Owning a car should be outlawed suggests Labour MP

[claig]

It was only a matter of time before they came up with this and stepped it up a gear.

"Owning a car should be ‘outlawed’ to force people on to public transport, a senior Labour MP has suggested.

Motorists who want to drive should instead be forced to join communal ‘car clubs’ where the cars are shared by drivers and used only when needed.

Dr Alan Whitehead, a Labour MP for Southampton Test and a member of the Energy and Climate Change select committee, said the increase in car ownership would lead to ‘something approaching a national traffic jam before 2040’.

He claimed that radical action would be needed to avoid national gridlock.

In an article in the Guardian, Dr Whitehead wrote: ‘We need to consider doing something serious. What we need is a considerable expansion of public transport over the next period and a shift from car to bus, train, bike or even feet. The big problem is how to do it.’

He went on to suggest that ‘outlawing’ car ownership was better than banning car use altogether, preferring ‘regulation rather than prohibition’.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2754252/Labour-MP-Beat-gridlock-ban-owning-car-force-motorists-share-vehicles.html

Hopefully, UKIP will have something to say about this and will put a spanner in the works of their green plan.

FatewiththeLeadPiping in the dining room (Cluedo reference), no, Farage is one of us. He is against their green plan. He wants us to have our high-wattage vacuum cleaners and hairdryers and private motor vehicles, he is not one of the puppets.

I live 4 miles from the nearest bus route, which runs 3x per day and goes to a town which I not the one I work in. There are no pavements and no train line. My job involves visiting the frail elderly who are often also in the countryside up to 30miles apart including evenings and weekends.

I guess I could ride my horse to the bus stop...

NighFallsFast, the lords of the manor and their puppets won't even allow us horses in the future because they use up resources and their manure "harms the planet". It will be the old "by foot" for us plebs as they turn the clock back for us.

I have not had a car for the last six months and as a part time worker with 3 DC it has been really hard. We are rural, the bus fare for all of us to the nearest town is nearly £10 return (where the leisure centre has been closed all summer holiday :-( ) We have often biked and walked in but trips out have been difficult. Cycling infrastructure is poor and public transport prohibitively expensive. Not easy at all. Far, far better infrastructure and cheaper public transport is needed.

This is the type of argument they use to restrict our lifestyles. It is all about waste, resources and the "planet"

"It's not particularly logical that I use a car to drive on my own at the beginning and end of the day to and from work, and the rest of the time it sits outside my house or my office doing nothing"

Under-usage. They want usage to be more "efficient" to save resources, so they say. it won't affect the super rich and their puppets on their estates, but under-usage is like under-occupancy (bedroom tax). They want us to be more "efficient" in order to "save the planet", but it won't affect the under-occupancy of their castles and mansions.

Now they are starting to say they want us to share cars, soon they will want us to share washing machines at the local laundromat. They will say that that is more efficient and doesn't waste so many resources and "saves the planet".

I'd like to start with a maximum size of car, or make anyone with a Chelsea tractor retake their test in one. That and a large charge to drive a few hundred yards to school could take enough cars off the roads, have the rest take up less space and cut fuel emissions.

Provide a quarter hourly bus service from our village to each of the major towns in the area, subsidise it so it's more affordable for everyone (ie not £7 return to the town 5 miles away, which far outweighs any savings you'd make buying food from the market). Extend this to all rural or semi-rural areas. Make all modes of public transport accessible to people with disabilities or young families and then it might be just about workable.

And yes, claig it's probably a revelation to you that a man whose politics I broadly (if not specifically) identify with is being an utterly clueless muppet. It's about on a par with the ridiculous article in the Guardian, today about how supermarkets must be dying out because the journo's "village" in London now has many, many delis, fancy cheese shops, fishmongers and butchers. My village doesn't even have anywhere I can buy a fresh cabbage and is probably far more typical.

Give us a decent public transport everywhere then!

Where I live - in a medium size town - the public transport is awful. Take at least 40 mins on the bus to get to the closest train station which only offers two routes! To get anywhere else would take all day to just get there

'UKIP are the elite.'

Are the elite fruitcakes and loonies? Some would say yes, just look at them, and that certainly does give one pause for thought but on balance I think the answer is no.