We are not set up for electric vehicles in this country

[Pollyannaatemyjelly]

We have an electric vehicle. We tend not to do too many long journeys but today it was inevitable. We have visit a very popular destination via major motorways but there is not one fast charger available on our route. I've just stopped on the M5 on what is supposed to be a dual charger (so more than one vehicle can charge) but it's not working. I've had to wait 20 minutes for the vehicle next to me to charge before I can even begin to charge mine. There is no chance this county can become all electric when the infrastructure is so poor.

This isn't true there are EVs that are WAV already
True there aren't loads but there is at least a Nissan, Vauxhall and Peugeot version that I know of and there may be more
As with all emerging technology it takes time to work through for more specialised applications

I know lots of people with my disability who prefer their EVs because charging is actually much easier especially at home with limited mobility and dexterity than using a petrol pump.
As you know not all disabilities are equal and what works for one won't necessarily work for others but I would say that the charging cables are lighter and easier to fix in place than a petrol pump hose.

Not ideal but people parking on pavements is even worse

Wow just wow. More proof that the mobility scooter hate is disability discrimination. MS users are told they cant run cables everywhere because its a trip hazard.

If only the reaction DH had got was simply "not ideal" and his cable wasnt running on the pavement or the floor indoors.

Huh? I’ve read your post three times and I can’t understand what point you’re trying to make. You’re trying to say that pavement parking isn’t a bad thing? I’m confused.

Uh no The sentence in bold is a quote from someone else. The rest of my post is the reply. Im pointing out the hypocrisy

I would people would use the quote system properly, replies to posts are hard to read otherwise

Ive been on here for 12 years and it was the way it was always done for a long time so its just force of habit. Im getting used to the fact there is a quote button

Ive been on here for 12 years and it was the way it was always done for a long time so its just force of habit. Im getting used to the fact there is a quote button

@JenniferBooth And absolutely nothing wrong with that. Still common practice on this forum. Unfortunately, becoming more common on this forum recently is thread police who make up their own bylaws whether it is don't use bold or dont requote long posts. Post however you like and ignore the police.

Given you can't quote just part of a post and people whinge if you quote too much, what do you suggest...?

I can see that the bolder bit is a quote and I still can’t understand what you are trying to say. Are you angry with someone who says pavement parking is bad, or are you angry at people who pavement park, or are you saying that “if someone complains about pavement parking, this is discriminating against mobility scooters?”

If you had noticed my previous posts on this thread i was wondering where all the EV evangelists were (who are insisting the batteries in EVs arent a fire hazard) when mobility scooter owners were and still are being told that the batteries in their mobility scooters are a hazard. Fucking tumbleweed when it came to sticking up for the latter.

Is that any clearer?

Isn't there another copy of the Light to keep you distracted?

The high street is dying because people are going to out-of-town big box stores. This is the problem with US-style car-centric development. Permission should never have been granted.

High streets clogged with badly-parked cars are unattractive places to visit. Car-free high streets with good public transport are booming.

@DdraigGoch

Car-free high streets with good public transport are booming.

The key point being "good" public transport which many towns simply don't have. Eg a 5 mile journey between my son's flat and the garage to pick up his car after a service. By bus, it takes 1.5 hours, on 3 different buses, and that involves walking for 45 minutes of it between bus stops on different routes! By road, an easy/direct 5 minutes! The garage is next to a huge retail park, so if he didn't have a car, it'd basically take him all day to go shopping and back! That's along the town's orbital by pass road - no buses at all run along the by pass road between the out of town retail parks etc - they all run into the town so it's a bus into town and another bus out of town on a different route.

As far "car free" high streets, plenty of vibrant town centres are car friendly and remain very popular because they have sensibly sized/priced car parks and no stupid traffic calming and one way systems causing gridlock. People can still drive to them and park easily/cheaply. Yes, a pedestrianised central High Street is attractive, but when the councils go too far and pedestrianise lots of other roads around it and then implement all kinds of one way systems, no entry roads, access only, bus only, etc etc it just alienates drivers and they go to the out of town places instead.

As for denying planning permission, where would you put a huge Tesco superstore on the High Street? Not only will there not be any existing buildings big enough, how would people buy "big" things like TVs or a week's shopping in several full carrier bags (along with a crate of lager), carry all that back home on a bike or a bus? It makes sense to have out of town retail parks and superstores than are good for motorists - the problem was local councils not including public transport options as a condition of PP, i.e. making the developer work with local bus firms to ensure new routes added or existing routes changed to make the out of town sites accessible for locals without cars.

Good public transport often requires the removal of cars from the streets. It stops buses and trams from becoming stuck in traffic.

I'm not sure that we really need massive superstores in the first place. These are killing our high streets.

In the town plan (the maps that set out council planning policy) the land allocated for development should be along public transport corridors. That applies to residential development too. New housing should encourage walking, with the full range of essential amenities available within walking distance of all of the new houses. The developer can construct this and underwrite the first few years of services.

The proportion of land that can be dedicated to parking would be restricted too. If you really need gargantuan car parks you can build them under your store. 1,000 space car parks between shops just result in more suburban sprawl. I'd prefer it if the UK didn't descend further into becoming a mini version of the US.

A few changes short of full pedestrianisation that can be made include knips (Dutch for 'cut'). You can still drive into a street, but it has been bisected so that if you want to make a through journey you'll have to go a much longer way around - and that doesn't mean that the next street over becomes a rat-run, you would be forced to use the ring road. Bikes and pedestrians are unobstructed meanwhile. Electric bollards allow buses, emergency vehicles and people with permits (perhaps blue badges, residents or people making deliveries) to go through.

Sadly we've got a PM who flies everywhere in a helicopter so don't expect this lot to boost public transport.

Car-free high streets with good public transport are booming

Not everywhere they aren't.

YY to the above.

Basically, if cities want lively town centers, there are two types of policy choice (you have to choose - you can’t do both).

1. You can design city centers around cars, assuming that most people live in the suburbs etc and want to drive in. So you let them drive in freely along big roads without many restrictions and without having to pay road tolls or congestion charges and provide lots of cheap government-issued parking areas at well below the true market cost of parking.
2. You can house lots of people in the urban center instead to so that they can walk and bike easily to their urban shops and services without needing parking - you enable this by building on the land which otherwise would have been used for parking. Dense agglomerations of people in the urban center makes it possible to develop proper fast public transit for the first time, ideally rail or trams (as the highly populated, profitable stretches of public transit effectively subsidize the loss-making stretches that reach into the suburbs). Public transit is paid for by making drivers pay heavily for using roads and motorways, for entering the city center by car, and by paying high costs for the few parking spaces that remain.

You can’t do both of these things at the same time.

If you design cities around cars, nobody is going to want to live in the car-clogged urban centers of cities, which means you won’t get the dense urban populations that are necessary if you want to develop fiscally viable public transport, and if you keep giving road and parking access away to motorists for free or really cheap, you won’t be able to afford to set up and run those nice trains and trams.

And conversely, if you start to house lots of people in the urban core, drivers need to accept that it is gradually going to become close to impossible to drive into the center of cities. Because firstly, nearly all the areas where cars might have parked will get houses and flats built all over them. And secondly, urban core residents who mostly don’t drive will push strongly for cars to be kept out of city centers - pedestrianization schemes, ever-tighter speed limits, ever-tighter pollution controls, congestion charges that get higher over time, bans on parking on inner city street sides. Also, bus lanes and cycle lanes start to take over roads, further reducing space for cars, and train lines are built on former roads, and trams get in the way of cars.

If you are going to build cities around public transport, it inevitably involves heavy restrictions on cars. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in Pollyanna territory.

Right now, the UK is facing a housing crisis, and we’re getting moans and whines wherever we try to build stuff. You propose building on the green belt - No, naughty! Mustn’t build on the green belt. You propose densifying existing suburbs - “But this will add to the pressure on local residents’ services like GPs! And the construction work will be noisy and dusty! Not here, please. Build on brownfield sites in the center of cities instead!!”

Which I think is fine, but I wonder if the suburbanites and villagers demanding “Brownfield first!!”have really realized what the consequences of this will be - like, are they aware that this is likely to set in motion a chain of events which will eventually mean they become unable to drive into the center of cities like they currently expect to be able to do?

As for denying planning permission, where would you put a huge Tesco superstore on the High Street? Not only will there not be any existing buildings big enough, how would people buy "big" things like TVs or a week's shopping in several full carrier bags (along with a crate of lager), carry all that back home on a bike or a bus? It makes sense to have out of town retail parks and superstores than are good for motorists - the problem was local councils not including public transport options as a condition of PP, i.e. making the developer work with local bus firms to ensure new routes added or existing routes changed to make the out of town sites accessible for locals without cars

Basically, if the idea is that you house lots of people in the urban center (which the UK is gradually starting to do anyway, given that we need to build 4 million homes and suburbanites/villagers throw hissy fits when we try to build anything near them….) they don’t need to drag a week’s worth of shopping home on a bus. They will do what I do and walk to the shops because they will be living locally.

I live round the corner from my modest-sized urban supermarket. Most people round here just pick smaller amongs things up more frequently because it takes about 5 minutes to do so on the way home from work. I do prefer to do a weekly “big shop,” so I just load it up on my buggy and push it home, which takes a few minutes. I’ve timed it against my suburban mother’s shopping trips (I visit her every summer) and I can literally walk there, get my shopping, pay for it, and get my shopping home and put away in approximately the same time that it takes her to drive to her big suburban supermarket and find a parking space. There isn’t the need for really huge supermarkets selling absolutely everything when you live centrally with lots of local shops, because we have so many smaller specialist shops along the street and it’s nice to get bread from a bakery that sells really good bread, for example, if I want specialist products.

If my family really needs to go to an out of town big box store like an IKEA (which is only a couple of times a year, probably), we just arrange for delivery. It still works out massively cheaper than running a car all year round.

If some suburbanites don’t want to use public transport to enter the city center as driving and parking there becomes increasingly difficult, that’s OK. They can, if they like, stick to a lifestyle of staying out there in the suburbs, driving to big box places out of town, and rarely coming into the city center. I know people like this - they just want to drive places like out-of-town garden centers or stay at home and they are are not interested in the kind of things you get in walkable, bustle-y town centers, like cool little shops or interesting coffee places or people-watching or whatever. That’s OK, they can do what they like and we all like different things. The big box out-of-town places are already built, and nobody is going to tear them down.

@user1477391263 it's worth noting that many of the American cities who opted for option 1 (build the cities for the benefit of cars, bulldozing poor/black neighbourhoods to accommodate highways and parking lots in the process) are now in financial difficulties. Endless widenings of freeways and stroads to satisfy an insatiable demand for more road capacity, plus the cost of maintaing highway structures that are reaching life expiry now is unaffordable. Interestingly Detroit is trying to get out of bankruptcy by densifying its urban centre.

I'm currently visiting family in a large European city. They, along with large numbers of others, live in (or within walking distance of) the centre. And you know what - it's great. The centre is bustling. Lots of shops, lots of Cafes and bars, small supermarkets, large indoor market for meat/fish/fresh veg, parks. It's alive in a way that the UK city I live in just isn't.

As far "car free" high streets, plenty of vibrant town centres are car friendly and remain very popular because they have sensibly sized/priced car parks and no stupid traffic calming and one way systems causing gridlock. People can still drive to them and park easily/cheaply.

Thing is, if I am a "car person" ("I like cars, I live in the suburbs because I want space to park two cars and have a car for every adult in the family, I prefer to drive everywhere, don't want to use public transport, would never considering cycling, want to patronize places that welcome me and my car(s) and make it easy for me to drive in, drive out and park in the meantime"), why would I pick a city center -no matter how car-friendly - over an out-of-town shopping centre or out-of-town shopping park filled with great big box-like shops?

Because no city centre is ever, ever going to compete with those out-of-town retail developments on car-friendliness.

The out-of-town retail places always have far more places to park free of charge and are approached by great big spacious roads; it's so easy to drive there and back and find a parking space. And then, once you are there and parked, you have these great big indoor spaces to wander around freely with no cars fouling up the air or making you panic for your toddler's safety.

A city center or high street, even when designed around cars and trying to compete with the out-of-town shopping mall, is fighting a losing battle. It just inherently does not have a car-friendly structure due to the lack of space, narrower roads; even if you blanketed the whole bloody place with free parking slots, it still won't have as much free parking as the out-of-town shopping mall. And then there isn't a nice indoor spacious car-free, fume-free area to wander about from in safety from the cars. You're stuck there with all the cars and spend most of the time dodging them and breathing in their fumes. Fun times. Why would anyone bother with this when they could just drive to SunnyLakes Shopping Haven out there in the surrounding countryside?

As suggested above, build city centres full of housing and let urban types (who actually enjoy cities, unlike the professed "car people") have their low-car cities on their doorsteps. It does seem to work just fine in other countries?

If you are a "car person" and you feel angry about city centres/high streets that are hard to access by car, well, don't go there, then. Just stick with your suburbs and drive to out-of-town retail developments/shopping centres when you want to buy something, have a day out, eat out or go to the cinema. There are plenty of these places and they are not going anywhere.

I am leasing a Tesla through a salary sacrifice work scheme, it arrived a couple of weeks back. Quite an economic way to try one out, I thought. However, the home charger installation can’t be scheduled for at least 10 weeks! So the bottleneck in our case is the electricians to fit the charger, not the availability of the car. In the meantime I am going to need to charge where I can. So far, I have done one supercharger (less than 3 miles away) one charge while waiting at a hospital appointment for my mum and one at a public car park when shopping in town. I have also done one charge from a normal plug at home, which took ages, but did work. So, so far, only been inconvenienced once by having to drive to the supercharger. As I mainly work from home I think I will be mainly charging with the normal plug at home as I don’t drive every day. But will be glad to get the home charger when it finally gets installed. Will have to see how the long distance drives go, but don’t do that often and got the long range Tesla with 330 miles, so hopefully ok.

If the UK were a normal, serious country, we’d have proper, reliable, electrified fast trains from most cities and high-speed rail between major cities, and the number of people needing to do lots of long trips via car would be a lot lower than it is now, speeding up the transition.

In the country where I live, we nearly always do big trips by our excellent train network, and only occasionally decide to hire a car for this purpose, not least because in my country we have to pay heavy motorway tolls for driving because drivers are expected to cover the costs of building and maintaining motorways themselves, rather than being subsidized by the taxpayer which is what happens in the UK (fuel duty and VED cover piss-all and do not remotely cover the costs of motorways etc.).

Sadly, the UK is reaping the consequences of 70-odd years of failure on its railway network.

The real fun and games will start in a few years when the government is finally forced to accept reality and bring in per-mile road pricing due to the collapse of VED and fuel tax. The UK has given away motorway driving (except the M6, Mersey tunnels and a couple of bits) for free for decades; it’s going to be a major culture shift and a lot of people will scream bloody murder!

I agree there are real issues with always building on brownfield sites. Where I grew up there are lots of houses now on green area that we used to play on as kids. The official parks are still there, but the population density is far higher without the informal space there used to be.

@user1477391263

The real fun and games will start in a few years when the government is finally forced to accept reality and bring in per-mile road pricing due to the collapse of VED and fuel tax.

Yep, all those saying how wonderful it is to have electric cars paying little/no VED, low tax benefits in kind, and enjoying "cheap" fuel are going to get one hell of a shock when the revenue currently raised from petrol/diesel car dries up.

The days of low tax benefits in kind will end. As will zero/low vehicle excise duty, and yes, almost certainly there'll also be taxes/charges for mileage or driving in congested places, hence why we got all the smart motorways in congested places with overhead gantries etc - ideal for monitoring and charging road use!!

Most of my driving miles are on C and D roads that will be virtually impossible to monitor. However, it would be straightforward to add the requirement to log miles driven between MoT intervals, and to tax annual mileage retrospectively. Newer luxury cars costing above £40k already have a higher rate of VED imposed for the first few years.