AIBU to ask you to read this, and then think twice before you make any unnecessary journeys by car?

[ArcheryAnnie]

I'm not talking about those essential trips where you are transporting a wardrobe/tools of the trade/someone with mobility difficulties/fourteen tiny children/etc etc etc. I'm talking about all those local trips where it's just you, and you aren't going far, and walking might add on a bit of time to your chores, but walking or cycling would also avoid one more car on the road for that day.

(I so, so feel for the grieving mother in this story, below. I live on a main road and now that I've learned more about things like this, I really worry about the effect that it's had on my son's lung development when he was smaller.)

Court ruling about nine year old who died of an asthma attack.

"...lawyers for the family presented new evidence to the attorney general that directly linked Ella’s serious form of asthma and her death with the heavy traffic on the South Circular near her home. Her death coincided with one of the worst air pollution surges in her local area."

www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/07/mother-asthma-death-girl-knew-nothing-toxic-air-ella-kissi-debrah-london?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

when I lived in London we very rarely used our car unless doing a weeks food shopping or visiting friends 20+ miles away. Because we had plenty of options for (cheap) public transport.
Now i live in a commuter town, and I commute by train (and walk to the station) but getting to many other places on public transport would be not time or cost effective.
I am trying to persuade my DC they could walk to their extra curricular activities, but while they put up with it in the summer, they are less keen in bad weather.

It can simultaneously be true that:

• structural changes and international cooperation are really needed to tackle climate change, at a global level AND

-driving your car less can result in better air quality locally to you

I guess this is the internet though, so polarisation rules.

I look forward to people enthusiastically embracing those changes when they come.

Segregated cycle lanes would also help

Where I live I have to drive to the shops, there are no buses and I don't fancy lugging bags of shopping 8 miles. However, I don't make daily trips, I think about whether I really need to go beforehand and often decide I can make do.

Living close to a congested road is the worst thing for asthmatics. Poor little girl. I am asthmatic, when I lived in central London my asthma was often quite bad, I moved to the countryside and I haven't had an attack since we moved three years ago. Even though everyone here makes lots of short journeys in their cars and most people have, shock horror, wood burners. My neighbours are essentially a non stop taxi service for their kids. Yet asthma is not an issue for me anymore.

If only it was that simple. That cyclist causes traffic congestion when it’s not safe to get past pumping clouds more pollution into the air

People making excuses as to why they couldn’t possibly not use their car are missing the point. Many built up areas do have shops that most people could walk to to buy a few bits, yet lots of people drive to them. It seems to be automatic to many people to just get in their car rather than think about whether they could walk. We all need to play our part.

The same goes for school runs. The road outside our local school is lined with cars at drop off and pick up. All children live within just over a mile of the school. People arrive half an hour before school finishes at pick up to get a good spot! Yes there might be the odd parent who needs to dash off somewhere after drop off but there are many who I know for a fact don’t. All those fumes just outside where children are.

There was a programme about this last year I think, where they measured fumes around schools - it was shocking.

Many people are lazy nowadays. The thread where people are horrified that a 6 year will be taken out for walks after school in the dark demonstrates this.

When I read that it made me mad at all those employers who want things to return to normal post pandemic with employees commuting into offices daily when in the vast majority of instances it has been shown that they can work efficiently from home.

The government too, wanting us back out providing footfall/custom for big chain retail shops surrounding offices. We will still buy stuff, just in different areas and less concentrated in one area which is better for suburbs other "local" areas.

It's been a once in a lifetime (hopefully) experiment in cutting the level of travel for work and seeing the effect. Sure the economy needs retail to flourish but some of the big players don't pay an appropriate level of tax in the UK in line with their turnover in this country anyway due to various accounting measures designed to have that very effect.

This is comparable to asking the public to stop using plastic drinking straws, when the "real" problem is meat farming and air travel. It's not something we can really impact is it?

Since the OP was about a young girl dying from asthma, with her death linked to a road, yes, we probably can. She didn't die from sniffing a cow.

The problem with whataboutery is that it's so easy to use to absolve ourselves from doing anything. I can use the meat farming today when I don't fancy walking to the shops, then tomorrow, when I want that extra steak, I can go "well have you Any Idea how much environmental damage is done by car journeys"- and so on, ad infinitum.

Walking home from work today doesn't mean I can't also eat a nice lentil stew tomorrow and decide not to holiday on the Maldives.

The death of this poor girl is tragic. Very sad.

However, I find this quite bizarre that the mother didn’t know about the link between pollution and her daughter’s asthma. I say this because my son developed asthma after moving to London. So many trips to GP, to hospital etc. I discussed this as well as noting so many of the children in his class also had asthma - previously I hadn’t known anyone first hand with asthma

Doctor told me where we lived was a pollution soup (long description of why that was then followed) and said the best treatment for my son was to move. That was early 1990s

Within a year of moving to suburbs, no more inhalers.

@SomeoneInTheLaaaaaounge

Ellas death is devastating. But it’s not down to individuals going to Tesco and individuals won’t solve it alone.

1. Break the hold fossil fuel industry has in lobbying and investment industry
2. Reform standards for emissions so cars that kill can no longer be sold. So that car manufacturers can’t get rich for selling polluting vehicles.
3. Put electric charge ports everywhere and subsidise the hell out of electric cars.

But that's like saying "My one vote won't make a difference" Obviously if one individual did it you'd be right, but if thousands of individuals made the effort, we would see a huge drop in pollution, as we did in the first lockdown.

If they knocked down some of those Debenhams and Acadia shops that are going to be standing empty and replaced them with multistorey car parks that are free

Our Debenhams is part of a large shopping centre, hard to see how you could make it a car park without demolishing the whole thing. The Arcadia stores are either in the shopping centre in the middle of the main shopping street, with offices or whatever above them. Again, not sure how you'd get a car park in there without knocking down a lot of the neighbouring ships as well.

Public transport needs to be cheap and frequent. And run outside of 9-5 working. I had a job where I often worked until 8 or 9, public transport would have taken me 3 hours to get home at that time, as opposed to around an hour if I was finishing at 6.

I’m not sure manufacturing new cars is that good for the environment either.
It’s a whole package thing not just The vehicle Produced emissions. I drive an old car, it produces low emissions as it is well maintained so it would be madness to scrap it.

Where would the electric come from if we all switched? We aren’t there yet with completely clean renewable energy.

I don't think it's the short "unnecessary" journeys that are the problem.

I used to live in London, didn't have a car for a long time, then bought a car at the start of covid. I used it maybe once or twice a week, for journeys that would mostly fall into the "unnecessary" bucket.

Then I moved out of London, and now I "have" to drive everywhere (the nearest supermarket is about a 50 minute walk). So obviously I have to drive more. So more pollution. The problem isn't a few unnecessary journeys. The problem is that many people, whether by choice or not, have their lives set up so that they have to spend loads of time in the car. People who commute for an hour or more a day. etc etc. It's not the 5 minute journeys that are the problem really. It's that our lives are spread out across such large areas that driving IS necessary for a huge amount of people.

I have had asthma all my life (am nearly 40). I've had a lot of really frightening asthma attacks, I dread to think what might have happened if I'd lived in a city as a child. When I visit a city even for a day, I can feel my lungs burning, & I cough & wheeze. It's harder to breathe. DD has asthma symptoms too. The air is relatively clean here, there is lichen on the walls of the shops along the high street & main roads into town.

We don't have a car. We don't live in an area with good public transport - we are literally on the edge of town, it's well over a mile walk to school or the nearest supermarket. We've not flown or gone abroad in over a decade. It's easy to make excuses or accuse people of having a holier-than-thou attitude but that's just silly. We don't have a car because we can't really afford one & don't need one. Ditto foreign holidays. But also, we made a choice about what's sustainable, for us.

YANBU
It's easy to pass the buck and insist the solution lies with government and that small changes made by individuals will not make a difference but the threads here are a testament to the fact few people are prepared to suffer the inconvenience some legislative change may bring. Everyone has better ideas about solutions and it's usually a proposal which minimally impacts them.

The truth is that we are ALL going to have to make changes to the way we live and some of those changes are going to be very inconvenient until we adapt. We need to come to terms with this fact and get on with make changes whether that is reducing short car journeys and international travel or turning the heating down a bit and putting it on extra layers.

Neither my spouse or I drive or have a car though I guess his carpooling to work might count in this as he can walk that in an hour; however, I don't think focusing on the individual helps here.

Our social systems have developed over the last century and a bit around car ownership. It's socially incentivized from how our cities & towns are designed to things like schools asking if you can 'pop round' a bag left at home in a timeframe that would require access to a car. Finger wagging about individuals harming others isn't going to change that. That would require collective action on area level to create a system that enables people to make those choices easier.

Also, a lot of what causes poor air quality in roads is a lot of lorries that enable us to stay at home or to use local shops on foot. I live on an A road between industrial estates. My lockdown was not much quieter as the car traffic was replaced by more lorries. I can bring up a map of the Air Quality Management Areas for my city, my street lights up because it connects the inner and outer ring road and the nearby motorway. The areas with the worst air are at where those connect and are heavily used, many which don't have infrastructure that supports public transport or cycling.

We just had a bridge replaced a few years back, and they could not be arsed to make to add something like an extra metre on each side so there could be room for a cycle lane. My DDs have to go over it every day for school & I bought them commuter scooters because I've seen way too many close calls on bikes. Their peers that live further out have to deal with multiple A road highway intersections that are poorly managed, I can see why some parents might be a bit twitchy about walking and cycling with that going on. The city could do better and many of us are still fighting for it, and we can't expect people to make significantly riskier choices for them when the government won't make things safer.

Yes, fewer people driving tiny distances could help, but I'm not sure it would prevent this death or other issues when there is a lot of other traffic and systemic issues going on.

Electric cars still produce particulates from wear on their tyres and on the asphalt roads (asphalt and bitumen are made of oil) although much less than a diesel car.

People need to drive less. Everyone who drives short distances has an excuse why they can't possibly do that but in my borough only 30pc of households have cars. The other 70pc manage to survive.

Besides cycling is usually faster anyway. Check out TERN electric assisted bikes - easy to transport one adults and two kids plus swimming kits etc.

Also don't people realise it often costs more to live in places near amenities? I could be all smug about how I walk and dont have my own car but I'm lucky we could afford a house somewhere with a supermarket, good local shops, decent schools, choice of GP surgeries and a train station.

I know a one car family of four who can't afford to buy here, are considering a town less than 10 miles away which is cheaper but only has an unreliable hourly bus to the city centre. They are going to need 2 cars if they move there but its affordable compared with buying a more expensive house so you can "fit your life around not having a car"

I understand cars should be used less, and it sounds great in theory, however public transport in this country is woeful, even in centra London it is often deeply unpleasant, frequent delays, over crowding, can take absolutely ages etc.

I take DC to school by bus r walking when the weather is fine, which is a a ten minute journey on the bus, in theory. However it's not unheard of to wait over 20 minutes for that bus, when it is cold and raining and makes you late, it's stressful, particularly when you need to get to work. I have lost count of the number of stressful comutes I've had, barely making pick uptime because of delays, signal failure, over crowding, etc etc. Then throw in the expense, over two hundred pounds per month my commute costs (pre-pandemic), thats without any extra journeys if I have to go to another office for example.

If people are to be encouraged to use cars less or give them up, public transport needs expanding, hugely, reliability massively improved and the cost reviewed, it's extortionate.

Shit like that puts people off giving up cars, and I say that as a non-driver.

What worries me is that new estates keep getting built literally right next to motorways. In my area these are quite often the only affordable family-sized homes if you aren't eligible for social housing and you're generally perceived as unusually picky if you try to avoid them. They're also just out of walking distance from most amenities so increase reliance on cars for local trips as well as subjecting the residents to pollution from longer distance journeys. Without enormous investment in rail freight that motorway will always be there so long as people in the north of Scotland want to eat food other than potatoes and own clothes they haven't woven themselves from passing sheep - you can't think that building there is only a problem short term. This is a planning issue as well as a matter of our own individual car use and we need governments to take some responsibility for it since the law currently allows developers to go over the heads of local planners.

Living rurally I totally understand that some of us are always going to need cars because public transport is poor/non existent and cycling country roads in dark, wet winters is not a practical option. What I don't get is able bodied people in big cities with good public transport who insist on owning cars and driving everywhere. Surely you're just spaffing money up the wall in order to give yourself a constant headache over parking?

I'm another one who lives in the area Ella lived in. Public transport is excellent, I can walk to 4 different stations (on 4 different lines) in 25 minutes, 2 of those are under 15 minutes walk away and there are loads of buses. The LTNs that the council have put in are a joke and are driving traffic on to the main roads with no way for them to funnel off to go elsewhere. I don't have a car because I don't like driving very much and think it's unnecessary in inner London, plus I work in central London so it's easier to get the train anyway!

I have noticed that traffic in the area has got much worse over the last few months, and can only assume that people who might normally have got the bus are now driving instead. A lot of the cars seem to be single occupants, although obviously that's purely based on what I see when I walk past them at traffic lights.

Whenever we've lived in Cities we haven't needed cars (BTW, I really don't think London public transport is bad - compared to other places I've lived it's amazing - albeit expensive)

Out in the country now though, so there's not much choice. I do agree that the one thing I miss is school busses - it would reduce traffic at the school so much if even half the kids could go by bus.

Agree that London public transport is amazing, but it's not expensive, isn't the bus about £1.50 and free for children?

In my city, it's nearly twice that, and half fare for children. Plus there's several different companies so you can't use day passes on different buses, you need a new ticket.

This is shocking. The doctors should have told the Ella's mum the risk of air pollution. My parents were told that my mum needed a drier climate for her asthma, and my father sold the house and moved to a different country, with much financial hardship. Ella's mum should have been given the opportunity to move her daughter to somewhere with less pollution.

Agree that London public transport is amazing, but it's not expensive, isn't the bus about £1.50 and free for children?

I guess it's relative, it cost me £8 to get to Marylebone and back by tube, would have cost much less in my car. (Not that I would drive).