You don't have to live in the deepest countryside to need a car!

ceridwen

LillythePink wrote: »

Our bus service is rubbish - fine if you live on the main roads or on the coast.

The amount of cars over here is stupid and I know that I contribute to that as well, but with childminder drop offs/pick ups, it isn't possible or practical to try and get busses - 3 bus trips per morning and getting into work late - not picking DD up until later so more costs there.

Moving isn't an option due to house prices or more importantly the fees associated with buying a house, I do work with people who either cycle in, bus or walk - which is fine because they are either within walking distance, don't have kids or have partners who do the running around with the kids.

When DD moves school in September, it will be within walking distance for her, so I will go back to using my scooter, but for the moment, it isn't practical as I would be doubling back on myself and getting into work just in time or later.

There are loads of people who don't need to drive over here, but do because they are lazy and can afford to - our petrol is still cheap (ish) - very cheap in comparison to you in the UK, but more expensive because they wacked on a load of tax and abolished motor tax, we don't have paid parking either (which is good).

We live on an island which is 26 square miles, but our busses are huge - far to big for the roads over here and are very seldom full - if they bought in smaller busses, covering a wider area and a wider time span, then more people would use them

I guess you live on one of the islands round British mainland then?

You made a very valid point - about a lot of people not needing to drive but doing so anyway (ie because they are "lazy and can afford to").

That is precisely the reason why the more farsighted of policymakers have been keeping an eye out for some years as to how many car journies are for less than 2 miles. Cant recall the statistics - but I think its quite a few (20% I seem to remember???). That would be 1 in 5 cars off the road right away if no-one ever got in a car for such short journies - and more oil to go round for those making essential car journies:cool:.

Its given that there are people who - with the best will in the world - simply arent healthy enough to walk distances of up to 2 miles and never will be (even if they take full responsibility for looking after their health the best they can) and alternative arrangements need to be in place specifically to deal with this. I certainly dont believe in genuine disability being a reason to "imprison" people in their homes - so maybe more community transport services/help with getting 3-wheeler bikes/motorised wheelchairs/whatever is appropriate for the person concerned. This is also an issue that needs addressing during this Transition period.

ellay864

Where I live the bus services have been slashed so much that they combine 2,3,or 4 routes into one. So the 15 min bus ride from our small town to the next ones 8 or 9 miles away depending if you're heading north or south, take 45-60 mins by the time they've wound through all the outlying villages. And in each case there is only one bust stop in those towns for us so if you need to get to the other side of town you have to factor in either another bus or a decent walk. For me, for the town I go to most, I'd be looking at 15 min walk to the bus stop, 45 min on the bus, 20 min walk the other end...or 10-15 min in my car right to the centre. Sorry but it's a no brainer especially if I have kids or heavy shopping to consider.
To get to work I'd have to get the bus (only one an hour), 40 min to the next town, 20 min walk to train station, 30 min on a train, then another 30 min bus ride. As for the idea of moving to live near where I work, that's impossible as it's in the heart of the really posh Cheshire, WAH territory where house prices are double those of where I live (though only actually less than 20 miles away). There are no other companies in the area so unless I gave up my career totally I just couldn't do it.
I'd happily use public transport more if we had a decent, reliable, regular, affordable service but I don't have the money or time to give up my car for it right now

rozmister

NEED is a strong word for car use. They make things very convenient for people and I think it is hard for people to extract the idea of convenience from need but there are situations where simply packing up and moving to somewhere with transport isn't viable, suitable or appropriate for a job.

My parents live in rural Cornwall and I grew up with out in the sticks. Where we live has no real bus service (1 in the morning at 10am, 1 at 12pm, 1st one back at 12.20pm, final one back at 4.30pm) and is about to be cut. My mum is a support worker for people with learning difficulties and her catchment for people is about 20 miles radius (and is taken from a spot 15 miles from our home) and no buses could get her to and from work. She also takes a lot of them out to places as part of her support work and some of her clients couldn't cope with the overstimulation and lack of routine public transport creates. She couldn't find a job closer to home and when she started my Dad had just passed away and I was quite young; it wasn't the right time to uproot me and make me change schools. She could try and get rid of her car and save money but there still aren't many jobs in our area and she's settled in that one so she doesn't want to leave and she could move but she doesn't want to leave a house full of memories.

It may be a "choice" but for some families there are extenuating circumstances that mean having a car is the best choice for that family.

In an ideal world there would be wonderful transport links, we'd all live near them and we could afford online shopping if transport meant we couldn't make it to the shops. But that isn't the case and to say we could all choose not to have cars is quite a naive black and white attitude to the discussion.

I don't have a car now (I got rid of it when I moved somewhere with good public transport links) but the buses are quite unreliable where I live and a 10 minute car journey is 40 minutes on the bus. I CHOOSE not have a car for money reasons (and it wouldn't be safe on my road!!) but if I had children and other things in my life it wouldn't be that simple. It's much easier for people like me who are single, young and have no obligations to get rid of their car.

We shouldn't be aiming for a car-free world at all, it's not viable we should be aiming at reducing the levels of car use in groups of people like me rather than applying the concept willy nilly. If more young, fit people with no need for a car gave theirs up fossil fuel would go a lot further easing up the pressure on our resources meaning people with families and jobs demanding cars could continue to use them.

ceridwen

!!!!!! wrote: »

What will happen is that people will start giving up their jobs because it is no longer cost effective.

You can not realistically price the car driver off the road if you haven't put the public transport infrastructure in place first to replace it.

I've seen threads on here already about people taking into account whether its worth the cost of paying out for a long commute to work and either wondering whether to give up jobs - or whether to take them in the first place. This is already happening.

Re not being able to "realistically price the car driver off the road....etc" - I had hoped this issue would be addressed BEFORE these concerns arose. However - Government simply hasnt done so and doesnt seem to have any intention of doing so in time - hence why I argue for "community" led schemes to deal with this whilst we wait for public transport to start being improved.

Again - dealing with what IS - rather than what we WANT. I would personally agree that the public transport infrastructure should have been sorted out FIRST - but can see that things are, at the moment, getting even worse on that front. (Goes off wishing I could "knock together" a few heads in the powers-that-be to "get their act together" to deal with this.....:cool:).

bap98189

!!!!!! wrote: »

What will happen is that people will start giving up their jobs because it is no longer cost effective.

In the short term, all sorts of things like that will happen. But since people are needed to do those jobs, in the long term something else will have to happen.

You can not realistically price the car driver off the road if you haven't put the public transport infrastructure in place first to replace it.

Yes you can if the solution is not to shift people over to other forms of transport, but to lower the number of miles travelled. In the UK, the average commute to work is the longest in terms of both mileage and time of any European country. There is little point in simply moving people from one form of transport to another. The solution is to reduce the distance people travel every day.

The way we have setup our society will have to change> I don't know what the solution is, but most likely it will mean people living far closer to their workplace than they currently do. This used to be the case in the past. The average commute has increased by just over 20% in each of the past two decades.

Gemmy_2

The buses where i live is far to unreliable and i go on the motorway to get to work

Padstow

FBaby wrote: »

Usually the advantage of living in areas where public transport is not so well catered for is that properties are cheaper, which in essence means you can afford a car with what you save in lower mortgages/rent.

I live in a hamlet, the nearest bus stop is one and a half miles away down unlit lanes. There is no gas, no mains sewage, no street lights, and my standing order for Council Tax is over £200.00 per month. That is for a single person. So not so cheap.

ceridwen

bap98189 wrote: »

In the short term, all sorts of things like that will happen. But since people are needed to do those jobs, in the long term something else will have to happen.



Yes you can if the solution is not to shift people over to other forms of transport, but to lower the number of miles travelled. In the UK, the average commute to work is the longest in terms of both mileage and time of any European country. There is little point in simply moving people from one form of transport to another. The solution is to reduce the distance people travel every day.

The way we have setup our society will have to change> I don't know what the solution is, but most likely it will mean people living far closer to their workplace than they currently do. This used to be the case in the past. The average commute has increased by just over 20% in each of the past two decades.

Some valid points. I am certainly absolutely astonished personally at how much time/money some people are prepared to use to commute to work (but its true that I have never had a well-paid job yet:( and rarely had a reasonably paid one even:() - so my personal figure of how much time/money I am prepared to "spend" on getting to/from work is an extremely low one (to allow for the low salary I have usually been paid).

People will have to get used to "living locally" generally - but I think its fair to accept that a lot of people will find this hard. For most of the time the human race has been on the planet - we have got used to living VERY locally indeed. Now that most people (in Western societies at least) have got a totally different mindset and have had some years of taking it for granted that things (work/leisure/etc) CAN be quite some distance away - then we are coming at things from a very different angle.

Personally - I think it best to accept that most people have now got used to "living globally" rather than "living locally" and try to adapt structures to deal with this fact (hence the much better public transport than we currently have) - because I simply dont think people will be prepared to go back to "living locally" (even though it was only in living memory that people could do otherwise). I think we have to be realistic here and accept that its fair enough to expect people to live MORE locally than they have done for the last 50 or so years - BUT not to expect them to go back to living AS locally as people did in all the previous centuries we have been here. It simply won't happen. I dont agree with people being "restricted" to a few miles radius of their homes and I think we have to accept that the mindset now is that people expect to be able to travel further afield than that - and adapt accordingly.

There IS a "happy medium" between the "living locally" of all centuries previous to the 20th century and the expectation of getting into a car/on a plane and expecting to travel tens of miles/thousands of miles in a day. Hence we need to have public transport that is MUCH better than the best we have yet had - and meanwhile the interim position is that we have to use community lift schemes and the like to get us through into that position.

littlerat

Hmmm, the problem is the small businesses no longer exist - our village is quite unusual in having a fair few businesses, but that said 20 years ago it had easily twice as many, the village my Dad grew p in used to have around 8 or 9 shops and now has 3.


I'd also like to know how many of those short journeys are made by the elderly or disabled who cannot move that distance another way - my Dad has to drive the 1/3 mile if he wants to get to the shop as there's no way he can walk it. It's a tiny distance, but there's no alternative for him - and I can't ever see there being a bus service for that!


As an aside, all 3 members of our household have a car, I don't need one as yet actually, but I do enjoy driving - but when I go self employed hopefully later this year I will need one. All very well to say it's a choice of jobs, but if everyone stopped doing any jobs involving driving, a lot of people would have problems.

Becles

I live in a village in County Durham and my Mam lives in a town in Tyne and Wear. By car the journey is 6 miles and takes around 10-15 mins.

To do the journey by bus takes around 90 minutes. I have to get a bus to my nearest town centre, then wait for a bus to her town centre, then wait for a third bus to the suburb that she lives in.

I'm self employed and work for field marketing agencies which involves calling on different shops. I get paid a flat fee per call, so if I can do several calls with a short travelling time by car, I earn more than doing a couple of calls per day with long bus journies in between. Sometimes I have to carry large amounts of point of sale material like stands, dispensers etc, which I physically wouldn't be able to carry on a bus.

My husband works 6am-2pm and there are no buses at that time of the morning. Although his fixed place of work is 4 miles away, he moves around other offices in the area, which ranges from Northumberland down to North Yorks and occasionally has to drive to meetings and training further afield.

I guess if we lived in a town with good transport links and both had fixed places of work, we could do without cars, but at the moment, they are essential.