to think that the news is demonstrating our over-reliance on cars

[Bennifer]

I was watching the news this morning watching the petrol queues, I saw a mum on TV talking about how she needed the car to pick the children up from school. Then there was a story about Nottingham charging people to park at their place of work. As the reporter was talking about this on the streets of Nottingham, there was a stream of traffic behind him, I didn't see a cyclist or a bus.

I just think we've got ourselves into such a pickle over transport policy where so, so many people are dependent on their car to get around, and it's lunacy. I know we all have different circumstances, so I'm not going to judge individuals, but as a society, it just seems crazy. AIBU?

I was one of those who 'absolutely couldn't live without a car', I used to drive to the shop down the road, I wondered how any mum could manage without one (and, I can walk to work). Until a year and a bit ago when I caught the mother of all flu bugs, my temp soared and I had a fit. I was in hospital for 11 days having all sorts of tests to rule out epilepsy. As a result of this I lost my license for a year. Well, in the beginning I would rather have cut off my arm than not drive, but I have got used to it. My hubby was all for keeping my car, but I insisted I had lived without it for a while so we sold it. I am due to get my license back any time now. I am lucky that I work locally and can walk, and I have my mum and my hubby with cars to give me lifts. Our bus service is actually quite good, although quite expensive. There has only been one time when the bus was late, 10mins when I had to go to dd's secondary school for a meeting, oops missed most of it (it was about Y9 options) luckily I had a booklet with the info.

I think this thread is demonstrating that, rather than an over-reliance on cars, any combination of public transport, cycling and walking is more expensive and more time consuming - ie unworkable - for the vast majority of people

Whatme,

Of course, I'm biased, but I think this thread is demonstrating quite the opposite, and that statistics demonstrate it. And how can walking be more expensive than driving? And cycling more time consuming than driving? A lot of the time, it really isn't.

I'm sorry to say this, but I think you're a little blinkered.

I think the reality is that the vast majority of people could be less reliant on cars (not car-free) if they thought in a different way. We all know people who drive to the paper shop, down to the gym, etc.

I've been thinking about this more, and I think the 'cost/ease/laziness' issues aren't just applicable to car use.

I work in London 3 days a week (bare with me, this is dull to make a point), because I have to use the tube for 4 stops each way, the cheapest way for me to get to work is to buy a monthly rail card with zones 1-6 with an extension to my local town. This means at lunchtime, I'll think nothing of jumping on the tube to go 1 or 2 stops to go shopping, however colleagues who get the train to Victoria (therefore can walk to the office so only have rail only tickets) and have oyster cards for any tube/bus journeys think it's odd I wouldn't walk (as it's about 20 minute walk to Oxford Street). I think, well, it takes less of my lunchbreak more childless shopping time and it's "free" as I pay for the travel card just for the commute, I don't calculate against any 'extra' trips I take.

In the same way, I could walk to Tescos from my house, and I will for little bits, but even though it's only a mile away, I'll drive for the convience of not having to walk back with shopping - the cost is rather irrelevant as I've already paid to learn, paid for my car, paid tax and insurance and it uses so little petrol to go so short a distance in my tiny car, it's not worth worrying about.

For those who use public transport, once you have a travel card/paid a flat sum, are you sure every journey you make is really necessary? Do you ever hop on a tube/bus that really, if you had a bit more time, you could walk? It's the same mentality as car usage, most people are lazy unless it's going to be expensive/complex.

Therefore, a good way to massively reduce the small journeys is to find a way to charge for them. So if insurance wasn't a flat rate, but a 'pay as you go' same as car tax, if you could be taxed just on the miles you did, it would make people think more about leaving the car at home. For small engined cars like mine, the cost in petrol for a short journey is so tiny it's not worth worrying about, but if I had to think "well, it'll be a fiver to go to tescos, am I only buying things I could carry?" I might walk. unless it's raining and i've straightened my hair

Very thought provoking Lydia, you might have something there.

Bennifer And how can walking be more expensive than driving? And cycling more time consuming than driving? I think Whatme meant that walking is more time consuming rather than expensive. And I think you are assuming that all car journeys involve people sitting in traffic jams in city centres for hours. I drive to work at 6.45 in the morning on an uncongested dual carriageway, my 10 mile journey takes 10 minutes. I would not attempt to cycle this as it would not be safe and would add a considerable amount of time onto my already long and busy day.

I have a car but I still walk a hell of a lot more than a lot of people. I kept the double buggy until just before DS started school as I would rather go on foot than drive and waste money on petrol / parking. We are walking distance of loads of shops but lots of my neighbours drive there and back.

When I lived at home (many years before I had dc's) I drove but still happily walked 3 miles to town and back.

But if we didn't have a car these days we wouldn't have been able to pop down to the coast last weekend. Days out and visiting friends would be a logistical / time consuming / expensive nightmare.

Driving is bloody expensive though, all in it costs about £150 every month for me (petrol / MOT / insurance / servicing / tax). I didn't queue for petrol by the way, I can walk to work / school and nursery.

GreenOlives, I think that is more what whatme meant, rather than what she said

I suspect what she meant is that driving is sometimes cheaper or faster than some combination of walking, cycling and public transport, but there are also cases where the opposite is true

I think the problem is that we live such fast paced lives now, we expect/ need to fit so much into one day that it wouldn't be possible to achieve so much without a car. I used to walk/ get the bus everywhere when my dd1 was little but when she started school and it was a 30 min walk with her whinging and whining all the way there and back and the winter was on its way I decided to pass my driving test. I also used to walk to work after dropping dd which was a further 20min walk but that meant starting work at 9.30am and leaving at 2.30pm.

Now I work from home but I work as a childminder so I look after 10 dc's per week for 45hrs per week, I do 2 different school runs which are 15mins apart I couldn't manage both schools without a car because the little ones I have wouldn't manage the walk and by the time we all got home they would have hardly any time to play and I would have next to no time to prepare their dinner before their parents picked them up, I'd also go to far less toddler groups as there are only 2 within walking distance plus in holidays I wouldn't be able to do as many trips. I know there are some childminders who don't have a car but they do not have the level of business that I have so the extra money I earn from having the benefit of a car more than pays for itself. It also means I can go to the cash and carry, do hospital trips in an emergency.

Of course there are times when the opposite is true and I think that if it is cheaper and faster to walk or cycle then lots of people would choose that option, the whole point is people tend to choose the most convenient way to travel and convenience is often weighted by the time/cost factor. A lot of the time the car will be the winner on that front though.

Our car costs a fortune, and we would happily do without it and indeed we have done for the past 4 years. We're both young, so the insurance alone is over £2000 per year. However, my husband works shifts, and my university placements are often impossible to reach by public transport on time (medical so 7am starts not uncommon). Public transport here starts at 6.30, and finishes at 11, and we're in a city.

Poulay Did you conveniently ignore the post that said my husband can't physically get daughter to breakfast club and to work on time? We have done test runs its too tight time wise, it doesn't work. I already cycle and it takes me 20/25 minutes, there is no way i could do it in 10/15! You are preaching to the converted.

Bennifer, I know of a few cases where walking would be more expensive than driving, but they involve having to pay for an extra hour of childcare/lose an hour of pay - often it's not just the cost of the transport that's important, it's what you have to give up/pay to make the time to do the walk.

As Lovemygirls shows, she could walk, but that would involve childminding less children or only children at one school. She could cope if she had to give up the car, but it would cost her a lot more than the car would.

I think it is obvious that sometimes having and using a car is the only logical thing, but it has also been widely recorded that the majority of car journeys are under 3 miles, so clearly they are being used a lot when they are not really needed.
I can appreciate lovemygirls reasons r.e her childminding, and thats fair enough, but saying that she got a car because her daughter would whine during the 30 minute walk to school..weeeeelll, I can get how it might make you want to have a car so you don't have to put up with the whining, but to me that is a bit of a cop out. A 30 minute walk is not that much, and a maybe a whining child needs to, er, put up with it! (Tough love!)

If the way public transport is funded and run was radically changed, and it was reliable and affordable, people like me, and many others would be happily using it, and not clogging up the roads with our erratic driving!
I would also cycle, if there were safe routes to cycle on, but the cycle routes seem to just run out halfway to my work, where it becomes a snarl of dual carriageway and kamikaze bus drivers.

I just think something is really wrong when people who are prepared not to add to the congestion and pollution of the roads, and want to find other solutions, end up having to drive regardless.

I quite like the idea of no cars, no planes, no oil fired power stations, no diesel trains.

My granny used to get the bus to the shops 7 miles away but walk home!Suspect she was hoping to be offered a lift and get a chance to gossip.
This would have been 1940s when a few people (doctors, vets) had cars but most didn't.

The pace of life must have been idyllicly slow.

The car is so much more convenient and it still is often cheaper than public transport.

Going to London tomorrow for 3 nights. Train was going to cost is over £300 for the three of us to travel there and back. cheapest I could get it was £155 if I went and bought a rail card. The petrol for the car won't cost us that much and it will take us slightly less time and we can travel at a time we chose.

"But if we didn't have a car these days we wouldn't have been able to pop down to the coast last weekend."

Weekend car hire from Enterprise costs from about £40 for friday night to monday night. And if you do 4 hires you get the 5th one free. What I do is make sure we pack loads into the weekends we'll have a car.

One thing on this thread I've noticed is lots of people complaining about PT being expensive. I think there's a problem with walk-up pricing across the board because it prevents too many people from seeing PT as an option. For example, my long term ticket costs are about a third of what you'd pay if you just paid for a return every day.

I think that councils should subsidise PT more. I'd like to see PT cost less than the equivalent petrol cost. Though with petrol rising at the current rate that may happen fairly soon without any changes. I reckon it's already true for my commute.

See your point OP,but to get people out of cars public transport needs to be a)coordinated and b)actually available in the first place.

I live in a village 30 miles from work - wasn't originally the plan but my firm moved.

I'd happily reduce my car use by WFH one day a week, but my boss is the old school and associates regular WFH as skiving. Which is not uncommon.
I have done the journey by train which takes 2 1/2 hours each way and means DH would have to pick the DDs up as I wouldn't be in time.
Car journey takes 40 minutes.

I try to walk or bus it on the 2 days that I don't work though.

What we need is investment in the train & bus services, and round here they're being decimated by the county council. And a sea change in employment policy to encourage WFH if it can be done.

But we can't legislate against human nature to be lazy sometimes.

And I don't hold out much hope of the council improving bus services anytime soon. They're investing in superfast broadband so at least the OAPs who have no bus service now can watch YouTube as they starve to death :(

Here endeth the lesson for today.

Telling story:
Colleage moved to North Carolina to be with his American wife.

First weekend there he decided to go for a walk. And no less than six SUVs pulled up by him to ask if he was OK.

Says a lot.

I only passed my driving test in December. Back then all the driving threads about how women were 'pathetic' not to learn both annoyed me and spurred me on to get lessons.

Now there are threads saying we use cars too much. sigh

Of course they are not mutually exclusive and actually are both sensible (to learn to drive but not to drive too much), but I can see how it all makes people feel defensive about their choices.

I hadn't really needed to drive when I lived in Bath or London, so didn't bother due to the cost. Now it's more useful if my husband is away, but when he's here, yes we use the car in the week to get to work (he tends to drive as it's his company car), but then I find myself barely ever driving, so we end up using it for short trips so I don't fall out of practice.

Public transport here is pretty crap. There are a lot of buses but none to my particular end of town without making a ten min walk which means I might as well walk the whole way. I can only get a train to work if I have a perfect nursery drop off and if there are no delays (there usually are and a mere 1 min delay affects changing trains). Trains to London are good, but I don't work there.

On days off when I don't have the car, we walk everywhere. I enjoy it, but it's quite hilly in my town and even a two-mile walk can get a bit tiring at the end of a long day. I do it... but if I had the car, I'm not so sure I would.

I seem to know a lot of people who planned their lives so that they will be dependent on their car. And then complain when that dependence creates problems for them. That's what gets me. People who could afford to live close to work but instead of town/city they fancied DesRes villages or hamlets with no shops or school. Or they chose a school that was 6 miles away rather than one of the merely "Satisfactory" rated alternatives in walking distance. They have traded off poor transport for a perceived quality of life gained from living in the sticks. Fair enough they expressed a preference for quiet dark night skies & pretty views of inaccessible rolling fields, but it's obvious what the price of that will be.

Then there are those who simply can't conceive of walking anywhere more than 3 minutes away, esp. if raining. They don't seem to even own suitable footwear. We live 15 min. walk from town centre in a dry flat part of England, & I see few other people walking it. :(

Public transport would have to improve if nobody had cars. Supply and demand and all that. Plus, imagine the weight the nation would lose.....

I agree wholeheartedly ragged

YANBU

We've chosen to live without a car and, as far as possible have planned our lives around that when it came to choosing jobs, houses, schools etc and because we don't already have a taxed, insured, fuelled-up piece of depreciating metal parked in the drive we don't find the cost of public transport/the occasional taxi as horrifyingly expensive as many car-owners do.

Currently we're living rurally so ds can go to a SN school - this meant finding a house to rent that allowed walking/cycling to both DS's school and primary school for DD, plus reasonable access to a train station (by bus or shortish taxi run) because I have to travel a lot for work. It would have been a hell of a lot easier to decide we needed to drive - we could have had our pick of lovely rural villages/hamlets within a 10 mile circumference of either school. But having decided on no car we compromised and managed to find a house that wouldn't have been our first choice but was exactly where we needed it to be and we're all very happy (and still car-free). I'm not saying this to be smug but to try and illustrate that it is perfectly possible to function without a car (and without begging others for lifts) but to do you need to actively structure your other life choices around that decision. Unfortunately I don't think many drivers are prepared to compromise - and don't see why they should have to.

You also have to be prepared for everyone to think you are a complete nutter. People in our village are STAGGERED that we don't drive. One mother at DS's school made a huge fuss about the fact that I walk DS to school and back every day - she actually said 'Oh the poor boy' with a perfectly straight face. It's a mile FFS.

I also find it amusing that the parents who drive from my village to DS's school set off at least 10 minutes before I do in order to secure their parking spaces and then arrive back in the village 10 minutes later than me and DS because they've then been blocked into their parking spaces and unable to leave the school . And these are the people who look at me as if I'm the mad one when I'm dropping DS off on foot in the morning.

Sorry. Rant over.