town is gridlocked between 330 and 630 every weekday

[badtraffic]

The answer is to build more homes.

I could cry.

I walk to school and cycle to work and would happily take the bus to town with the DCs except that for a ten minute journey it's over £10 for the 4 of us.

Soon people will start blaming the weather on immigration.

There has always been a need for new housing stock. The 1930s and 1950s, for example, saw massive housebuilding projects. The only option is to build new towns with their own infrastructure on some of the existing greenbelt. We are rightly very protective of nature in the UK, but in reality only a tiny proportion of land in this country is actually built on. I would also happily sacrifice some of the numerous golf courses in my area for some houses and roads.

Better joined up public transport outside of the cities would also help. I live a 5 mile drive from my place of work. The only bus option involves a bus to the centre of the town, at least a mile further on, then waiting for another bus to take me back again.

Hmm, this could absolutely describe whee I live (beginning with N). Absolute gridlock but new homes being made (without adequate infrastructure) all the time. Public transport? Laughable!

NB I have lived in London and I genuinely don't think that some people who live in larger cities like that understand how awful public transport is in smaller places. It would take me about 3 hours by buses (without bad traffic) to get to my old place of work, or 30 mins by car.

Same here, 3 big new estates in the last 2 years, public transport cuts. I don't have a car and am fortunate enough to be able to walk to supermarket, doctor, chemist, but have to use transport to get to hospital appointments and have to leave 3 hours early to travel 25 miles to the hospital.

Dixie, on the other hand living in Birmingham, in my experience driving is fine here. Traffic varies of course but it's rarely been really bad. It's not great, I usually average 15 mph on my drive across town (including time spent doing 0 waiting at lights etc), but it's OK. Maybe I'm just lucky and take the quieter routes, I don't know. Still, if Birmingham's transport network can cope with the demand and be building hundreds of new homes, why can't other towns and cities?

There'll always be some traffic jams because induced demand is a thing, but it shouldn't have to be "gridlocked between 330 and 630 every weekday".

Very true, Safari! I don't n ow how town planners can get is so wrong in some places!

*know!!

My work is 7 miles from home on a good day (leaving after 8.30) it takes me 20 minutes👌 If I leave around 8.00 I arrival the same time, 9ish, if I took public transport I'd need a 10 minute walk to the bus stop, two busses and another 10 minute walk, would probably take me the best part of 2hours to travel 7 miles, it's a no brainer to drive (later in my case)

I accept the fact that not everyone can cycle.
However, many of the reasons given are avoidable and I believe many people make choices that make their lives harder.
I chose to live somewhere that has good public transport.
I chose to send my DCs to schools they can walk/cycle.
DH and I both work near enough to be able to cycle to work.
We have shops we can walk to.
We shop online etc etc

The traffic eases greatly in the school holidays so that tell us something.
Do children not get transport to school anymore? Are private schools the problem?

When it rains the traffic is much much worse here, similar in the schoolterm time the traffic is worse than holidays.

It’s not the state school holidays though when the traffic eases, it’s two week before when two public schools finish the summer term that the traffic dramatically becomes less

That's a shame about Cambridge - I used to live there when it was a pleasant, quiet place with not much traffic. Clearly I'm very old or have a bad memory.

My town is exactly the same. It's a small (pop approx 22k) historic town, built on a medieval street pattern. It has a river across the middle and just one road out in each direction.

New homes meant that in the 10 years from 2001-2011, the population increased by 25% without any infrastructure improvements. Few of these developments were more than approx 20 houses, they shoehorn them in in every tiny corner.

They will soon start building 600 homes on a former industrial estate. There will be some infrastructure improvements: there will be a new road built for access to/from the new houses, but it will still join up with the existing roads in the town centre and there will still only be one bridge across the river.

I have to use my car for my job, so have no choice but to drive. The mile from my house to the office often takes 20 minutes, and 30 minutes is not unusual. We are 1.75 miles from the station and the buses don't start early enough for most commuters, and the last one is at 5.45 pm, before most commuters get back. We have one bus an hour and it's £2.20 each way if you travel before 9.30. That's nearly £1,000 a year on top of the £5k season ticket!

I'm very lucky, we have flexitime so I don't try and leave the house before 9.00 am, when things quieten down a bit, and I finish at around 4, so the journey isn't too bad. Fixed hours colleagues often find it takes them an hour to get out of town at the end of the day though.

I work in housing, so fully support building more homes, but they really need to think about traffic improvements when they do. I also resent the fact that almost all of the new building has been new homes for sale, with very little under £500k, so no help at all to those in desperate housing need.

You all need scooters! They cost about £50 for a good one. A thirty minute walk now takes me 10 minutes and i’m Flying past everyone sat in gridlocked traffic

They need to sort out the roads and improve public transport them. Stopping house building when we're in a housing crisis is a silly idea.

We need better public transport, safer walking routes and cycle paths

This. Our legislators need to prioritise non-vehicular transport yet if you examine Jesse Norman's speech at the Tory conference, this isn't happening.

Three in five journeys between one and two miles in distance were made by car or van in England during 2015. That's ridiculous when that's an easily walkable distance (although not feasible for everyone, I know).

Solving congestion isn't about wider roads or less roadworks but a sensible, holistic transport policy. If you're annoyed, contact your MP and make it a priority for the government.

You can campaign about inappropriate development and the council can agree with you. But it's going ahead anyway because the government overruled the local council (or at least that is what is happening in my area).

Do children not get transport to school anymore?

Lots of issues here.

Firstly, a lot of parents choose primary schools that are close to their workplace rather than their home. If they have a 30 minute drive from home to work, they can't drop off their kids at their closest primary because it'll be shut at 8.15. So they choose one closer to work where they can drop off of 8.45 and still get to work by 9. Same at end of day, they can stay at work to 3.15 to pick up at 3.30 whereas if they chose close to home, they'd have to leave at 2.45 to be there by 3.30. It's a knock on effect of both parents working.

Secondly, even if there is a school bus, fares are extortionate in many places, more so if you have two kids and have to pay twice. Some people just can't afford it and have to drive their kids instead.

School bus routes havn't moved on from the past. There are usually no "school" buses when you're "choosing" a school in a different town outside your catchment, so you're stuck to service buses which may not run at suitable times, may not stop near the school, etc.

Another issue with our city's public transport is that it's train station and bus station aren't close together and there's no "shuttle" between them, so the idea of "integrated" rail/bus travel is a joke. The only way of a connection is getting a taxi - which obviously just adds to city centre traffic congestion. You couldn't make it up sometimes!

most problems like this would be solved if kids just attended their nearest local school

That's true, but it doesn't always work out that way.

A few years ago, there was a huge number of 4-year olds one year, and reception places were massively oversubscribed. The LEA decided that, rather than add a few children to each of the primary schools, they'd just add a whole new form of entry to the only primary
that had room for temporary classrooms. Unfortunately, that school is right on the eastern edge of town, so many of those parents had either a long walk or a two-bus bus journey to get them there, so the drove.

Now all those kids younger siblings are at that one school, it's bursting at the seams and the traffic and parking up there are dreadful.

It's just along the road from the HQ of a public service, which has now decided to let another public service share the site, to save money for them both. The number of staff will almost double, and there is only one way to get there, which involves going past the school.

The roads up there are a nightmare and parking after 8.00 am is almost impossible.

I have lived in London and I genuinely don't think that some people who live in larger cities like that understand how awful public transport is in smaller places.

^^ This.

Go outside of the large cities and public transport is almost universally awful. Expensive, lengthy and unreliable.

There have been a few times where I have needed to travel to a different city - one which is accessible by rail. I have a 2 mile walk to the station as no bus goes there - fine, 2 miles is not a problem and on a nice day it's a pleasant walk. In the winter or bad weather it's horrible as there is no street lighting and several sections have no pavement. I then catch one train from my local station to the connecting station; the rail operator is frequently late, trains are cancelled or there's a problem on the line. The reliability is probably about 75%.

Arrive at the connecting station, catch next train to the city. Train should have 10 carriages on but turns up with 3. People are sitting in luggage racks, on tables and in the loo. Manage to squeeze on but several people are left on the platform as the train is too full for them to get on - note that this is outside of peak time and rush hour. Go-slow all the way to the city due to 'engineering works' which seem to be constant as there's never yet been an instance of them not being in progress. Arrive into city feeling hot and stressed after being crammed into a carriage with less room that we give livestock during transport, 30 minutes later than the timetabled arrival time and £30 poorer - all for a one way journey. Time taken varies anywhere between 2-3 hours.

By car it costs me approx. £5-6 in fuel, takes 45-60 minutes and I have the pleasure of sitting comfortably and in control of the temperature rather than stuck in carriage with broken air-con and stuffed under someone's armpit. I know that I can make my appointment because I check the traffic and journey times before I set off - and I can arrive and leave when I want to rather than having to place myself at the mercy of a train which may or may not turn up.

I'm not saying that we should be travelling by car. But the connection I have described is a main line - not a milk run between Nowhere and Fuck-knows!! It's even worse in rural areas. Every single time I have tried to use public transport in the last 12 months, something has gone wrong - and it's usually that a train is cancelled or massively delayed. The infrastructure needs to be completely overhauled, because unless you address the issues of reliability then people won't use it unless they have no other choice. Councils sticking up posters extolling the virtues of public transport have no idea - one lot came to our offices recently to encourage us to embrace buses, walking etc. They arrived by car...

Put it this way, I didn't learn to drive until I was 30 - and I only did so in the end after 10 years of public transport commuting which was so bad and unreliable that I cracked and took driving lessons and saved up for a car. I've ended up better off - as running the car (including tax, insurance and maintenance) is still cheaper than the travel pass I was paying for. I've also ended up with hours of my life back because my commute was halved (and the job I then started doing simply wouldn't have been possible to get to on public transport).

As it happens we are currently in the process of moving somewhere with a far better public transport network, so I anticipate using my car much less. But not everybody has the luxury of being able to up sticks and move.

I chose to live somewhere that has good public transport.
I chose to send my DCs to schools they can walk/cycle.
DH and I both work near enough to be able to cycle to work.
We have shops we can walk to.
We shop online etc etc

Unfortunately not everyone can "choose" to live in exactly the same place. There just aren't enough places with local shops to house everyone, same with jobs, same with schools. Then you factor in the price - in my town, 2 miles from the centre means about £80k difference in the purchase price for the same house.

I've had to change career, as health means regular commuting into London isn't feasible, but in my old profession you worked in London if you live in the South East as jobs in that field are few & far between away from there. My regular commute would cost me around £6k a year and take up to 2 hours each way provided I drove to the station - the bus costs as much as a full day parking at the station, and takes 40 minutes rather than 10 so would add a further hour on my (already long) days.

I'm interested in the solutions proposed by all the people who (1) don't want any extra houses to be built in their town (2) can't possibly consider not using their car and (3) want everybody who needs a house to live in to sod off away from where they live in order to preserve road space for them and their cars.

People have to live somewhere. What do you propose? A load of new Milton Keynes-style cities on greenfield sites? Where's the money for that, and the new rail links, and the new roads to get to those towns, and the public buildings, coming from? It would be a massive undertaking, and people, unsurprisingly, like living near established towns.

Or perhaps you're part of the contingent who think that everybody who wants a house should move to Middlesbrough or other parts of the country where we're told there are empty houses. Never mind if your job, friends and roots are in, say, Bristol. No. Move to Middlesbrough or somewhere else far away because we need all the space on the roads for our cars. Off you go!

BTW I was amused by the post stating that some families wouldn't be able to afford to use the bus so would need to use...their car! No problem affording that, then.

I hear you OP, public transport is non existent,that's quite hard for some people to understand when they live somewhere with good PT. It's awful.

I chose to send my DCs to schools they can walk/cycle

Unless your children are at private school then you didn't "choose" you were lucky enough to be allocated.

I "chose" the 3 absolute closest schools in order and we didn't get any of them. We were allocated a school 15 mins drive (if lucky) and no public transport link.

We then chose to send our DD private - again no public transport link.