To say car ownership shouldn't be seen as the default

[Sidslaw]

several posts on here about financial problems, all claiming the car is "needed" and not up for discussion

People tend to set up their lives with the assumption that they will drive - surely with the climate in the stat it is in it should now be the other way around? People to set up their lives with the assumption that they will not drive, as the default.

I don't drive, I am dyspraxic, so can't and always knew I wouldn't, and it has never been an issue, as I have chosen the places I live and the jobs I do on that basis. I use public transport, walking, cycling, taxis. I have raised my family as a single mother like this, and my children ( not dyspraxic) have grown up to set up their lives the same.

There is always going to be people who rightly or wrongly think they are an exception, but surely the default should be, don't own a car, don't drive?

This makes no sense do you suggest everyone just move to a city with 24hr public transport ? People usually use their cars to just get to work not everyone works locally or 9-5. You are very naive and privileged if you think that people "set up" Is wrong.

I suggest you come to rural Suffolk and try to get around for a week on public transport.

Our village has 2 buses a day. Neither at times which allow people to get to school or work.

It is also a time issue. My dh who doesn't drive for medical reasons has to go to the office once a week. This involves a 5 hour train journey each way so also an overnight stay. The drive would be 2 hrs each way so could be done in a day and would cost us considerably less. Also without me driving he wouldn't be able to leave or get to the village at all after 4pm.

Public transport is city centric and outside of them its fairly difficult to have a meaningful existence without a car

I have my life set up so I mostly don't have to use the car. DH and I get the train to work, the kids walk to school.

However the Scottish government likes to centralise services so to get my kids to their regular hospital appointments takes 30 mins by car but over 2 hours by public transport.

I'm not going to subject two potentially vomiting children to public transport for 2 hours when they can be driven comfortably and more quickly door to door.

Yellowlegobrick - lots if people cycle because its quicker. Cargo bikes can carry lots of shopping or shopping can be delivered. This is what i mean about mindset, pro car lobby are always looking for reasons not to change.

Have your kids ever needed a lift to get somewhere though? My DS plays football and my DD plays tennis and there are weekend matches all over the place. Even if we could manage our day to day lives without a car, we couldn't give them the opportunity to compete.

It really annoys me as a driver when people are sanctimonious about not driving but happily expect people to give them lifts. My DM has a CF friend who is known for this. Works for a well known green charity and no car in the household but wants collecting from the station, taking to places etc.

Can’t you see that @Yellowlegobrick might struggle to get a weeks shopping on the back of a cargo bike (if she can afford a cargo bike, and if she can store a cargo bike), along with a 4 year old and a six year old? And then ride safely (presuming the riding is physically possible for her) however far it is home, over whatever terrain?!

We don’t all live in lovely safe, flat cities with supermarkets 10 minutes away.

Pointing out the reality of the situation is not pro car lobbying and to characterise it as such is either staggeringly close minded or disingenuous.

If I lived in a nice, flat area with cycle paths, nearby supermarkets and safe, well-lit roads then cycling would be a much more attractive proposition.

As it is, I don't. I live in hilly, rural Cumbria. Outside of town, none of the roads are lit, there are no cycle paths or pavements and the roads often barely fit two cars down them. Add in high hedges, blind bends and pot holes, and it's not exactly suitable for most adults, let alone families with cargo bikes and children.

It's not just about poor public transport either. Everything is further away than it used to be. There are very few local post offices, local shops are twice as costly as supermarkets, supermarkets are on the outskirts of towns, banks have closed their branches, local surgeries have amalgamated and moved to further away locations. Every place that I could walk to as a child is now located about 2 miles away. If I had to walk to the bank, post office and doctors in one day it would be about a 7 mile journey going back and forth across town. If I drive I can visit all 3 in 30 minutes in my lunchbreak. That would not be possible by walking OR by public transport. Time is money that most people don't have.

What you say is all very well for people who live in cities with excellent public transport, but it doesn't apply to rural areas.

I live in rural Devon. I grew up on a farm a mile from the village, 3 miles from secondary school, and 20 miles from the nearest large town or city, where the cinema, swimming pool, supermarkets etc are. The village had a bus to the nearest market town once a week on market day.

The first thing that you do when you turn 17 is learn to drive.

I still live in the area I grew up in. The bus goes to the city every 2 hours from 7.30am. The bus that goes to the town comes back at 1.30pm so no good for anyone working.

The train station is around 5 miles away on a busy main road, and has no car park.

I am self employed, and a lot of my clients are on farms. I have to have a car , there is 100% no way that we could get around on public transport. However, the state of the roads is shocking, with potholes everywhere and people often damaging their cars, but we have no alternative.

Why should I have to move to the city just so I don't have to drive a car, when I have lived in the country all my life?

I also have mobility issues, so it is far easier for me to be able to drive door to door.

It might be ok in Cambridge, but even able bodied cyclists struggle with the hills in the area I live in.

My friend can't drive and has always managed just fine, (but with a partner who does drive). She doesn't expect other people to drive her around and is happy to get buses but she's currently undergoing unexpected hospital treatment. And she's screwed. She can't get her DH to drive her every time as he's working and trying to make up the shortfall due to her being stuck on sick pay. The hospital is 40 minutes drive or 1 hour 45 minutes on the bus. All appointments before 10am have to be cancelled and rearranged as there's no public transport starting before 8:15am. Should she have moved out of her hometown that she grew up in on the off chance that she would have this medical issue somewhere down the line? Moving to a big city with good public transport isn't a lifestyle choice that you can easily make on a whim. Learning to drive and owning a car is far easier and benefits you hugely.

And using the example of previous generations not driving and learning to live using buses is ridiculous. It was a completely different time and life was fucking hard for women. They had to spend most of their time pissing about getting the family shopping in daily unable to do much else than work in the home and were able to live on a husbands salary. Times have changed. We also didn't have indoor plumbing or central heating in the old days and they managed. Doesn't mean I'd be okay with bathing the whole family in a tin bath in front of the fire on a Sunday.

Most people don't live in rural Cumbria though. This thread has been peppered with responses of "but I live up a mountain", failing to recognise (perhaps intentionally) that 90% of people do not live in rural areas, and that most of them do not have caring responsibilities.

There are parents who drive less than a mile to their kids' primary school in the afternoon, sit outside idling their engines for half an hour (got to arrive early to secure a convenient stretch of pavement to park on) before driving back less than a mile.

I went to secondary in the late 2000s. It was quite a small catchment area, such that I - at a mere 1.1 miles distant (shortest route on Google Maps) - was on the edge of it. In fact, the school was so oversubscribed the following year that I wouldn't have got in at all. Nice, safe, flat suburban area with cycle paths and traffic light controlled crossings. I cycled to school every day, except for the one day that I had a large musical instrument to take. With very few exceptions, my peers were just as able-bodied as I was. Yet there were long lines of cars pulling up illegally on the roundabout outside the school and the nearby leisure centre's overflow car park was used (with permission) for the school run.

This isn't about pupils with disabilities (their parents had permission to drive up to the school entrance), nor is it about those carrying bulky instruments or art projects or those coming in from a long distance. There was no reason that these teenagers couldn't have walked or cycled.

Most people don't live in rural Cumbria though. This thread has been peppered with responses of "but I live up a mountain", failing to recognise (perhaps intentionally) that 90% of people do not live in rural areas, and that most of them do not have caring responsibilities.

Well, if you actually read what you'd quoted, you would know that I clearly haven't "failed to recognise" anything as I did say:

If I lived in a nice, flat area with cycle paths, nearby supermarkets and safe, well-lit roads then cycling would be a much more attractive proposition.

@DdraigGoch rural Cumbria (or Devon or the Hebrides) aren’t the only places without decent public transport and with difficult for cycling roads and lack of amenities.

I live in a bog standard northern ex mill town- we have an unreliable bus service into the next town- and it costs a fortune. We have one small and expensive supermarket. It’s a linear town with all of the housing built up the sides of a steep valley- there aren’t any busses that serve any of the housing- literally only the one that goes down the main road through the town. There is a partial cycle Lane on the main road, but it doesn’t even reach the edge of town from the centre, never mind get you to the next town. There is one high school- of you need a special school/want a faith school/private school/Grammar school etc then you have to go to different towns.

This is an average sort of set up for massive swaths of the country!

All these threads do is make it blindingly obvious that lots of people have no idea about life outside of their own circles.

I used to live near Cambridge in a nice, flat, safe town with lots of cycle paths, well-lit roads and amenities. All the housing estates had shops, post offices, dry cleaners and takeaways on them, there were schools within walking distance and multiple safe, regular bus services for people to use. There was a train station with a regular service to all the "big towns" as well as London too. You could easily set up life there to never need a car as you could walk/cycle/take the bus pretty much everywhere.

Where I live now - it's just not possible unless you live a very limited life. The trains don't run on Sundays or Bank Holidays, or early morning, or late at night. There was no bus service at all up until last week, and it only runs once a day in each direction, so it's completely pointless to anyone who needs to work or commute anywhere.

There are no cycle paths, the roads out of town have no street lights or pavements and are full of pot-holes. Even super fit cyclists have issues cycling around here and you often see them either crawling along at 5mph up hills or walking and pushing.

There's actually plenty of things within a few miles of here (so, easily within walking or cycling distance) but there's no means of getting there on foot unless you risk your life on a windy NSL road with blind bends, 8ft hedges and no pavements.

I live in a capital city with decent public transport. ALL of my family are car dependent and cant even fathom public transport. I will admit that I was the same, until I moved to London for a few years and re-learned how to get around on public transport!

Ive since moved back home, and continue carless, and its not something I want to change.

However, it is good to know how to drive, and I have access to cars, should the need arise.

But otherwise I just get around with my (very cheap) monthly pass, and the occasional taxi or uber!

Came on to this thread thinking it was about leases/PCPs!!

Anyway. YABU. I live in a v metropolitan area of the West Midlands. Public transport is crap. You can get into Birmingham but that's about it. If you want to go to Wolverhampton or Stafford or Bromsgrove say it's a whole different ball game. No direct trains and not as easy as it should be. As for buses I'd have to walk a mile to get one and we are in a build up area!

I agree. I think lots of people, though far from everybody, are trying to cut down on their car usage for short journeys and walk where they can.

Where I disagree with the anti-car narrative is that I think it is terribly naive about what is and isn’t realistically possible for many people to do without using a car. Cars are extremely convenient, and there’s no point trying to argue that a cargo bike (even for the privileged who can cycle - I physically can’t) is ever going to be anything like as convenient for certain people making certain journeys as using a car is. Some people are lazy but there are genuine and reasonable reasons people make some of their journeys by car. I think this applies to a pretty large percentage of journeys people make in their car, but the anti-car views seem to think that cars are rarely required. I don’t agree.

I'm well aware that there are large areas of the country without adequate public transport. The fact remains that most people don't live in these areas, the majority live in urban areas. Many of those people could change overnight, if they were motivated.

It really annoys me as a driver when people are sanctimonious about not driving but happily expect people to give them lifts. My DM has a CF friend who is known for this. Works for a well known green charity and no car in the household but wants collecting from the station, taking to places etc.

That's a CF problem. I hate being driven, asking for a lift is always a last resort.

But there are huge parts of the country that are* urban and* that don't have access to decent public transport.

It's not only a problem that exists for those of us who live rurally.

Where we are a large village In Central Scotland the bus services are fine quite regular I use them my husband needs his car for work he can't go on public transport or "bike" my children need their cars for work, 1 works shifts and works 20odd mile away rurally its ridiculous to suggest that they should alter their life style to get rid of a car. Most families can't get to where they are going with a cargo bike !

And there are plenty of people who would drive a journey of less than a mile, despite being fit and capable.

I'm not sure why this keeps getting trotted out - nobody is saying that those people don't exist. Of course they do.

But that doesn't change the fact that huge parts of the country are reliant on cars because the public transport is horrendous.

I used to work a 40 minute drive from where I worked - it was about 20 miles away, give or take. To do that exact same journey by public transport would take five hours.

I live in a town that (on paper) has a decent train service. But it only runs up and down the coast, so if you want to go anywhere inland, you need a car. The buses only run once a day to one town - they don't go anywhere else and don't run at weekends or on bank holidays, so they're pointless for 99% of people who need them.

I’m in Scotland that is pushing hard for net zero yet they keep cutting all the public transport, routes and times down, make it make sense