Do you think we are becoming more car dependent?

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No matter how many efforts to get people out of their cars and walking/cycling, town planning, and especially many of the new build estates popping up without infrastructure seem to be pushing us in the other direction.

I quit driving due to a surgery 2 years ago and apart from the dreadful mess the trains are in at the moment, I haven't looked back. I didn't change my diet, but becoming a ton fitter and slimmer was a nice side effect. I planned to return to using a vehicle but am in two minds now.

Granted, I have no children at home who need driving around, and I live close to some decent walks, but I have this feeling the way the country is heading, we are becoming less and less able to reduce car use.

Visiting my family last week I noticed my home town has become chock with traffic, most shops are out on retail parks now and there are very few cycling paths or places to walk. With so little attention to improving public transport I can't see this getting any better. And once you atart walking everywhere, you realise that there are more roads than pedestrian spaces in a large, typical town. And it stinks, which I never noticed so much when I was driving myself.

People discuss processed foods and sedentary jobs when looking for reasons to explain rising obesity, yet few people look at increasing car use as a factor.

I have recently been in temporary accommodation in a village 3 miles from my house (following flood damage) my village has a train station. New village only had a bus service You couldn't leave by public transport after 5.30pm, on a Sunday the buses came every 3 hours. To get to the station from new village you had a choice of walking down a dangerous but lit A road or walking in the pitch black on an old railway track (now cycle/foot path). So yes, you are forced to be car dependent if you need to work.
Also the buses weren't direct so to get to city where most of the jobs are, 18 miles away would take you 2 hours. Its a catch 22 because no one uses the buses due to them taking too long, they won't expand the service.

It's a planning issue. In the 50s and 60s we decided as a nation that the car was the future and our post-war reconstruction was predicated around car use, and our cities rebuilt around it. Other countries (notably the Netherlands and Denmark) took a different view.

Yanbu. There's people in my office who drive to work, get the lift up the stairs, the lift back down at the end of the day and drive home. No, they don't go to the gym or have a stealthy running habit to make up for it.

All my neighbours drive 1 mile to town. It's just me carrying bags back and forth.

I'm often amazed at how little some people are prepared to walk (disabilities aside). I had planned a day out with a friend and she messaged me saying her DH would drive us to the station .... it's a 15 min walk. She drives him to a pub which is in sight of her house.

I had a city break with four friends. We covered about 12,000 steps each day, which I think is low for a break like that. Two of them commented several times on the 'amount of walking involved'.

You see posts on here frequently .... "is a mile too far for my DC to walk to school".

So many examples like this. And I swear bus stops were more spaced out a few years ago!

Which is entirely irrelevant to you simply being wrong to claim that busses are a "big reason potholes exist".

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In London, there seems to be ever more cars, but also far, far more bicycles. The advent of electric bikes mean these contraptions with space for two child passengers are everywhere. So many parents bringing children to school on these types of electric bikes - and it makes so much sense with all the LTNs and CPZs.

Keep digging.

This discussion is around cars and public transport. Not HGVs.

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That’s the daftest thing I’ve read for a while. Town and cities are ever more congested, particle emissions are damaging our lungs, and you think the answer is less public transport and more cars?

I find it frustrating that our local council takes deliberate steps to make driving more difficult - resident parking schemes all over the place, high charges for cark parks, all kinds of anti-speed gubbins cluttering up the roads - when they know that almost all the jobs and significant amounts of leisure activities are in out of town developments that they happily gave planning approval to served by shitty unreliable bus services. They must know that if we did all actually ditch our cars like they keep telling us to none of us would be able to participate in the local economy because we wouldn't be able to physically get to where the council itself have decided it happens.

It's completely different in America. We have a reliance on cars here as our public transport is so poor. You're ok if you want to go into nearest busy town or city, but if you want a different one, you have to go to first and then move

I work 17 miles from my home.
22 mins in the car £6
1 hour 10 mins in fastest bus, 1 hour 50 mins otherwise £10
Train 2 hours £12 (and 2 buses)

That's each way (costs are return)
Why the fuck would I use public transport?

And I didn't include the 20 minute walk to the bus stop/train station from my home, and 20 from the train station, 10 from the bus stop for the office

So add on an extra hour for both sides.

More shit is spewed from buses than cars with their NOx emissions.

Come back to me when the UK is full of EV powered milkfloat buses.

We need London quality public transport in terms of cost, frequency, routes, reliability etc., FIRST, before we should even consider LEZ anywhere else.

That's the same in most places in the UK outside London and a small number of other large cities with good public transport options.

At the same time we scrapped most of our World leading railway network. Our politicians of that era were probably even worse and more hopeless than the current crop of incompetents.

Exactly. Carrot, not stick. Unfortunately most local initiatives outside of London get this arse about tit and you just end up with the situation where using public transport is difficult and driving is difficult, nobody changes their behaviour and everyone is unhappy and frustrated.

Most of the buses in my town are electric, they seem to work just fine. I’m certain they don’t need to be replaced by a fleet of taxis, of all things

Increased use of taxis instead of cars would make the roads more congested not less. The only benefit would be reduced need for car parks.

Yup, we're stuck with a Green led council in our nearby city. They're insane. They're planning to pedestrianise parts of the central one way system but have no plans as to where the traffic will go, so it will get stuck trying to get through residential streets. The only other alternative is a long diversion (over 10 miles) onto the motorway to get from the North <> South of the city centre. Wow - that's really green isn't it?? Causing traffic to travel an extra 10 miles just to get from one side of the city to the hospital at the other side! And no, the public transport can't pick up the slack as that's crap too. Buses are OK on the main arterial corridor, but if you live in the estates further out or in the outlying smaller towns and villages, it's basically unusable. Our village is only 5 miles out (not a tiny village, it has 7,000 inhabitants), but the bus is only hourly during the day M-F, no evening services after 7 and a 2 hourly daytime only service on Sat and Sun. The Greens don't have any plans at all to improve the buses. Their policy is all stick and no carrot. They want to make using a car as hard as possible, but seem to expect everyone to walk or cycle instead! Baffoons!

It is a shame. Everywhere you go traffic is busy and parking is a nightmare, which I contemplate and complain about while in my car, adding to the chaos 🤦‍♀️ We walk where we can, and sometimes trains are more convenient, but we wouldn't do without the car now. There would be no way to get DC to some of their after school stuff. Visiting my parents - half an hour in the car, god knows how long door to door to walk-train-bus-walk, visiting in laws would take forever and would require a long taxi too, work/school logistics are finely balanced, days out, holidays, etc...

@Badbadbunny that all sounds depressingly familiar.

We had similar except they went a step further and completely closed a number of the residential streets to cars, stating that they were being used as "rat runs" - a "rat run" apparently being a road that people drive on to get from one place to another. So now all the cars - which have not disappeared, because the buses are as shit as ever - go stop start for up to 40 minutes along two sides of a triangle rather than in a straight line, and air quality is horrendous across the area as a result. Other effects of those streets becoming supposedly leafy pleasant car free zones is that a couple of the small businesses on them went bust and other crime tangential to drug use went up because fewer people were around and about.

They basically took a situation and made it worse in every way, under the guise of "helping the environment".

There was a shift in parents WFH at the local primary school after 2020 and the number of cars lined up along the road since has increased despite abundant free parking within 2-3 mins walk and most families living within 5, 10, 15 min walk. The cars at the back end of the queue are no closer than the carparks.
The catchent is small so apart from the small number that move out of catchement it's not a distance issue.
It's a time or an effort issue.
Some parents find it more efficient to do the journey as a direct trip from work/ home via school rather than increasing time to do a return walk.
Some are shoehorning in the journey in as little time as possible within the working day.
Some line up along the road 20-30 mins before the end of the school day so that's usually an effort issue not time.

You'd have thought that the congestion would go down with WFH, but it's increased it and taken demand off the ASC which had previously spread the load.

You then end up with the spiral that older children don't walk themselves because "the road is too busy"

Like many suburbs, while bus routes aren't bad, they only serve access to the town centre and it gets expensive by the time you pay per child. The new tack-on estates are more disconnected from the community facilities and bus connections.

Planning guidence ignores the reality of human behaviour and that drives up car use.

I walk around my suburb unless it involves carrying something impractical or I'm pausing while passing through. When going into town, I park about a mile out in a free carpark and walk in along a cycle route if I'm not carrying more than fits in a rucksack.
I don't cycle functionally because of unsafe or impractical connections beyond the suburb.

I love not driving and having to walk everywhere locally. It is definitely a contributing factor to my fitness and mental wellbeing. We chose where we lived based on the fact that we can easily walk or take short bus journeys to school, nursery, work, swimming, supermarkets, markets, playgrounds, woods, doctors, shops, etc so our day to day life works perfectly being car-free. However, I do feel as though I will need to learn to drive soon as it is getting increasingly more difficult to get further afield without a car due to bus services being cut and trains being so unreliable.

Bus routes being cut/changed has made it dramatically more difficult to get around without a car in the last couple of years. I've never driven and have always found it to be reasonably easy to get around by public transport, but since 2020 our services have been cut year after year and now every journey takes longer or simply isn't possible anymore. I live in an area with many lovely walks, hills and woods which used to be well served by bus routes (and were often very busy!) but are now inaccessible by public transport, unless you want to walk for miles down busy roads without footpaths before reaching them.

@Essie274

I love not driving and having to walk everywhere locally. It is definitely a contributing factor to my fitness and mental wellbeing.

Same here. I moved my small business to our village so that I could walk to/from walk (about a mile) rather than driving. I'd previously had an office in a town 5 miles away that I could cycle to, but prior to that my workplaces were typically an hour or two away that were impossible by public transport. So I actively firstly got a job more locally and then started my own business more local still.

But not many people can do that.

We can't all live and work in big towns and cities, or other places with local amenities. Our village has lost ALL it's shops, cafes and pubs in the 27 years I've lived here. There's nothing left that villagers can walk to that they need! When we first moved here, we had a newsagents, 3 pubs, 2 convenience stores, a butcher, a greengrocer, a post office, a fish & chip shop, a bakers/cafe. All gone. So telling people to walk achieves nothing. Villages aren't going to walk to town 5 miles away to buy a newspaper or a pint of milk! Even if we had a good bus service, it's still a pain in arse (but we've not got a good bus service), so virtually everyone just drives everywhere. This isn't a tiny village either, it's 7,000 inhabitants. But 3 new supermarkets in the town to the North, and 3/4 in each of the towns to the South have just sucked all the trade away, along with online shopping deliveries, and one by one the village shops have had to close down. At least pre covid, we still had a convenience store and a couple of other shops, but the covid lockdowns and restrictions killed them dead as the supermarkets expanded their home delivery services.

Yes, in most places it's very difficult to do everything you want to do if you don't have a car.

We live as 'car-light' as we can. I cycle or walk to most places in our day to day lives and so do my primary age children. I had a bike trailer for them when they were little and it was great.

School, work, a lot of shops, GP, gym, pool - we don't drive to any of these because of the area we've chosen to live in combined with the fact that we're prepared to put a small amount of effort in and aren't afraid of a bit of weather.

The benefits of active transport are huge imo. I love the freedom, the exercise, the time outside, the deeper connections you build with your environment. Public transport is another story. It takes longer, costs more and is far less convenient. It has many of the downsides of driving and few of the upsides.

We still own a car and though it doesn't get daily use or even always weekly use, I wouldn't like to be without it. We use it to go to anything that's too inconvenient or too far to cycle - which is quite far for me, but there are limits to everything. Later I'll use it to take the cat to the vet, for example.