if you want to reduce petrol prices, then walk, or use a bicycle. stop using the car.

[stitch]

supply and demand. less users, the price wont hike up so much, and if the cost of petrol is down, then the cost of getting food to supermarkets will be less, which means the cost of food we buy in the supermarkets will be less.

simple really.

sadly i think we all love the convenience of the car too much.

gets some popcorn

Has this kicked off yet?

i wish i could!

nope, no one seems interested.
just following on from the dont use bp/esso thread.

where do you live stitch?

we arent all greedy consumers you know.

some of us live in rural areas with no public transport - what are we supposed to do, grow our own?

ha ha, sounds like fun.
or actually, lets all become hunter gatherers!

im not having a go at anyone, just trying to point out the simple solution the bp/esso thread seems to be missing.

but it's only a simple solution if you live near enough to everything that you don't need a car

I think it does depend so much on where you live, though. We went a whole year and a half without a car when we lived in Croydon. If we needed a car (for a weekend away, for example) then we hired. Shopping was done via the internet. Plenty of buses, trains and taxis to use and town was only a 20min walk away.

Here in Worcester it's trickier. It's just not practical taking the non-subsidized bus in to town (slightly too far to walk - about a 40min walk from here, I believe) for a 1 hour dash around the shops before a 1 year old and a 4 year old get bored. I still get shopping delivered and try and shop for many things on the internet though. Then again, it's "easy" for me as I hate driving so automatically try and minimize that. We've chosen where we live to be in walking distance of a decent nursery, school, a supermarket, community centre and post office. However, we've paid a premium for that - not everyone could afford that.

If you're in an area you can't get shopping delivered, off a bus route or on a route that's intermittent at best... then you're pretty much reliant on a car.

Now what really should happen is for car manufacturers to pull their finger out and produce decent electric cell cars. The technology is there (costs about £5k to convert an existing car to electric, but would be cheaper if built from scratch like that) - costs about 1p a mile to run off your household electric bill, can get cells that allow the car to reach 70mph and travel 120miles+ from an overnight charge... Bastards won't make them though.

Nice if you can.

Did when I could. Lived without a car for several years

Can't do it any more because of the place we live.

This is too easy to judge other people's situations

yes i know. thats the sad fact of our lives now isnt it?
i couldnt do without a car.

g, is that really a solution though. because electricity is produced by burning petrol, so we would still be using a nonrenewable rsoource.
as you said, the bastards should also be using wind farms etc.

I'm with you stitch. I have a car but I don't use it very much. I hate car culture with a passion and think it has absolutely ruined our world.
Not to put tooooo fine a point on it.

i use public transport to get to work. before my feet and ankles started to ache so badly this pregnancy, i walked the journey to work three times a week - 4.5 miles round trip - to keep fit. now i use the bus. Plan to do that again after maternity leave.

We live near town centre, so it's easy for us to walk many places.

We do, however, keep a car. It's very handy for errands and big shops, particularly as buses aren't handy if you have two kids still in a buggy. Our 'local' infirmary is also a hassle to get to by bus.

Also, we cannot afford to go on holiday, so we use the car for day trips at weekends.

We did w/o a car for a year, and queueing for a bus in dark Scottish winter, w/rain blowing in your face, a newborn and a toddler + all their gear, just isn't something either of us cares to do.

Nope, I'm on a green tariff electricity thingy - all my electric is windfarms etc

i totally get how impossible life with kids is in countryside without a car....but do think that certainly in cities we should be taxed highly on petrol as it is unsustainable resource and also totally crap for environment...

Yes it's so simple if you live in a town. But none of this will work unless public transport improves. No point giving up your car if you can't actually get anywhere.

It really annoys me here that they're hiking up the prices of carparking in town, but not really improving the public transport to match it. It's leaving many elderly and disabled people in an almost impossible position, and is just turning more and more people away from the small local shops in the town centre and into the out of town shopping centres. It's a complete shambles of a policy...

petrol duty makes up a large proportion of petrol prices (and they are subject to VAT) - it's something like 50p a litre for unleaded I think

I think we should be focussing our efforts, not campaigning about petrol prices, but campaigning for a decent COUNTRYWIDE public transport service, that's cheap, reliable and accessible no matter where you live.

Was talking to a friend the otherday who has 2 young children the same ages as my two, she'd never even HEARD of low-loader buses - let alone seen one

oh ok sophable so it's ok to have a car if you are wadded then is it?

even if we had a countrywide transport system (unlikely sadly) it still wouldn't offer all the links you needed. e.g. if I went to see the ILs on public transport, I would have to go in to central London, change to another main railway line west of London and then get a train. By the time I'd done that, I could have got to Oxford in the car 2 times over!

I agree, QofQ! The public 'tranport' here rots, plain and simple. Not frequent enough, not disabled/family/elderly friendly and deffo not very affordable. Not enough carriages on the trains, either, always delayed or late, expensive, etc.

Cost us £23 return to get to a place it cost us £16 in petrol and half the time to get to in a car. Who's got an extra £7 to throw away, especially when you need two of you - one to hoist on the buggy, the other to hold baby whilst you fold buggy down and pray there's a place to stow it.

And I'm talking about a fairly large city!

foxinsocks - yes that's with the current transport system - if they introduced many of the routes which have been 'phased out' in recent (and past) years then people WOULD be able to travel easier.

We used to be able to travel from Saltburn to Bristol - on the train - with just 1 change!

the problem is that any public transport system would be privately owned which would mean they would want to make profit which would mean they would ignore any route where there weren't enough people (anyone in rural location!)

Totally with sophable about high taxes for fuel in cities. They'd have to be spent on improving public transport though. It's woeful where I am.

This is an interesting website if you are interested in transport matters Roadrage