ˈbaɪpɑːs/
A road built around a town so traffic avoids the centre.
The bypass opened in 1994.
Now read the story
Story · all 20 words
The Bypass
The bypass opened in October 1994 and everybody was pleased, including me, aged eleven, because we were taken to look at it.
You have to understand what the town was like before. The A-road ran straight through the middle, along the high street, and lorries came through it all day. There was congestion from about seven in the morning. Crossing the road outside the butcher was genuinely dangerous and a boy in the year above me was hit by a van in 1991.
So a road around the outside was not a stupid idea. It was the obvious idea, and the campaign for it had run for nineteen years.
What nobody said out loud – or if they did, I did not hear it – was that a great many of those lorries had been stopping.
Within four years the high street had lost the greengrocer, both butchers, the hardware shop and one of the two banks. The through-traffic had been the customers. Take the traffic away and you have a very pleasant street with nothing on it.
Then in 1999 they built a supermarket on the outskirts, next to the new road, with a car park, and that finished the argument.
By the time I left for university in 2001 the high street had eleven empty units and a shop that sold mobile phone cases. The old cinema was derelict. The pub on the corner had closed and nobody could work out who owned it.
I want to be fair about this, because it is easy to be sentimental. Some of what replaced it was better. There is more green space now – the council took the old goods yard and made it a park, and it is a good park, genuinely used. The top of the street is pedestrian only, which would have been unimaginable in 1990, and there is a cycle lane along the river that my nephew uses to get to school.
And the town is quieter and the air is better and nobody has been hit by a lorry outside the butcher, mostly because there is no butcher.
The mill was the long argument. It stood empty from 1996, eight storeys of Victorian brick at the end of the street, and every few years somebody proposed something. A hotel. A museum. Flats. It was easier to leave it. Twice they nearly decided to demolish it and twice it was listed at the last moment by people who did not live there.
In 2019 a developer finally got permission to put up ninety-one flats behind the retained facade, and eleven of those were supposed to be affordable, and by the time it was built that number was four.
Four. In a town where the average wage is what it is.
That is the part of regeneration nobody explains at the consultation meeting. The building gets saved and the street looks better in photographs, and the people who grew up two roads away still cannot live there.
My mother still lives in the same house. She does not drive any more, and the bus into town is hourly, and the fare is two pounds forty each way. Public transport is the thing you do not think about until you cannot use a car, and then it is the only thing you think about.
She manages. She can get around, mostly, if she plans the day around the timetable, and my sister does the big shop.
I moved to a city and I have complained about rush hour and overcrowded trains and the price of a season ticket for twenty years, and I know perfectly well that having a crowded train to complain about is a luxury. Six months of roadworks on the ring road last year made me furious in a way that would have embarrassed me if I had thought about it.
The clock tower is still there. It is the only landmark the town has ever had, and it is on the sign as you come off the bypass, and most people driving past have no reason to turn off, which was always going to be the point.
Talking about your town is a guaranteed B1 speaking task. These are the words that make the answer specific.
| the busiest time for traffic | rush hour |
| too many cars for the roads | congestion |
| the outer parts of the town | the outskirts |
| the main shopping street | the high street |
| empty and in very bad condition | derelict |
| improving a run-down area | regeneration |
| They knocked the building down. | They demolished it. |
| They built new flats there. | They put up new flats. |
| cheap enough for ordinary people | affordable |
| travel from place to place in a town | get around |
Traffic is uncountable. No plural, no a:
✗ There were many traffics. ✓ There was a lot of traffic. / The traffic was terrible.
The countable word is a traffic jam: we were stuck in a traffic jam for an hour. The same applies to congestion, transport and parking – all uncountable.
By, on or in? This trips up almost everybody, because English uses three prepositions for the same idea:
by + no article, for the method in general: I go by car, by bus, by train, by bike, on foot (the odd one out)
on + a vehicle you can walk about in: on the bus, on the train, on a plane
in + a vehicle you sit down inside: in the car, in a taxi
✗ I came by the car. ✓ I came by car. / I came in the car.
✗ I was in the bus. ✓ I was on the bus.
Some nouns here are always plural: roadworks, outskirts, traffic lights, the suburbs, customs. You cannot say a roadwork or the outskirt.
British words you will meet in the exam:
high street = the main shopping street (American: Main Street)
town centre or city centre = American downtown
public transport = American public transportation
pavement = American sidewalk
petrol = American gas; the underground or the tube = American subway
Fare or fee? A fare is what you pay to travel. A fee is what you pay for a service or to a professional. A fine is a punishment. Three different words that learners frequently swap.
Getting about: rush hour, congestion, public transport, fare, season ticket, get around, overcrowded.
The street: pedestrian, cycle lane, roadworks, high street, landmark, green space, bypass.
Change: outskirts, derelict, regeneration, demolish, put up, affordable.
The rules: traffic has no plural. By car but on the bus and in the car. Roadworks and outskirts are always plural.
Exam task: describe how your town has changed. Use regeneration or derelict, one transport preposition correctly, and say whether the change was an improvement.
Now practise with the questions below.
Check your understanding
Answer the questions below. You will see instantly if you are right.
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