Sadly, parking seems a sine qua non in Surrey and to suggest otherwise a condition of madness. Some of the streets near the town centre are the worst for being snarled by parked cars, even in the evenings, so you can't blame sneaky commuters. These are households within a minute or two walk of all the facilities (and probably the same people who complain about the decline of the town centre). One of those streets was the one I picked up the complaint about 'double yellows' and that access by emergency vehicles shouldn't be at the 'expense of parking spaces.'
Those are people who are literally willing to die for their parking space.
The thing is there are probably journeys that are made by those residents that can only be made by car. Either due to the time of day, or the just generally shit service available.
There's a lot of talk about how to reduce car ownership, particularly through dis-incentives. But the fact of the mater is, if there is one journey that you need a car for (To go to Church on a Sunday? to go Mountain biking on a Saturday etc...), you'll hang on to it. Because for many the cost of the car is just absorbed into their finances the way that the mortgage payment or phone bill is, they don't associate that the £200 they are spending each month so they can drive to Church on Sunday once a week is effectively costing them £50 per journey. There then becomes the issue of "well I've got a car, I may as well use it", and so now the 2km round trip to the supermarket get's done by car, and thus into the pit they fall.
What this is a long winded way of saying is we need to really push the alternatives to car ownership, that means car share schemes, public transport, bikes, etc... Public transport especially really needs to be designed to transport the public, that means going where people want to go, and when they want to go, not just when it is most profitable to transport them. Buses and trains need to run late into the night, they need to goto the villages, and do so with a high frequency. If you have to stand for 15 minutes waiting for a bus, then after 5 mins you're gonna go home and get in the car, at least stuck in traffic you're warm.
I am in the privileged position that I live in a city with an exceptionally good public transport system. There is both a metro and tram stop within 100m of my flat, and even then I regularly moan at the company running them that it just isn't frequent enough, wait 7 minutes for a metro? are you taking the piss? The thing with such waits comes from trip chaining. Trip chaining is where you string multiple trips together, take the kids to school, stop by the pharmacist to get your meds, nip into the bakers to buy lunch, head to the office. The Dutch charging system for public transport means that if each stop is less than 35 minutes between getting off one public transport vehicle, and checking into the next, it's considered one journey. This is fine if the services come along every few minutes, but with typical UK frequencies of every 15+ minutes, if you miss one, it's a long wait. If you only have 35 minutes to run your errand between each leg, and you spend 20 minutes waiting for a tram, then you only have 15 mins to do your business. The other issue with the frequency is that rarely does a single vehicle go the whole way you want to go. For me to get to the cinema in the centre of the city requires either 2 metro's and a walk, or 4 trams. If you have to wait 5 minutes for each tram, that journey just got 20 minutes longer. This is really annoying as until July last year, there was a direct tram from 5 minutes walk from my flat, that stopped outside the cinema. They removed this route to improve the service we receive*. Public transport needs to be ridiculously cheap, incredibly frequent, and go where people want to go, when they want to go there. Until we have that, we can have all the parking enforcement and ULEZ we like, people are still going to insist on owning a car, because to not do so is just too damn hard.
J
*I'm actually really rather bitter about this, it was the first major timetable/route map shake up in 20+ years, and it seems to have made every single journey I make longer due to having to change more, and poor connections. I often will come into a tram stop and see the tram I need to connect to disappearing round the corner, meaning a 5-7 minute wait...