To think car ownership is out of control in the UK

[JacquesHarlow]

I fully expect to get a vast majority of "YABU" comments, but here goes:

Firstly, before I get flamed - I am a woman, a car owner, and yes I have a driveway now (though didn't before). I am a car enthusiast in terms of the enjoyment I've got from driving and I don't have an issue with "cars" per se.

What I have an issue with is how ridiculous Britain's councils and governments are on car ownership. How cheap car ownership is. How anyone can distort the living environment around them with their choices.

Have you driven down a suburban street lately, or even an urban one?

Small and narrow Victorian streets with lines of cars packed on either side, and only room for one vehicle to drive down it. Why so many cars? The houses have been there for 150 years. Why now?

And because so many people (often fellow women, annoyingly) don't ever like reversing, you find yourself caught in the middle, having to reverse right back to the end of the street to start again.

School runs are chaos - so many cars, parking up in illegal or careless ways, purely to save a short distance walking.

And the size of cars! Absurdly large vehicles which then take up more road space on the kerbside. Yeah it is "legal" but in a decade where theoretically we want to get better as a country environmentally, most people do not give two fucks as long as their precious DCs are "safe" (you're just as safe in a NCAP 5* rated Yaris as you are in a Merc GLS, but try telling that to people where I live).

So this is the madness of today:

Cars are SO much bigger. And thanks to PCP they're cheaper - and this is why I see so many cars where I live ,and up north when I visit, and everywhere else. The PCP monthlies thing keys right into the British obsession of wanting to look and feel wealthy. Years ago a Golf or an Audi A3 would be considered posh for a family. But why would I buy a Golf when my monthly payments could get me into something BIGGER!

The one thing that isn't bigger, is the United Kingdom. I've seen councils in London paint "parking lines" half on the pavement so that people can park up on either side to let cars past. I've seen people in these Discoveries and Defenders mount kerbs at drop off time without a thought or care for who might be behind them or even aware of this being an issue.

And you can have 1 household in a street of 20 houses own 5 cars. You do the maths as to how much of the available parking is then taken away.

Why are people so aggressive and discourteous in their car ownership? What are we going to do about this?

Some of us remember 20 or 30 years ago when you could drive to another street and not have to face a x5 barrelling towards you, parked cars either side? With a tiny woman peering over the steering wheel refusing to reverse back into the space immediately behind her? But powering through so that you, in your little hatchback, have to reverse 10 car lengths to accommodate her ego and lack of driving skill?

Our city and town streets are not made for X5s, Discoveries, Range Rover Sports, and god knows what else, to be parked along the kerbside blocking out the light into tiny terraced houses.

How do we put a stop to this? I love the Japanese principle in certain cities where you have to name a parking space you own or have access to before you buy a car. Could this work here?

AIBU? How will we ever wean ourselves off this 'bigger is better, and every member of my family must have a car' mentality?

I'm working on HS2 atm. Will be interesting to see how much difference that makes. If it ever completes.

The amount of money being wasted is absolutely staggering. They're seemingly completely unable to order the right amount of concrete half the time so you end up with situations like Friday where I was asked to do two hours overtime but upon arriving at site the pour had already been finished and me and the guy behind ended up dumping a few grand worth of concrete into a big waste pit. And I then agreed to work on Saturday and got paid £250 for coming in and working a six hour day redelivering the dumped loads which they realised they did need after all - were for a separate application filling in a hole around some pipework.

It's absolutely mind blowing at times. It's never an exact art but most customers get it right. They estimate an amount and measure when they're nearly finished before ordering a make up load. A second make up would be be unusual. These guys are ordering several and then dumping them. And then it all needs broken down when dry by a digger and loaded onto tippers who then take it elsewhere to be dumped. Serious amounts of £££!

I agree with you op. What gets my goat is people parking on the pavement when they have an empty drive. It’s also a nightmare taking my grandchildren for a walk in their pram, the amount of times I have to go in road with the pram because I can get the pram past a car half way on the pavement, I have to avoid certain streets because of this.
No wonder this country has a high rate of cardiovascular issues.

Someone has probably mentioned this, but a lot of the problem is due to a) teens saying they "need" a car the moment they pass their test, whereas before they used to just drive mum and dad's and b) those same young people being unable to move out because of the cost of accommodation so the cars mount up. They don't want to have to get the bus or walk or cycle to work, or are unable to do so.

My DP's son is 21 and still at living at home. Cars are his hobby. He has three, all of which he keeps at home, one on the driveway and three in the street. I imagine the neighbours hate him. I would too. Thankfully I don't live in the same house as him.

But it is.
My 70 year old neighbours own four - FOUR FFS!!!!! - cars between them. It's ridiculous.

I live in a town where most cars are those black tanks that everyone favours. They hog the roads and parking has become a nightmare. I hate it.

Go to France and it's like the UK was 20 years ago. Normal sized cars and rarely a tank to be seen.

Strong name to usage correlation. 🤣 Although I'm not sure you need defended from a cyclist crashing into you lol. But I do love big vehicles. I used to have pick up trucks as a hobby. They're just not practical for me now.

I can fly to Spain for less than a train ticket to visit my DD, who lives 120 miles from me. They need to make public transport better and more affordable if they want less cars on the road.

My neighbour over the road has two 20 year old daughters. They have six cars between them, plus a camper van. Nuts

Wanker Tankers my exH calls them.

Does he think that names like this bother the people who drive them?

All sounds good.

Well, I beg to differ on the cyclist point! Drive round Regent’s Park on a weekend and see the cyclists getting up to 40mph (and they don’t stop for anyone or any light). I’ve seen one smash into the window of a Ford Fiesta type number.

My 70 year old neighbours own four - FOUR FFS!!!!! - cars between them. It's ridiculous.

Assuming they are parked on their property, what difference does it make how many they own?

They can’t drive four cars at once.

work in the same office do we? 🤣

And we park on the street in our Zone 1/2 neighbourhood. Council won’t let us drop the kerb and park in our front garden, so…whelp. Guess they’d rather have the parking permit fee than anything else

Agree OP. It’s car-centric thinking not people centric thinking.

I think we need to be more creative and have shared ownership as cars just sit there taking up space 90% of the time. So much of our environment is given over to their storage. There’s places where having one is pretty vital - rural, limited public transport.

But in the vast majority of cities and towns where the majority of people actually live, most people just don’t need a car all the time but may need access to one every so often. We sold our massive car - have our own off road parking space but really only used the car for camping trips where we needed the space to safely load it with a large dog and camping gear. But it would sit there for weeks on end not being used. I never used it for school run or going to shops as it is faster by bike and I do think SUVs are pretty offensive in cities.

Car hire is expensive though and Zipcar cars are often booked up so we take taxis if we need to, still cheaper than owning a car. I think we can’t keep increasing the number of cars on the road with associated congestion and really offer viable alternatives for short journeys. For us if we could share the cost of a car with several other people for the three weeks a year we’d actually use it that would be brilliant.

i think there’s a need to improve public transport outside the big cities, invest in decent active travel and make multi modal travel possible and have shared ownership and it would make a huge difference to air quality, health, congestion and many other benefits.

Or:

Cars are so much safer these days! There are so many design features which increase the chance of your family surviving even in a serious accident.

Many people, like myself, have to pay to park their car outside their own house.. meaning more money is going into overstretched local councils.

People have so much more freedom these days and many (sadly not all) are able to choose better options for schools, work etc because of ease of travel. My children are able to go to a much better school because I can drive them there.

People in rural communities can more easily access services too! People with a doctor service ten miles away don’t need to worry about relying on the one an hour bus service to get to their appointments on time.

People at some workplaces are being rewarded for car pooling! They are able to get around and are being encouraged to think of more sustainable options as well as helping others in their communities. Much like the many schemes in my local area where elderly people are being helped to collect their shopping etc

I don’t want to look and feel wealthy - I just need to a) get my child to and from school in a situation where her abusive father calls the shots and b) be able to work (and having a car is part of my job contract)

My 80 year old parents have 3 children. When we were all little, my parents had one car. Now they are still there with their one car, and each of us three children have one car each. So that's four cars. We three have three grown up children between us, each of whom have a car each. So from 1980, where there was just one car in this family, now there are seven. We have four more children yet to buy their own cars, so if my parents are still alive at that point, there will be eleven cars where there was just one 45 years ago.

I imagine it's the same across the country.

I do agree that cars are unnecessarily large these days and they take up too much space. You can often tell a lot about the person by the car they drive.

It's a problem with many causes that took a while to create, so it's going to take a while with many approaches to unpick.

To be fair, the government have made some moves towards a solution (Although they need to go a lot further IMO). It's now (I believe) legal for local authorities to take buses back under their control, for example. Bus fares are now capped (we actually have the Tories to thank for that 😱), trains will be taken back into public ownership.

Someone who needs to shoulder their fair share of the blame is the car industry. They're responsible for aggressively marketing cars to us- especially the larger ones, which give them bigger profit margins. I think they should have to contribute to a fund to improve public transport, and they should be discouraged from manufacturing big cars.

I just look at the traffic on the roads from 07.00 - 19.00 and wonder where on earth everyone is going all day every day and why they aren’t at work.
There used to be clear busy times, 8-9 am and 5-6pm.
You go to our out of town shopping areas any time of day and the car parks are full, as are the cafes, but apparently nobody has any money 🙄
It ought to be illegal to park on the street if you have a perfectly good drive too.

I detest driving now, hell is indeed other people.

SUV Alliance

This is the organisation campaigning for reducing SUV numbers in cities.

I'm surprised there's only one person on here with one!

@HiddenInCubeOfCheese The reasons you put forward don't really warrant driving a tank! If you are scared of what a pushbike might do to you, imagine how terrifying it would be if you were on a bike and a Defender was bearing down on you.

If you like being higher up you could equally get a people carrier sort of thing which is the width of a normal car, they also have big boots.

And I'm sure you have worked hard for it, but you are still ignoring the fact that your choices negatively impact other people.

(I am not flaming you btw just replying!)

Women don't like reversing ?
WTH OP?

Statistically its cars crashing into cyclists that is the bigger issue, but of course you know that

@OldieButBaddie - point taken about a pushbike being scared of a Defender but that’s not a specific issue ie I drive just fine, and carefully and have a million sensors on the car. Other people you might have a case against. However, ask the average driver in London what they think of cyclists in London…

Honestly, a people carrier to me is ugly as hell. I like the Defender and its climate control and a/c in the seats.

The general vibe of “oh people don’t NEED cars” or “people should only have small cars” is nuts to me. If we’re saying that, well, then let’s do a one child policy and nobody is allowed a detached house or other things that they simply just want. Lots of kids or foreign holiday travel etc negatively impact others but… I mean, honestly, I don’t care. People who don’t have cars do things that negatively impact others. It’s not a black and white game.