To think car ownership is out of control in the UK

I last got on a bus a few weeks back with my OH to pop to our neighbouring area, dangerous dog at the back, man shouting at dangerous dog (looked like a massive staffy bully type thing), playing loud music on his phone.

Yeah, a nice experience, makes me want to use the buses more.

My sister's house is in a rural village outside Barnsley. I returned her library books when she died. Five hours return trip on public transport due to timings! This included using South Pennines community transport. The car is in for an MOT and I will be driving. Small car - not ULEZ charge.

I have spent the last 30 years being ripped off by sub-standard rail services! Nah, not happening mate. Comfort over air pollution!

I could have written this myself. I had this very conversation with a family member yesterday.

I learned to drive in the early nineties in my northern town. I drove for a couple of years before moving to London. Since 1995 I have not driven. Sadly, my sister died last autumn and left me her house and car. I travel to South Yorkshire regularly to check on her property. It takes me 5 hours door to door. This includes a tube journey from my zone 4 flat to London St Pancras. Over 2 hours on the train to Sheffield, then a local train to my birthplace (a former mining town in South Yorkshire). The journey costs me over £80 and this is with booking in advance and using off-peak services. That is the cheapest option.

My sister's house is in a rural location. Buses run every two hours on a Sunday. The nearest large supermarket is 5 miles away on footpaths. The car is now in the garage awaiting an MOT. I will be driving it back to London.

I am 54 now. Not doing the bollocks of long-distance train journeys. When the East Coast line is down the service on East Midlands Trains is terrible. No advance booking and I have had to stand between London and Sheffield recently.

I have no kids. I took my first long-distance flight to the Caribbean recently (on my own). I give zero fucks about air pollution. I have a second job that is night shift working. I can get to work in six minutes in a car. The 40 minute walk around canals, tube lines etc at 11pm is not attractive.

I don't drive (due to anxiety and just being rubbish at it!) but I wish I could. I'm a SAHM to two preschool age children and getting to places outside of the town centre takes two buses and 45-60 minutes, if not longer. And many lovely places are simply inaccessable without a car. It takes so much more planning (my local bus is once an hour), the kids are often tired on the journey back, and the cost adds up. I get why most people wouldn't choose that!

So have you shared your car between 5 adults in a household who all have different places to be? Usually with no public transport going there? How did that go?

I've lived in towns, villages and a city, and none had great transport links as I was on the very outer edge of that city, though that was clearly the best one. Most towns and villages in the UK have shockingly bad public transport options these days.

Three words

Lack of public transport

(actually that was 4 words)

Dont come and talk to me about London, Im a Londoner but we moved out and I had to drive to do so. We go on holiday all around the UK, different places all the time. We look at bus stops and laugh. Oh you can go to that tesco (only tesco) on a Wednesday afternoon and come back on the Friday. Thats handy.

Other places, last bus is around 6pm or so. Great

No stations within walking distance. Roads without pavements to walk along

My terraced house was designed for miners at the local coal mine which is no longer there. The streets designed for horses and carts. Can you imagine if everyone decided to own horses and carts in order to get to work! Carnage. Our houses were designed for people working within walking distance. That’s not really possible for most people. The wife would be home not working. I’m a single parent so not sure how that would work. They’ve also developed our town from what was once a small mining village to a huge Newtown with retail parks and about 8 primary schools feeding into the one secondary school - that’s also ran out of space and the buildings are dilapidated and waiting for a rebuild.

I need a bigger car. The amount of stuff that lives in my boot for my kids’ hobbies plus space for my weekly shop. My daughter would love for me to get rid of the car for to get a horse and cart though. That would be loving the dream. But it’s only the gypsie travellers going about their daily business on horses with carts. And even most of them upgraded to caravans many years ago.

Society has moved on.

Edited to add. When my DD starts college in September she will need to get a bus and then a train followed by a 10-15 minute walk to get there. We don’t live close enough to the train to walk there. The bust from ours doesn’t go to the college. It goes to the same city but then it would be a 40 minute walk from the bus station rather than the 10-15 minute walk from the train. She likely won’t learn to drive but many of the teens at that college will turn 17 and learn to drive because instead of leaving the house at 7am to get a bus and train to college taking about an hour an a half they could drive there in 30-45 minutes depending on traffic.

I doubt improving public transport to the level of near perfection would make much difference. People default to the easiest way of doing things and driving is frequently the easiest way, and conveniently externalises some of the costs on society.

Well you've clearly stated you're part of the problem. Are you getting rid of yours?

Yes it is, once you have the car it is a lot cheaper to drive than to use public transport and taxis, even if you want to account for servicing, MOT, tax on top of petrol.

Cost to visit my distant family by train: £120
Cost to visit my distant family by car: £65

Try living semi-rurally with minimal public transport available (let alone reliable), having to travel miles for work, school runs, shops etc.
cars are a must have here unless you don’t need to get anywhere!
we have 1 car each per adult, each have different needs and timetables - I have just changed my golf (R32 - do love proper cars) for a Volvo estate as we have a child, a dog, live semi-rurally and go camping a lot so we need the space.
i wouldn’t choose to live somewhere that either doesn’t have parking or decent reliable public transport (not an option around here).

The problem is, there isn’t reliable public transport everywhere, I live in a village with absolutely no public transport to the nearest town, there isn’t even a bus route that passes the village and I do own an evil Range Rover (granted it’s nearly 10 yrs old!) but it’s a necessity as the village entrance floods every time it rains and it’s the only way the flood water is passable unless we wait 3 days for the flood water to subside! We do have two cars, which are parked on the drive, again a necessity when there’s school run and we work in opposite directions. I imagine families having 4 cars, etc. is because of children living at home longer, I fully expect we will be a 4 car household in the not too distant future

Well if you have a population that wants to live like Americans, you can't complain when you end up like America.

I'm not sure about out of control but it is getting excessive, fueled at least partly by car-centric planning and public transport seeing lip service at best. My estate is ridiculous, cars and vans taking up every square inch of parking space and that is normal across SE England. Is it really necessary for each individual adult in a household to own one car each? I reckon we should have a law that states no-one can own a car unless they have somewhere off-road to park it. That would get rid of the PITA situation of double parking on primary roads shrinking them down to the equivalent of single track, and obstructing vision of drivers trying to turn out of side roads.

Decades of short sighted and crappy thinking has really f**ked us over in the UK.

Growing up we initially had a family car mainly used by my dad during the week and for everyone at the weekend, but that was easy enough as my mum didn't work and didn't really ever leave the house, and we were a short walk from school. Later she got her own car when she was well enough to go out places during the week. When I passed my test, I also got one as the buses were once an hour and only went to the centre of town and I'd need to spend about 1.5 hours on 2 or 3 buses to get to friends' and now DH's house that was a 10 minute drive away, plus I had to get the train to another city every morning and there were no buses to the station. If public transport is poor, and all adults in the house work, then of course more cars are needed.

As for people not walking to school, a lot of that is also because people are dropping off on their way to work that they need to drive to so it makes no sense to have to walk back 20-30 minutes to get the car when they could take it with them in the first place - especially with childcare timings. If you have to drop off at 9 and after school club closes at 6, you can't afford to not even be leaving home until 9.30.

Finance means everyone (almost) can own a car. Wasn't such a thing back in my day, you either had the money or got moped!

There wasn’t car finance , so if you didn’t have the money you couldn’t buy one. Car finance has made those shiny new cars available for everyone .

Not everyone makes those choices

Am sure it’s been said already, but yes bigger people = bigger cars

also housing - children are living with parents /house sharing more than in previous generations so more cars per household

The world changes, humans adapt, our mode of transport will too. Private car ownership doesnt need to contune increasing.

I actually own a 4x4, but I live out in the middle of nowhere. I need it to be able to see over high hedges when pulling out. When we first moved here, I had a little sport car, it was like playing Russian Roulette trying to get out from some roads.

I totally agree though, the younger generation are not happy with a little runaround to get them going anymore, they go from passing their test to getting a new car, and to be fair, this is being encouraged by parents, so you can't blame all of them.

It also seems that every couple should have their own car too, not like years ago when one car was sufficient. I don't really see what has changed, my husband and I used to work full time, he would leave the house before me and use public transport and walk part the way to work. I would use the car as I did the child care drop off and pick up. It worked and I don't see how it's any different now, everyone seems to be in su h a rush. Unless you live completely out of reach of public transport.

Another contributing factor to so many cars in the road is the number of offspring staying at home for longer due to house prices. We have just had a family move in where I live, there's the parents, one grandmother, and 2 children, one has the boyfriend living with them too. They have 7 cars and 2 work vans, fortunately they have room to keep them off the street. If they were living in a town, that would be one house with that number of cars.

I don't see things changing in the near future either, we now live in a world where people have what they want regardless of the impact on the environment, or their surroundings for where they live.

Getting city dwellers out of their cars is a good start for sure

Car ownership is not 'cheap', not for many of us, I only earn a basic Supermarket wage, so please don't say the cost of motoring needs to be more than it is already, if streets are 'clogged' that's just the modern world for you, in China they have traffic jams which last for hours, as the population of Britain rises by hundreds of thousands every year, there's going to be many more vehicles out there, that's just the way it is.

And yet here you are contributing

Car ownership is "cheap" - really? .....it must be nice to be wealthy enough to be able to say that....