To wonder why is Mumsnet so anti-car?

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There is at least one thread a week on here demonizing cars! What is with all the hate? I know they cause pollution and can kill people however they’ve revolutionized the way we live! Not all of us are fortunate enough to live somewhere with good public transport.

Motorists aren't "anti" changes. We want the changes to happen.

@Badbadbunny I'm sure that this is true of you, and of many other motorists. It's true though that there are a significant number of motorists who viscerally resent any money being spent on new infrastructure - "how dare they waste my hard-earned taxes on a bus lane" etc. Doubtless they are the same individuals who say "why should I contribute towards the NHS? I'm not ill".

There's a third group though, those who don't have good public transport but want it. I've lived in villages where the last bus left far too early to get me to a night shift (I would get a slightly later bus to a different town, pace around for an hour or so, then get on the bus which connected the two towns and pace around some more outside the warehouse, in the run up to Christmas). I'm fairly lucky at the moment that my current village happens to be on a through bus route connecting several towns, though I tend to cycle anyway. It's still not perfect and there's no attempt to connect the bus and train services late in the evening (when they're quite sparse) so that you can have a seamless journey. I've travelled all over Europe, and seen the good, the bad and the ugly of public transport. I'd love to arrive on a train and have a row of buses waiting to take passengers on to the villages, rather than departing five minutes earlier.

I do lots of short journeys in my car every day - most of them under two miles and all of them under five.

But it's part of my business. If I was to start walking everywhere, my working day would probably triple in length and it simply wouldn't be viable to work like that.

So yes, it is true that lots of people drive short distances everyday, but that doesn't mean they do it unnecessarily.

The aggression is the same, but the weapons are more potent. An aggressive jogger isn't going to cause much harm - possibly breaking the hip of an old lady by shoving past. An aggressive cyclist could in extremis seriously injure or kill you, whereas an aggressive motorist is almost guaranteed to leave you either in intensive care or a mortuary.

@Badbadbunny Thats why i said in my early post that it works both ways... believe me, i have seen plenty of idiot cyclists but the the point is that whilst a selfish cyclist might delay your journey, a selfish car driver may well kill or maim a pedestrian/horse rider or cyclist.

Cars kill 1800 people each year!!!

I would have thought most of the 75% of drivers who are reasonable would love to see most of the 25% who are not or have health issues off the road, and many would be happy for those who travel half a mile to and from school instead of walking to walk instead.

In my experience, the "anti car" brigade want the bike paths built and the buses in place so that people CHOOSE to not drive.

But if there were decent bike paths and buses, people who could use them would, and people who needed to drive, like you, would find it easier to drive because there would be less traffic and better parking.

Whataboutsecondbreskfast, obviously some people will need their car for lots of short journeys but others don't. We're not talking about individual cases here, we're talking about the bigger picture, about gradually changing the culture around cars.

Sure, but that's never going to happen until public transport is cheaper and more widely available, and the country has a decent, safe network of walking paths and cycle tracks that can be here all year round.

I would fully support people driving less but these threads always always go the same way. People are told they should just cycle or get the bus, and if they try and explain that the car is legitimately their only option, they get shouted down and called lazy or selfish.

The reality is a lot of people in this country need their cars and need to drive on a daily basis. Some will be commuting long distances and others will be doing shorter journeys, and the short journeys aren't necessarily down to laziness which is what's being implied by people quoting the same statistics over and over again.

Also, I don't think ignoring peoples individual set of circumstances is very helpful either 🤷🏻‍♀️

The car culture is slowly changing in parts of the world and the uk, that is already happening. Individual cases are not as valid as over all statistics because as has been stated numerous times, no-one is denying some people need their cars.

Mumsnet isn't anti-car, it's anti-other-peoples-cars.

That's assuming you have a car, not everyone does

I could give you the statistics of families that don’t own cars, and the highest numbers live where the public transport is the best

Yes, indeed, the statistics agree with common sense that people living in areas with good public transport and walkable local amenities (shops, leisure etc) have less need for a car and therefore generally fewer cars are used in such areas.

Yep, nail on the head. I've got a car, but rarely use it. I relocated my business to be within a mile of home so that I can normally walk there and back, primarily for health/fitness reasons. My annual car mileage averages around just 3,000 miles per year! There's a garage around 5 minutes walk from home which I walk to/from to buy a newspaper, milk, bread, and other odd groceries etc as needed - that's actually new - it used to be "petrol only" but now houses a small convenience store too, since the village Spar shop closed down a few years ago.

What annoys me are a couple of our neighbours, one in particular, who actually drives to the garage, which they can actually see from their upstairs bedroom window! They'll drive away and be back in 5 minutes with some milk or bread. That's just pure laziness!

And that’s why I’m pro public transport. I’d like everyone under 25 to get free bus passes, thus they could use the bus before learning to drive for free. Increasing demand for busses, which in turn would create more bus routes

then subsided buss passes for 25-35 to keep people using the busses

if we can subside private car use then we could use the money to subside public transport

I couldn't drive when I trained to teach, so had to use public transport. One school was an hour away by bus, not including walking and waiting times. The other school wasn't accessible by bus at the time I needed, so I had to beg lifts.
Finding a job, whilst being reliant on public transport was a nightmare, unless I wanted to work in a supermarket on a bus route.

Finding a job, whilst being reliant on public transport was a nightmare

which is why Public transport needs improving & with a higher demand for public transport if it was free for under 25s it would be easier to increase services

Giving someone a bus pass doesn't help if there are no buses to use it on. It's chicken and egg really. We need better bus services AT THE SAME TIME as your bus pass proposal, for it to work.

It would only work on, say, a bus route where there's an irregular or infrequent service, i.e. hourly or two hourly, or no bus in the evening or Sunday, etc., where there's be an increase in users on the existing sparse service to give a "nudge" to the bus firm that there may be the demand for a more frequent service.

It does nothing at all where there isn't currently a service at all,

That's the problem with public transport. The routes/services etc are all historic, so if number of users on a route fall, they reduce/remove the service. It's nigh on impossible to get a new service introduced.

We had a huge out of town supermarket/retail park built that was nowhere near a bus route - it took a whopping 20 years before a couple of local routes were "tweaked" to include it so that locals without cars could actually get to it without relying on lifts or taxis!

Same happened with our nearby city's park n ride scheme which didn't go anywhere near the main hospital for our entire county. It took years to get them to change the route to include the hospital!

Exactly what I wanted to say. As long as no one else drives SUV, mumsnet user's Range Rover/Audi Q7 is fine on the roads😅 It's others who are polluters and take up space.

As the saying goes "You're not struck in traffic, you ARE traffic".

Giving someone a bus pass doesn't help if there are no buses to use it on.

not everywhere is rural, as one mn - there are plenty of cities in uk with decent public service - Manchester with an average age of 27 has a great bus service and trams, that could be included. London also has decent bus service as does Birmingham

Places with great public transport don't need more people using it to get even better public transport!

The problem areas are those without, and that's not just rural, lots of towns and smaller cities have poor public transport. Giving people in those places a bus pass doesn't help - if they can't use it!