To not understand the obsession with driving / red flag if partner doesn’t drive?

I'd rather be a non driver than a bad driver. So many bad drivers out there yet not one person will ever admit they are.

This is a great response. 👏 One of the reasons I don't mind not driving is the awful behaviour of people once they get behind a wheel. Impatient, bad tempered, dangerous. Yet not one person will admit they're a bad driver. It's always other people's fault.

I live in a town only 40 mins train from London. Population 100,000. The bus comes once an hour - wtf am I supposed to do with that??? Would be impossible to not drive.

I agree with you unless live in London with excellent and cheap transport no option for to drive. Luckily I love driving

Theres a tbread at the moment where the OP (not driving) is complaining that her husband won't drive at 1am 3 times a week.

It might be the OP has medical issues... butvthis is the kind of thing that people want to avoid. The expectation that the sole driver will drive whenever.

Just to add to my previous posts on this thread, I live nowhere near London. I live in the North, purposely somewhere with decent public transport links. I've no desire to live out in the sticks. London isn't the only place in the country you can live a fulfilled adult life without driving!

You sound lovely.

As a society we have become too wedded to the presumption that the car is the default transport choice. This is one example of how that is viewed. Another one is that behaviour that would never be accepted in any other situation is normalised when behind the wheel. The alleged 'war on the motorist' which is largely just getting people to drive lawfully, for example.

I drive, DH drives and it's essential because we live rurally and there is hardly any public transport. Think two buses a day to the nearest town. When we get old and decrepit we will seriously think about moving because it would be impossible to live where we live without a car. If there was public transport I would use it rather than my car. Cars are expensive, a constant drain on finance and I think public transport is greener.

Exactly the sort of attitude from non-drivers that irritates the rest of us, the complete lack of recognition that it might be nice to have someone else do some of the “work”. And yes, on a four hour round trip it would be nice to have someone else do one of the legs so I could relax and enjoy the scenery. It’s not a red flag to expect someone to chip in ffs, it IS a massive red flag to just sit back and expect or allow someone to do all the legwork.

Who wants to date a man and then have to do 💯 of the driving and chauffeur him around like a teenage boy? No.

This!

Is this a competition to tick off every last square foot of Scottish soil? There are lots of places in Scotland that most people will miss out on in their lifetimes, with or without a car. There's only so many places you can visit during 28 days of annual leave each year. You might be able to name somewhere you've been that I've missed out on. But likewise I will be able to name places I've been that you haven't.

I've just tried sticking pins into random bits of Google Maps to see if I could find somewhere that was completely inaccessible without a car. Thought that Shegra (near Kinlochbervie) might count but then discovered that there is a dial-a-bus scheme covering the area which would allow a connection with the 805 to/from Inverness. So it is technically accessible. Again, as a tourist I can relax and enjoy the journey, it's a different prospect to trying to live somewhere year-round.

Many of us get to places on time even early without having someone wait on us to get there or need a lift.

That reminds me. Some years back on a freezing January breakfast shift at the hotel I worked at, several others were turning up late and moaning that their cars wouldn't start. Funnily enough my bicycle gets me to work on time far more consistently than a car ever would. Far fewer variables (such as congestion and parking) to worry about.

Exactly. It's very expensive to learn to drive — I never learned as a teenager because it was simply unaffordable.

I could just about afford lessons now, but brain fog and tiredness mean it probably wouldn't be safe. There's never been an occasion when I've needed to drive.

My partner has never learned either. Come to think of it, I've never been in a relationship with someone who could drive. About half my friends can't. It's normal and not commented on.

However, we do live in cities. If we could afford to move somewhere rural, we could probably afford to learn to drive, also.

You live in London.

Lots of people don’t, surprisingly.

Who wants to date a man and then have to do 💯 of the driving and chauffeur him around like a teenage boy? No.

Bear in mind that I actually did own a car at the time, but didn’t enjoy driving so rather than suffer 400 miles behind the wheel each way, I took the sleeper and used local public transport. I let the train take the strain, as the adverts used to implore.

I got the Fort William sleeper and the Jacobite to Arisaig. Stayed there about ten days, most of which was shuttling to photo spots to get photos of the steam trains. There are four public trains and four road coaches per day in each direction between Fort William and Mallaig (so a better service than many English towns get, according to this thread), plus up to two steam trains.

I also used the foot passenger ferries out of Arisaig to visit the small islands (Muck and Eigg I think). I then moved on and took the morning train to Mallaig, followed by a CalMac ferry to Armadale, a bus to Kyle of Lochalsh (change in Broadford, I think) and train from there to Inverness. Skye also has a reasonable bus network which I didn't take the opportunity to explore properly. It's not exactly every ten minutes, but as a tourist one doesn't need to be rushing around.

On a recent Interrail trip to Romania with my brother, the one time that we used Bolt (which is similar to Uber) was when there was a public holiday due to Orthodox Easter Sunday so the buses to Bran weren't running. Incidentally, visiting Bucharest really made me see how cars make cities unpleasant. If it's not the massive amounts of land covered in tarmac or the air pollution, it's the amount of noise the wretched things generate. Honestly, you'd think that the roads in the city had been designed by an American traffic engineer ("just one more lane will fix congestion...")

I’m actually a bit concerned that environmental concerns haven’t really featured in this discussion.

I am honestly puzzled why you would post this ridiculous question. Surely you realise not everyone on mumsnet lives in London with access to decent public transport or has funds to keep ordering taxis? And that, in very different circumstances to yours, one partner driving and the other not can place quite a bit of extra reliance and responsibility over the years on the one who does? 🙄

Tom and Jerry

No idea where that gif came from

Public transport where I live is appaling. I learned to drive when I was 40 as I could no longer cope, I couldn’t get DD anywhere without a taxi or hours on buses. I couldn’t change jobs as there was no PT to so many places.

i have a friend with 4 children. DH doesn’t drive. All of their activities fall on her, she also picks him up from work so he gets home at a reasonable time. It’s a lot for her.

I don't drive. It would be a very bad idea because of my ADHD, especially since I'm also in perimenopause and it really affects my ability to focus.

it’s entirely possible to be perimenopausal and still drive

Don't worry, I judge people who can't drive equally, man or woman.

DH doesn’t drive. He has epilepsy and until he met me in his 30’s was never seizure free for a year. He managed that long so has just never bothered. It’s a bit of a ball ache when the kids want picking up from places, sometimes in the early hours but it is what it is

I remember one friend being aghast that I asked for petrol money when I drove her to the lakes as “you’d be going anyway”, er yes but it would be nice to have shared the driving on the two hour journey let alone the cost.

Good grief, who needs to share the driving on a two hour journey?! That's a red flag, right there!

I haven’t read the full thread - but living in a rural-ish area, not driving could be likened to not reading/writing. It’s a basic life skill. I once posted on MN, mentioning I’d declined to date a very nice looking guy because he didn’t drive, and I got annihilated. But it somehow emasculated him. It would have been an imbalanced situation