To think car ownership is out of control in the UK

🙄fun = holidays/trips.

On a day to day basis i'd need about 5 hours extra in a day to use a bus for my life. (to horses, to work, to horses)

I’m a rural community nurse so will always need my car unfortunately, public transport just ain’t going to cut it there same for my colleagues and other home carers

i have to park on the street due to being in a HA house and having to take what they offered and it has no drive way so currently electric car is also out of the question for us

We only have one (large 7 seater because we have four kids) car. We would be fucked without it. Kids schools are a 10 mile round trip - even if we did have a reliable bus service, it would cost me more than £20 a day in bus tickets, and involve a half mile walk at the school end on top of the 20 min bus journey which inevitably would mean us standing up as well. I need to be home for 9am to start work. With a bus journey that would be impossible.

Add to that the clubs my children do every night. Plus the football matches my son plays all over the county and has to be there for 8am on a Saturday morning. My family also live 150 miles away. Costs me about £50 in fuel and 2.5 hours each way to visit them, as opposed to several hundred quid on trains and buses and God knows how many hours.

My husband luckily works very locally so he can walk to work, but if he didn't, he would need a car because he's a shift worker and no buses start before 7am or run after 8pm.

My children are all still young but I imagine all four of them will own cars by their early 20s because unless you work in the tourist trade (seaaonal) there are few jobs round here, and with the way the cost of living is, they'll still be living at home as well so potentially 5 cars here.

Not only that, public transport is Incredibly anti social. I don't want to spend a small fortune on sitting next to someone who stinks, perverts, smelling the weed wafting from upstairs hearing people's mobile music or their crap conversations at the top of their voices. I hate my kids catching the bus because there always seems to be fights or worse on there. They're filthy as well.

No. I'll stick to my car (which I can reverse and parallel park even though I'm a woman!) Which is clean, comfortable and convenient.

We've got 2 cars because we value our time above everything else. The public transport over here isn't too bad, but it's 1h to get to work on the bus vs 15 minutes in the car. Same if I want to get to the nearest shopping centre.

From your OP:

What I have an issue with is how ridiculous Britain's councils and governments are on car ownership. How cheap car ownership is. How anyone can distort the living environment around them with their choices

Now granted you did fill up the full checklist of car whinges but your OP highlights car ownership.

I note you haven’t addressed any of my points regarding your inaccurate claims either.

But lets face it, you already have what you want from this thread.

Also, some of us feel alienated from the anti-car movement by the Just Stop Oil crowd and their predecessors, who disrupted public transport (remember Canning Town), who probably drove cars to get to their protests, and who used oil for their signs; also the celebrities flying to climate conferences in their private jets. I bet even Greta Thunberg flies or drives when she thinks nobody is looking.

I know this thread is not about climate change, but many of us are yawning and deaf to any moralising is because in the last few years, there’s been so much finger wagging “you shouldn’t go about any business, travelling, pleasure or work at all, because it’s bad for the planet, it kills granny, it burdens the NHS, it causes carbon emissions,” etc, and often the voices saying it are the biggest offenders themselves. We’ve heard it all before, and to take the line that teenagers sometimes use, we didn’t ask to be born.

I've got to disagree on the PCP affordability piece.

I bought a car on PCP in 2016 and to get the same car at the same list is over £1000 more per year today. All other associated costs have jumped too. You'd have a point 10 years ago though.

I think until public transport is affordable people are going to have multiple cars. Everyone I know needs to drive to work as the public alternatives are either unreliable or top pricey

https://images.app.goo.gl/x2CnHUuKogxrxBiD8

this was out this morning on my home, I’ve seen a couple where I live. I think you can get similar with 2 seats at the back for children & its electric

ideal for short trips

Railcards arent a perfect solution i agree, i was referring to a poster who mentioned 3 people, so assumed a family

Enough hours in the day to drive for fun

I haven't read the entire thread, but you do know that the population has massively expanded right? So even if the ratio of cars to people is the same, there are MORE cars now than there were 20 years ago?

But I agree re public transport. Outside of major cities, it's shit. Not just in terms of regularity, but also the variety. We live on the London/Surrey border - so not exactly out in the countryside. With the exception of the golf club that DS likes to go to, not a single one of the DC's activities are reachable by convenient public transport. If we are willing to walk for 12 minutes into our local village, we can get a variety of busses ..... weirldy though, they all go to the same large town. So basically, we can get to that town really easily, but nowhere else.

That means yesterday DH took DS to the rugby club. Today I will take DD to dance class while DH takes DS to gym. I will take DD to her swimming less on Thursday evening.

DS used to do an activity that had a bus... one an hour, stopping at 6:30. So he could get there alone if he was willing to arrive 30 minute searly, but he couldn't get home.

My neice and nephew go to a school that is 4 miles from their house and there is no bus/train that even vaguelly gets them there without along, convoluted journey. We considered an excellent faith school for DD which would have been a bit further away than a local state school, and one reason we decided against it was that while she could take a train from our local station, if she misses the school bus from the station to school or is travelling at odd times, it's a LONG walk with no public transport options.

cars become essential for these situations.

i find public transport absolutely horrific. sharing space, waiting, people, cost.

Driving however, ive never been stressed. i'm happiest when i'm always "on"
I've driven all over Europe just for fun, i drive horse lorries, tow trailers, i can jump in any vehicle and just, drive. i'd rather be sat in traffic in the comfort of my cars than going a little faster (potentially) on a bus/train.

That said, ive not been on a bus since i was about 12 and can count of one hand how many times i've been on a train. public transport doesnt fit in to my life, not enough hours in the day for that!!

We shouldn't need rail cards. They're just to hide the "mug pricing" of overcharging those who don't care abut money (large employers) or those who are disorganised. We should have sensible realistic pricing in the first place.

Rail cards are also problematic in that they're not flexible. Most middle aged people aren't eligible for one on their own as they're not going to qualify for the "under 25" or "over 60" or whatever. So they'd be looking at "two together" or similar, which are no good if you're not always travelling with the same other person - they're useless for travel on your own or if you go with someone different.

Re cars, the purchase and fixed costs are "sunk costs", so once you have a car, the decision whether to drive or use a train is made solely on marginal cost, i.e. cost of fuel and parking against cost of the train fares. If you already have a car for other reasons, such as commuting, etc., then you're really not going to leave it parked at home and use a train for a specific journey that costs 3/4 times more than the petrol, even with a rail card.

But we don’t use the trains enough to warrant one.

Cars aren’t cheap to run or buy, but they are used all the time so worth the investment.

So you think LA works well?

So every bus has smelly alcoholics and dangerous dogs? Blimey

Rail cards bring the price down, cars aren't cheap to buy or run

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow

Maybe if the rest of the country had a transport infrastructure like London they wouldn’t need a car?

Nail on the head. Those living/working in London generally don't have a clue about how bad the trains and buses are out in the regions.

London doesn't equal the entire country. In lots of places, it's the "anti social" people who use buses, not "normal" commuters, shoppers, etc.

Maybe if the rest of the country had a transport infrastructure like London they wouldn’t need a car?

But they don’t. l’m in a big city. Our bus service has been cut from every 15 minutes to every 40 mins. How do you propose we travel to places?

To travel to London for 3 people on the train costs £500 quid. So we go on the car.

Simple really

"Plenty of public transport..." You're clearly speaking for yourself. Where I live public transport is virtually non-existent.

ANY attempt to reduce car ownership HAS to begin with a massive improvement of public transport.

Arguing over hens teeth there... plenty of EVs are bigger than comparable ICE vehicles and their extra weight is a real issue for our crumbling roads.

Then there is the loss of fuel duty revenue, which will have to make them more expensive to buy/tax/charge.... its a £27 billion loss if we all switched and its completely unfair to load that on the remaining ICE vehicles, as it'll be the less well off with them....

Not least in social care, where this vital role is done with people who, generally speaking, drive pretty ropey cars, as thats all they can afford... even a 2nd hand EV is totally out of their reach.

Whatever the issues with ICE vehicles, they aren't going to go away as much as Govt's might want.

Why are there more cars? Because of how our life is. For example both DH and I drive to work. If I got the train to work I’d have to get a train at 6:46am (but I’d also need to drive to that station as the earliest train from my station means I’d miss that one), to arrive at 8:00 and then walk 30 mins to just about make it on time. That isn’t feasible with a family. I’ve no idea how DH would do it, maybe 3 buses.
There’s just a lot more going on in life these days than there used to be, the kids do more activities (eg DS has football matches all over the city, DD has drama at the same time on a Saturday).
Sure, we’d be as safe in a Yaris as other cars but we also wouldn’t fit in a Yaris, DH is 6’3, DS is taller than me already. Plus the dog and some stuff if we’re all going out.

I can't say that's my regular experience, no 🙄. I don't get the bus on a regular basis any more because I live in rural Cornwall, but I got one at the weekend and the only dominant demographic I would say was "hiker". But I used to get public transport constantly when I lived in London, and smelly, antisocial people were a tiny minority.

That reminds me of my school days.

One bus every two hours that the last bus of the day was touch and go to catch after school. If I had an after school club there were no busses. The kids that had to rely on that bus to get home used to be allowed out of school 5 minutes earlier than everyone else to be able to catch it!

I got the train instead which was thankfully free, but was still only once an hour.