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?

Tell me about it!!!!! I live in a high rise estate and it seems most of the residents have a car. Unfortunately the car park isn't big enough to accommodate all the cars and people are parking on the corners so you can't see what is coming towards you, or they park in no parking zones right in front of the flats (we run a lot of activities from the flats/community rooms and apparently they had to cancel the parents creche as someone had parked right in front of the emergency exit!!!) Or they park right in front of the pathway to the street pavement and you can't use it!!!! 😡😡😡😠😠😠😠😠😡😡😡😡

Full Self-driving Tesla’s will mean people give up car ownership and just use cheap taxis or rent out their car when not using it (as an extra income). So will be fewer and fewer cars parked on the road in future. Should start in Austin, Texas, USA this month. If you see Uber ordering 1,000s of Tesla’s you will know it’s on the way.

Most cars are parked most of the time so this will clear the streets etc.

I worked in Japan. A person could only purchase a car if they had a dedicated space to park it in. Worked wonderfully

I have a bike... it's great..I cycle to work 50 mins each way..so don't have to deal with public transport.. it's very easy to park. I think people used to cycle and walk much more to work. It's my me time too also where I can relax. I honestly tell lots of people how much better it's made my days .. no traffic jams, no fighting for a space.

This is by far the most insufferable thread.

Improve public transport.

Until this happens people will rely on cars. When I lived in London I didn't have a car as there were plentiful, frequent and relatively reliable underground and overground trains, and buses.

Where I live now you're lucky if a train or bus even shows up, never mind be on time. They're only scheduled every half hour, never go anywhere near where you need to get and cost a bloody fortune. So unless walking distance, I drive everywhere.

PCP doesn't make cars cheaper, it makes them much more expensive 😁

Car ownership is "cheap" - really? .....it must be nice to be wealthy enough to be able to say that....

And yet here you are contributing

Car ownership is not 'cheap', not for many of us, I only earn a basic Supermarket wage, so please don't say the cost of motoring needs to be more than it is already, if streets are 'clogged' that's just the modern world for you, in China they have traffic jams which last for hours, as the population of Britain rises by hundreds of thousands every year, there's going to be many more vehicles out there, that's just the way it is.

Getting city dwellers out of their cars is a good start for sure

I actually own a 4x4, but I live out in the middle of nowhere. I need it to be able to see over high hedges when pulling out. When we first moved here, I had a little sport car, it was like playing Russian Roulette trying to get out from some roads.

I totally agree though, the younger generation are not happy with a little runaround to get them going anymore, they go from passing their test to getting a new car, and to be fair, this is being encouraged by parents, so you can't blame all of them.

It also seems that every couple should have their own car too, not like years ago when one car was sufficient. I don't really see what has changed, my husband and I used to work full time, he would leave the house before me and use public transport and walk part the way to work. I would use the car as I did the child care drop off and pick up. It worked and I don't see how it's any different now, everyone seems to be in su h a rush. Unless you live completely out of reach of public transport.

Another contributing factor to so many cars in the road is the number of offspring staying at home for longer due to house prices. We have just had a family move in where I live, there's the parents, one grandmother, and 2 children, one has the boyfriend living with them too. They have 7 cars and 2 work vans, fortunately they have room to keep them off the street. If they were living in a town, that would be one house with that number of cars.

I don't see things changing in the near future either, we now live in a world where people have what they want regardless of the impact on the environment, or their surroundings for where they live.

The world changes, humans adapt, our mode of transport will too. Private car ownership doesnt need to contune increasing.

Am sure it’s been said already, but yes bigger people = bigger cars

also housing - children are living with parents /house sharing more than in previous generations so more cars per household

Not everyone makes those choices

There wasn’t car finance , so if you didn’t have the money you couldn’t buy one. Car finance has made those shiny new cars available for everyone .

Finance means everyone (almost) can own a car. Wasn't such a thing back in my day, you either had the money or got moped!

Growing up we initially had a family car mainly used by my dad during the week and for everyone at the weekend, but that was easy enough as my mum didn't work and didn't really ever leave the house, and we were a short walk from school. Later she got her own car when she was well enough to go out places during the week. When I passed my test, I also got one as the buses were once an hour and only went to the centre of town and I'd need to spend about 1.5 hours on 2 or 3 buses to get to friends' and now DH's house that was a 10 minute drive away, plus I had to get the train to another city every morning and there were no buses to the station. If public transport is poor, and all adults in the house work, then of course more cars are needed.

As for people not walking to school, a lot of that is also because people are dropping off on their way to work that they need to drive to so it makes no sense to have to walk back 20-30 minutes to get the car when they could take it with them in the first place - especially with childcare timings. If you have to drop off at 9 and after school club closes at 6, you can't afford to not even be leaving home until 9.30.

Well if you have a population that wants to live like Americans, you can't complain when you end up like America.

I'm not sure about out of control but it is getting excessive, fueled at least partly by car-centric planning and public transport seeing lip service at best. My estate is ridiculous, cars and vans taking up every square inch of parking space and that is normal across SE England. Is it really necessary for each individual adult in a household to own one car each? I reckon we should have a law that states no-one can own a car unless they have somewhere off-road to park it. That would get rid of the PITA situation of double parking on primary roads shrinking them down to the equivalent of single track, and obstructing vision of drivers trying to turn out of side roads.

Decades of short sighted and crappy thinking has really f**ked us over in the UK.

The problem is, there isn’t reliable public transport everywhere, I live in a village with absolutely no public transport to the nearest town, there isn’t even a bus route that passes the village and I do own an evil Range Rover (granted it’s nearly 10 yrs old!) but it’s a necessity as the village entrance floods every time it rains and it’s the only way the flood water is passable unless we wait 3 days for the flood water to subside! We do have two cars, which are parked on the drive, again a necessity when there’s school run and we work in opposite directions. I imagine families having 4 cars, etc. is because of children living at home longer, I fully expect we will be a 4 car household in the not too distant future

Try living semi-rurally with minimal public transport available (let alone reliable), having to travel miles for work, school runs, shops etc.
cars are a must have here unless you don’t need to get anywhere!
we have 1 car each per adult, each have different needs and timetables - I have just changed my golf (R32 - do love proper cars) for a Volvo estate as we have a child, a dog, live semi-rurally and go camping a lot so we need the space.
i wouldn’t choose to live somewhere that either doesn’t have parking or decent reliable public transport (not an option around here).

Yes it is, once you have the car it is a lot cheaper to drive than to use public transport and taxis, even if you want to account for servicing, MOT, tax on top of petrol.

Cost to visit my distant family by train: £120
Cost to visit my distant family by car: £65

Well you've clearly stated you're part of the problem. Are you getting rid of yours?

I doubt improving public transport to the level of near perfection would make much difference. People default to the easiest way of doing things and driving is frequently the easiest way, and conveniently externalises some of the costs on society.

My terraced house was designed for miners at the local coal mine which is no longer there. The streets designed for horses and carts. Can you imagine if everyone decided to own horses and carts in order to get to work! Carnage. Our houses were designed for people working within walking distance. That’s not really possible for most people. The wife would be home not working. I’m a single parent so not sure how that would work. They’ve also developed our town from what was once a small mining village to a huge Newtown with retail parks and about 8 primary schools feeding into the one secondary school - that’s also ran out of space and the buildings are dilapidated and waiting for a rebuild.

I need a bigger car. The amount of stuff that lives in my boot for my kids’ hobbies plus space for my weekly shop. My daughter would love for me to get rid of the car for to get a horse and cart though. That would be loving the dream. But it’s only the gypsie travellers going about their daily business on horses with carts. And even most of them upgraded to caravans many years ago.

Society has moved on.

Edited to add. When my DD starts college in September she will need to get a bus and then a train followed by a 10-15 minute walk to get there. We don’t live close enough to the train to walk there. The bust from ours doesn’t go to the college. It goes to the same city but then it would be a 40 minute walk from the bus station rather than the 10-15 minute walk from the train. She likely won’t learn to drive but many of the teens at that college will turn 17 and learn to drive because instead of leaving the house at 7am to get a bus and train to college taking about an hour an a half they could drive there in 30-45 minutes depending on traffic.