to feel car driving is frequently unjustified

[Clairetree1]

Having sat in a traffic jam yesterday, in which I counted 10 buses being held up by around 45 cars, many of which only had one person in.

So say 60 people in cars holding up 600 people in buses....

just as a snapshot, throughout the whole journey, each person in a car seems to hold up 10 people in a bus, and if the cars were not there, those car travelers could easily fit on the buses, and everyone would be moving at least 3x as fast,

and I can't really see how this is allowed, or can be justified.

If you are in a city, or in another area with an adequate bus route, and are physically able to use the bus, how do you justify to yourself the danger, inconvenience and lethal pollution you subject everyone else to? Not to mention the further damage to the environment caused by concreting over parking spaces, car manufacture, etc.

I know some people are going to say they need the time, but if cars were banned from our cities and more people on public transport, everyone would be moving faster.

I know some people are going to say they are disabled, or have too much to carry, but some people who are disabled or have a lot to carry do use buses, they often have no choice! it doesn't automatically preclude you.

I know some people are just going to say they have a right to, but really, do you? Pollution is killing thousands of people a year in the UK, not to mention those killed in car crashes, the environmental damage done including global warming, and the sheer inconvenience to everybody else.

I know a couple of cities are planning on banning private cars, and I know petrol cars are on their way out, so things might well improve, but I just don't understand how we reached this position in the first place, so much death and destruction and time taken away by an entitled privileged few with such a selfish habit I can't understand how they justify to themselves.

I don't expect many people to agree with me, I think this privilege is so deeply ingrained in our culture that people genuinely feel they have a right to drive cars, when perfectly adequate public transport exist.

I don't think there is any moral right at all though, I think it is morally wrong in every way

Define rich @clairetrees

You can get an old banger, insurance, tax, and a full tank of petrol for less than £1000. That's not even a month's salary for someone working full-time at minimum wage. The car would be shit but you'd have one.

We live rurally, 20 mins to nearest town and 1/2 hour to nearest cities. I also work in district nursing where we cover a very large rural area, from my base I can easy travel 60 miles to the other base we cover and the outlying areas that covers and then in my original base I can cover 30 miles to all the outlying visits and areas that base covers. My children’s school is in the next village and the buses only run to 2 destinations and at weird times

Sorry but we couldn’t manage without the car and as it happens there isn’t even that much car activity around where we live

just a moment, you do understand that the air pollution caused by driving is killing children, don't you. Every year, by the hundred, do you think this is just a throwaway phrase, rather than actual real children's lives ending becasue of the decisions people are making?

I understand perfectly well that pollution is a killer for every living thing, not just children that you appear to enjoy highlighting. But as other people have stated, you yourself are using public transport, planes and your own car. I'm assuming you don't see the irony of your post. Unfortunately you've portrayed yourself as someone who uses all polluting services but yet you're opposed to everyone else doing it. I really did think your original post had some interesting points. You must be prepared to be slaughtered if you use Mumsnet as I've learnt in the past.

We don't have a car and manage fine, although we live near buses and trains. I often think that cars are wasted. Most of them spend 95% of the time on a driveway or car park. I wish there was a viable way of sharing cars so fewer cars get used more often. Public transport can be dreadful but if there were fewer cars, more money would be channelled into improvements.

Tripling the price of fuel would cripple the haulage industry. It would send prices for us as consumers sky high for pretty much everything

I'm currently learning to drive, the sooner I pass the better. I loathe the public transport here and the rude people on board, I can't wait to get some privacy and some reliability into my day. If people want to travel without having to sit next to strangers that's their choice.

As for allowed, because we have civil liberties, people don't need to justify the number of passengers they have in their cars. Ideally people would walk shorter distances but that's more about fitness and lifestyle, hell of a lot of stick and not much carrot in your argument.

The cost of fuel should be doubled or tripled? shock

Businesses use road transportation too, including supermarkets. I assume you would be willing to pay more for food then?

I said possibly doubling or tripling fuel prices for private cars may help limit car use

as for supermarkets, one delivery van visiting multiple households who have ordered online is a fantastic way of reducing traffic and pollution

I can catch a bus to Chernobyl

As it happens, when I was researching alternatives to getting a train from Granada to Seville as the train line was/is closed, I noticed that you can get a bus directly from Spain to Kiev in Ukraine, which is near enough Chernobyl to get an organised tour bus. So yes, you can probably get the bus to Chernobyl after getting the train to mainland Europe under the tunnel of course.

I do agree that some people do use cars unnecessarily some of the time, but the reality is that most people whose experience of public transport in London will have no idea how hopeless it is in the rest of the country.

The difference is probably best illustrated by a comment in a program I watched about homeless people in London, who resorted to travelling around on the nightbus as a way to get warm.

I spat my tea out when the narrator stated that because the nightbus 'only' ran every 30 minutes, the people in the program had to get off and wait at the bus station until they could get back on another bus, or something.

Now, in most of the rest of the country, A - night buses do not exist, and B - a 30 minute bus frequency is the best you can hope for at rush hour, having buses run around every 30 minutes in the middle of the night is about as realistic an expectation as being picked up and taken to work by a spacecraft.

Re shifting the pollution elsewhere: Sorry, I assumed that shifting to green electricity was an obvious necessity with electric vehicles, but I can see I didn’t state that. I buy “renewable” electricity and again think that this is an area where we need to encourage change. Compulsory solar panels on new builds would seem to be a good start. More wind turbines. Off-shore are even becoming more cost effective now. Sea-snakes (the wave powered turbines encased in a tube to avoid risk of damage to wildlife) are an interesting potential option too. And introducing greater CO2 recapture and particulate filtering where we do burn fuels, until we can shift further and further towards low-emissions. And then there will be the work required to reduce pollution from making batteries, and essentially any other structure.

I also do think that relocating emissions out of town centres is a worthwhile venture even in the build up to using more renewable electricity. Not ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s inportant to work with what is realistic to get the population to do.

I'd agree that people do use their cars too much when they could walk - I know individuals who will drive to the corner shop, 1/2 mile away. However for most journeys the car is the only viable solution if you live outside major cities that have decent public transport. If I lived in London, I wouldn't bother having a car but I live in a town 30 miles outside London. We have some buses which don't run every 5-10 minutes like the ones in London, every hour if you are lucky and not after about 10.30pm. My DD is looking for a part time job at the moment, until she passed her test she was restricted to places she could walked to as the public transport options were so restrictive, now she has much better options open to her.
If we all had the options open to us of city dwellers I could understand your post OP, as it is, you don't seem to understand that most of us live different lives to you and you can't see that. Can't you put yourself in others shoes - bit worrying that as I think you are in education?

Putting aside the convenience aspect, and the fact that it would increase my working day by 1.5 hours, I would be worse off by switching to public transport. A monthly season bus ticket would be £71 per month which is £852 per year. That would only cover journeys to and from work, no good for journeys elsewhere.

My annual running costs on my little car, which is £0 tax for its low emissions, and does 60 mpg on a good run - servicing, insurance, petrol - is less than that.

That's comparing bus with car. Let's not even talk train tickets. Sorry, OP, but the simple fact is actually that you need to be rich to use public transport on a daily basis. Which is the opposite of your statement.

I use my car because it takes over an hour to get to my nearest city by bus - it goes through every single village on the way. It takes me twenty minutes to drive.
I can't fit my occupied double pushchair plus walking child on a bus. If a space is available and a disabled person gets on the bus I would have to get off. This may happen in one of the rural villages. There may not be another bus for several hours. I can't collapse my pushchair because I cannot safely hold two small children whilst also ensuring the safety of the child who is walking. I would have no hands free to ensure they behaved well or to keep them safe.

I drive because unless you live in a city, public transport is not always regular. Transport in and out of cities is also sporadic in a lot of places.

@Clairetree1 - I need to drive my car for work ta. Bus services outside of the usual metropolitan elite hubs are normally shit so I can't use them for work travel. Earning a living in a job I love is more important than being stuck on a bus to appease a statist sjw. Anyway, private car ownership is a right I intend to keep on exercising.

barbaraofseville exactly. Our buses stop running at 6pm

I assume you'd like to pay me my lost wages when I can't do my job anymore after this double petrol price rise you would like to instate, OP? I'll send you my PayPal details.

You must be prepared to be slaughtered if you use Mumsnet as I've learnt in the past.

There are people who disagree with me, that's fine there are people who try and be nasty, mocking or belittling, I don't mind that, they are just ignorant,

if I wasn't perfectly happy to read unpleasant posts, I wouldn't start a thread that i know is challenging a lot of peoples presumptions about their own personal entitlement in life.

I am pleasantly surprised at the number of reasonable, interesting posters who have responded either agreeing with me or with sensible reasons why they don't agree in all situations.

I hope that at least one person somewhere will think twice about getting in their car for an unnecessary journey at some stage because they have read this!

*So how are you going to get to Chernobyl, OP?

Sail through the air powered by the shit that's spouting out of your mouth?*

hahahahaha probably the best comment yet! She probably thinks that since planes can carry more than one person, they don't contribute to polluting the environment

ugh bold fail

I was referring to the lorries and vans which deliver to the supermarket.

How would you define who was a private car and who wasn't? If you're a business rep driving to multiple places, how do you define if they are on business or personal time?

Or a district/area manager? Or one of the other thousands of people in cars driving to multiple places on business?

You can't possibly monitor who is using their car for private or business use. People who have business insurance often use the same car privately. How would you determine at the petrol station who was using their car for business or pleasure?

It's not possible and a very silly suggestion because it's too complicated.

I agree people should use their cars less but to suggest fuel be doubled for private cars is ludicrous.

You aren't just talking about unnecessary journeys though, you have commented that shift workers should get public transport.

Do you really expect car users to then pay to use an over priced and unreliable public transport system? Why would I spend over 2 hours and around £15 on public transport this afternoon when I have a perfectly good car Sat in the drive which is already paid for other than the small amount of fuel for under 30 minutes drive

I do have to challenge one assumption that keeps coming up on this thread though, that public transport is worse outside big cities like London.

I have lived in many places in the UK, and traveled by public transport absolutely everywhere, in every county in England, Scotland and Wales, I think.

In London, the public transport is reasonable, although severely hampered by congestion caused by private cars.

It is not the best though.

There are places in the UK where bus services are DIRE ( Devon springs to mind!!! Glasgow too- these two places are the worst I have ever experienced)

But there are many rural, semirural or suburban places where the pubic transport is very good indeed, and far superior to London

Plus people have commented saying they either have zero public transport where they live or it's shite or the nature of their work/shift patterns/multiple visits all over the place means public transport isn't an option.

The solution? Double fuel prices for private cars. Ridiculous.

Presumably the OP means ignorant defined as "rude" rather than ignorant defined as "lacking knowledge or awareness", because the latter description fits herself perfectly