IPSOS Survey - Discouraging car use

[hatler]

No real surprises here - IPSOS Survey

"... public back action to encourage cycling and public transport but remain attached to their cars"

[ian]

The only way to discourage car use is to make car use less convenient and/or more expensive. The end.

[jdsnape]

The only way to discourage car use is to make car use less convenient and/or more expensive. The end.

It's a phrasing thing, but I feel it should be described as  'making people responsible for the true costs (externalities) of running a car' rather than just making it more expensive as that sounds vindictive. The big problem is that you can run a car, and the harms to the environment, people's health, loss of space are not accounted for in your costs of doing so.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Or even more so that we think it should be allowable if "paid for".

[Peter]

I've always had fairly discouraging cars and have used them as little as possible.

[mrcharly-YHT]

The only way to discourage car use is to make not having a car convenient; i.e. owning a car is an expensive inconvenience, not seen as a necessity car use less convenient and/or more expensive. The end.

FTFY

[cygnet]

Or even more so that we think it should be allowable if "paid for".

Wasn't there a primary school that started charging parents who were late picking up their kids from school, to counteract teachers being used as unpaid childcare? The wealthier families just paid up, and collected their kids as late as possible.
Problem not solved.

The only way it could work is to pass on the true costs.

"War on hard working families"
"War on motorists"
"Don't close the tax loopholes, the rich earners will leave"

[The Family Cyclist]

I think we also need to make the alternative more affordable and reliable. My family went to Portsmouth recently and for us all to go on the train would be north of £200

While I realise there are already costs of owning a car to take the train which I'd have much preferred was simply unaffordable for us even with the price of fuel

It would also have involved rail replacement so probably couldn't have done the journey in time to get to the event

[Jaded]

Actually, sadly, that won’t be the answer, the answer will end up with us travelling less, within our post-oil household budgets.

[rogerzilla]

Wasn't there a primary school that started charging parents who were late picking up their kids from school, to counteract teachers being used as unpaid childcare? The wealthier families just paid up, and collected their kids as late as possible.
Problem not solved.

Many schools say they will call the police 

[ian]

I think we also need to make the alternative more affordable and reliable. My family went to Portsmouth recently and for us all to go on the train would be north of £200

While I realise there are already costs of owning a car to take the train which I'd have much preferred was simply unaffordable for us even with the price of fuel

It would also have involved rail replacement so probably couldn't have done the journey in time to get to the event

That's the thing though, using a car is massively subsidized – someone worked out the real price of a litre of petrol (costing for externalities, and still not all of them, that was mostly pollution and climate change, imagine the cost of broader social impact, health etc.) and it was £27 (compared with £1.60). That's just one part of the equation. Roads aren't free either.

There's no overnight solution, but we should make using a car less attractive, especially for shorter journeys. We need revitalized localism. An easy default is always to get in your car, it's hard to dislodge that. Limits on parking etc. force people to start thinking more strategically about their car use. At the moment, you can live anywhere, pave over the front garden and park three cars outside and then complain there's no public transport nearby.

Ultimately, travel costs money, we just generally want someone else to pay for it.

[The Family Cyclist]

I'm not disputing that driving is subsidised and I very rarely use a car for short journeys but currently the unavoidable fact is that on the day so ignoring the standing charges associated to cars it's generally cheaper to drive and with the budget squeeze it's going to come down to whether a tank of fuel is cheaper then a family train ticket

[ian]

That's the rub though, a tank of fuel is cheaper to you, but only because everyone else is subsidizing it. We have endless stories about it being cheaper to drive than take the train, but the fault isn't the price of the train journey, why shouldn't it cost a few hundred pounds for a family to travel across the country, when did that stop being reasonable?

(not a dig at you, but rather at a society that expects to travel anywhere they want, when they want, and for very little money)

[The Family Cyclist]

Ah Ian I know its not a dig

We are however going to struggle to get people out of cars if the option which is already becoming real for a lot of people with the cost of living crisis is not to travel/do anything

I realise it's only a handful of decades ago people didn't travel apart from a holiday once a year but I can't see people wanting to go back to that

[ian]

These are all valid things – we could have got public transport to the place we went the other day, but 10 minutes to the station, an hour into London, an hour out of London, then a taxi from the nearest station, so 2.5 hours plus about £75 for a journey that's actually <30km door-to-door, so yeah, we drove. To be fair, it is never going to be a sustainable journey by public transport.

But those ought to be occasional journeys and we ought to recognize that there's a cost. That's why I said we should focus on localism, we live a 10-minute walk from a town centre that ought to have most of the shops and recreational activities we routinely need, and we're fine with that (admittedly like most local high streets it's in decline, because, well cars), but most people instead will get in a car to drive to Croydon, Redhill, wherever, same as they'll drive their kids to school etc.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I wonder if we might actually get used to travelling less due to world circumstances. We have energy prices, fuel prices and prices generally rising faster than most are used to. We've had two years in which to get used to being able to do things without much travel. We have war, in far off places like Syria but coming every closer. We have political and social instability in an increasing number of parts of the world. We have the realisation among businesses that long supply chains are more vulnerable to all sorts of shocks and failures at various points of the chain. We seem to have increasing sympathy for direct action climate protests, albeit so far limited to the shinylands. And of course we have internet and mobile communications. It does seem possible that all of these together could combine to persuade that to travel less is better, safer, more pleasant and so on.

[Kim]

I reckon the easiest way to reduce car use in a politically-acceptable manner is to reduce the availability of parking.  People are relatively enthusiastic about "pedestrianise the town centre", and it doesn't feel like a "war on the motorist" the same way that VED, fuel taxes or congestion charging does.

[handcyclist]

A few years ago I had a job filming at the UK HQ of a well known car brand.

Some 120 staff worked there.

They had parking onsite for 120 cars and visitors. The management noticed that only 100 or so of the staff car spaces were in regular use. They also had a mild issue with time keeping, it being the SE corner of the UK, and thus prone to traffic jams.

The solution they found? They reduced the car parking spaces to 85 + visitors. After a couple of weeks adjustment, everyone was on time, with 85 people there early and 15 travelling a different way or finding time to park elsewhere. I'd love to go back and see how this progressed ......

[ian]

Reduction in home parking – permits for on-street, and restrictions on numbers, plus stop people paving over their gardens (which invariably results in two cars in the garden and one on the street, tripling the number of cars) – most people assume home parking is some infinite resource, but parking should be something people plan around like number of bedrooms, garden or not.

[Adam]

It needs a concerted effort by local & national Government, to make car use generally more unacceptable, the way drink driving is for example.

Definitely agree that councils should drastically increase the cost of parking permits.  It's daft that it might only cost £60-£100 pa to get a permit to park your car on the public highway somewhere near your house, and yet a public car park is at least £10 per day. 

[Canardly]

Affordable and accessible public transport has to be the way forward. Of note is early legislation for the cost of train travel that limited ticket prices to a penny a mile. (Still expensive for the majority tho' but). When I was a lad, Manchester transport buses had a workers all day ticket that cost just over 5p and you could travel anywhere in the City (and back) for that and the buses were well used. Current tram prices are around the £7 mark.

[Mr Larrington]

Admittedly Islington is quite a lot more upmarket than Walthamstow but an item on BBC Londonton News the other day stated that the annual charge for a space in one of those on-street sawn-down-Nissen-hut bike sheds is £135.  I can’t remember exactly how much my annual parking permit is but IIRC it's less than forty of your Earth pounds.

[Kim]

Affordable and accessible public transport has to be the way forward.

Yeahbut the Overton Window has shifted to the point where that's basically communism.

[Jaded]

Affordable and accessible public transport has to be the way forward.

Of course it is.

However affordable and accessible public transport requires us to live differently.

[rogerzilla]

New estates with no facilities and the "flexible"* labour market would have to go.  And they are really baked in.

*insecure