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?

Simple solution to Dutch flooding: a little boy sticking his finger in a hole in a dyke (or whatever they’re called now), and staying there all night.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist it,

The corruption or incompetence in planning/construction and the firms that deliver it for councils and govt is endemic....
Its like a job creation scheme, why do a decent build or repair when a shoddy one will mean they have to return a few months later?

A traffic Island for parents to cross the road near school local to me, was eventually built at great cost and long traffic delays.... many people said it was in the wrong place... but the council still went ahead... months later, it has been removed - it prevented the local bus turning left on its route!

the repair to otherwise good tarmac is awful, a series of potholes in the waiting but never mind, they'll get paid very well for that fix... which wont last.

With our by-pass, it needed a huge bridge (6 lanes) across a river. Land on one side was far higher than the other so it is a sloping bridge on a hill. When they brought in the huge bridge sections (pre-fabricated off site), for which they needed a couple of specialist cranes that have to be booked months in advance, the sections weren't long enough! Delayed the whole thing by about a year. Apparently, the "engineer" who designed the bridges didn't account for the length to be longer than the direct width (bank to bank) - must have missed the basic GCSE trigonometry lessons that the hypoteneuse is longer than the base of a triangle, which is basically what the bridge is, being on a slope rather than level!

Its like a job creation scheme, why do a decent build or repair when a shoddy one will mean they have to return a few months later

Exactly the same as what is happening in social housing.

Local to me, we had a cock-up with repairs to a bridge over a railway, because someone had ordered the wrong size parts.

but I do hate the way so many roads are clogged with parked cars that make navigating cities, towns & villages so difficult.

Walking around Palermo yesterday, trying to navigate around the parked cars was a nightmare. They were parked almost everywhere, bar a couple of pedestrianised streets. You'd never get to plonk a garden shed on public land for free so why do people expect free parking for a car? The noise is ridiculous too, though not as bad as Naples.

In my village there are too many cars too. I hate having to dodge in between them when a car passes (no pavement, or if there is one it's blocked by parked cars). Ambulances struggle to get through, so the problem is genuinely dangerous. Some people try to block off "their" spaces with cones. Eggs got thrown at the car of the last one to try that. I sold my car and bought a bicycle.

To those Londoners who say that permits cost £6-700 per year, I could point out that the space could be worth anything from £25k-£250k so if you were renting it commercially you'd be paying at least three times the current rate.

I do like the Japanese approach of banning overnight parking - if you want to store your private property overnight, you should own or lease the land.

As for poor public transport? Guess what the buses are stuck behind when they're running late? Cars. Can't cycle to work/school/shops because it's too dangerous? Cars again.

The secondary I went to had a very small catchment. No more than 1.5 miles. No reason that secondary kids need a lift for that sort of distance (save the minority with disabilities). Yet every day the streets would be clogged with hundreds of cars dropping the kids off in dangerous places. I cycled from the very edge of the catchment, rain or shine.