Driving: What is the tipping point?

cougar – we would save even more driving to schools if we got rid of the stupid choice agenda in schooling and everyone just goes to their local school. Everyone walked to my secondary school or got the bus. No one – and I mean no one of the thousand plus pupils was driven to school. No one travelled more than 2 miles to school

Agree. Admittedly I did go to school in 70’s and early 80’s but nobody was driven to school. The primary schools were all within a mile and secondary schools with 3 miles so it was a choice of walk or cycle (or rollerskate, it was the 80’S after all)

Transport planner of 20 years here, now living in Sweden, gave up with the UK’s transport policy 🙂  (kind of)

It’s an incredibly complex issue made worse by more disposable income (2 cars why not huh) , more choice (school is 15km away why not huh) and ironicaly less choice (investment in public transport has been reduced by approx 45% the last ten years and it was terrible anyway) but it basically boils down to political will.

Road building will not fix it (The Downs Thomson Paradox if you are interested) and i won’t go into Highway Capacity , Level of Service, Passenger Car units  (size of car does alter capacity, but so does condition of the road, weather, regulation measures on said road etc)   but i will say that Cardiif has l a lot more capacity and it can get much much worse!

The car, currently, even with congestion, the cost to the environment and the pocket etc, is still the best alternative for the majority of people. An alternative must be provided that is faster (as it is time  that is the deciding factor for most with journey choice, not all people, but most, cost is not important, just time)  than the car, and that requires the political will to do it. So vote Green basically!

Anyhow, wait until autonomous vehicles come in, then we (you) are really in the sh*t!

I also happen to live in Cardiff, and avoid driving as much as possible. This includes cycling a hilly 7 miles each way to work (except on Fridays, when I finish early and treat myself to a drive). I have spent a fair bit of time thinking about efficient transportation, and below are some ramblings based on the content of this thread:

Given how miserable it is to drive at the moment, and how short a lot of people’s journeys are, I don’t know what it would take to get people out of their cars. I understand the point previously made about a driver’s perception of traffic being only the end of a longer trip, but the daily traffic jam in Cardiff extends miles up the A470.

I once had the idea that cars should be individually taxed in inverse proportion to their average speed, to disincentivise short journeys that could easily be replaced. However, it does have an obvious flaw, and is functionally about the same as a congestion zone charge.

The incoming Fleet Emissions Standards will make it practically impossible for non-hybrid cars to pass, and also explicitly allow higher emissions for heavier cars. Given this, why would a car manufacturer make a small, lightweight ICE-only car, instead of a heavy, hybrid SUV? Combined with car financing, I see a depressing future ahead of oversized, over-engineered cars that are not designed to last more than 5 years.

https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/vehicles/cars_en

I am all for disincentives to driving, but this seems the most miserable way to do it (for all end users). I have thought a bit about what would be the ideal, sustainable vehicle, and it generally reduces down to an ebike. At this point I tell myself to man up and keep pedalling, but I suspect the issue for most would be the weather. Given that a lot of people seem to work somewhere where the norm (now) is to arrive perfectly coiffured and made up, I can see why anything short of a sealed box from door to door is not attractive.

As I see it, a lot of the issues discussed (houses built far from anything useful, roads unpleasant for walking and cycling) are the symptoms of a culture of increasing dependence on cars, and would reverse themselves given the right incentives. I just can’t see what it would take – people seem to have an almost infinite patience for sitting in traffic (except when they see a cyclist ahead!), so short of blocking off roads to cars, I’m not sure what would work. Car ownership itself is also quite tedious and expensive, yet we all do it.

A side note about buses – I really wish Cardiff Bus would scale the size of the buses with the demand throughout the day. A couple of the larger roads are clogged most of the day with full-sized buses with about 3 people on each one – by any metric (emissions / particulates per passenger, efficient road usage per passenger, etc) this is not good. And cars letting out buses – I’m all for paying into the road karma bank (as I do make heavy withdrawals from time to time), but why would I let a bus through and then sit behind it as it stops and starts, breathing in nasty diesel fumes? I’ve also had too many run-ins on my bike with bus drivers, where only my cycling skill has saved me from getting knocked off or run over. It’s a shame, but I really don’t have much sympathy.

Thanks for that, twrch. Genuinely really helpful.

Completely agree about the school situation.
Our local primary school is around a corner. It’s a 3-4 minute walk away (even for a toddler). Yet all our neighbours take their children to schools that are a mile away (one neighbour does try and walk there). Another neighbour takes her 3 children to a school 6 miles away. I don’t understand this.

Fuel is not expensive enough for people to change their habits. We all think £1.30 / litre is expensive, but bottled water is often more expensive!! When we get to £10 / litre people will be forced to make changes.

Or the less penal route is to encourage people out of cars, which is going to take years (probably generations). More/better public transport, safer cycling, more working from home.

If you watch any rush hour traffic, the vast majority of cars have only single occupant, so people are not lift sharing or going out of their way to reduce their costs / footprint.

The governments have to want to make change – they are approaching it very softly today (clearly it’s not a vote winner to tell someone their freedom will be compromised), so a change of approach is needed. Make more places traffic free. Force people to walk the last mile to their office / school, charge for leaving cars parked up when at work, encourage people to think and make different choices, get the VIPs to set examples (give the mayor a Pinarello not a Bentley).

Fuel is not expensive enough for people to change their habits. We all think £1.30 / litre is expensive, but bottled water is often more expensive!! When we get to £10 / litre people will be forced to make changes.

Brexit may get a few hundred people protesting, £10/litre will get you a revolution.

Cars are an odd one. Rack the cost of rush hour driving up would help the congestion problem (eg time based congestion charging and I might take the bike to work more. But I’d still have my car, for mountain biking and pursuing other hobbies, visiting my parents, shopping (which could be replaced easily by home delivery).

Spreading out the problem is key – flexitime and remote working – plus everything thats been said about schools upthread. Our roads may be clogged for a few hours a day, but outside of major cities (where public trans and cycling make sense and are already used) they are under utilised.

Society has taught us to go to work at 8-9 for the same five days*, then drive to the shopping centre or the beach at 10 on a weekend. with the great variance in day length at this latitude, we cant even use the excuse of getting up with the sun for this.

* anything else is “shift work” and gets looked down upon by many

Until recently we had 1 car and I’d take it once a week and bike all the other days to work. However it’s a bit inflexible (12 mile commute takes a while) doo we’ve gotten a second car. I feel a bit sick about it and I’m determined not to use it.

In general, the current situation is madness to me. Everyone owns at least one car which they use for say 1-2 hours a day on average and otherwise it gathers dust. It’s a massive depreciating asset that also has a big environmental impact to manufacture and use. They have a limited lifespan too after which they are mostly on the scrapheap.

I like the idea of renting a car when you need to use one. Imagine just being able to walk up to any car, hop in and drive (or be driven by computers). This stuff isn’t as far away as you might think I reckon .. most new cars are keyless and call home for software updates so technically a key could open any car for rent. Perhaps the uber model of surcharge at peak time would kick in, but that extra cost could be offset by ride sharing.

When we get to £10 / litre people will be forced to make changes.

Yes, but will they have any options? It’ll take years to build transport links, increase housing density somthat people can live closer to work/school/shops etc. That’s assuming you can build the type of housing that will serve people’s needs that they can afford.

Plus it’ll just mean that rich people can afford even more mahooosive range rovers once hoi polloi are off the road.

Could do the other stuff before we need it, see if that will allow people to make better choices.

Seems like we are more likely to wait til everything comes to a screeching halt and then try and fix a 20 year problem in a week cos we are really good at that.

Road charging will be coming in soon. With the increasing switchover to EV the revenue reduction means that government has to start road charging.
I’ve been talking over the last 9 months to various bodies in Canada, Australia and Singapore and they’re all starting the process towards road charging.
Whether our one issue UK Government can see this and get the infrastructure in place on time will be ‘interesting’.

If you watch any rush hour traffic, the vast majority of cars have only single occupant, so people are not lift sharing or going out of their way to reduce their costs / footprint.

Four directors of a company I worked for while at uni (so this is going back 20+ years when the company car thing was a big incentive) all lived within a mile of each other. They all separately drove their company cars the 2 miles or so to work, all arriving within 10 minutes of each other. Same on the way home.

The idea of sharing a car would have been a huge blow to their alpha male identity. The company was paying the bills so for them, there was zero incentive to do anything to reduce usage. Insane, even back then.

chomolly – what is needed is not to do that overnight but over a long period – 10 – 20 years. Slowly take the subsidy from cars into public transport and then price cars out while using the revenue to improve public transport

It make commuting less viable as well so will have added good effects like making commuter villages affordable again and so on

Locally to me we have a ridiculous situation where rural workers live in the big towns having been priced out of the rural areas and thus commute into the country and the town / city workers commute from the country into the city.

Road charging will be coming in soon. With the increasing switchover to EV the revenue reduction means that government has to start road charging.

Inversely charged by distance and time of journey. Airlines, trains – hell even Uber – do supply/demand based pricing so roads should be the same. Expensive between 6-8am and 5-7pm to discourage school run / commute etc and inversely proportional to distance. Shorter the distance the higher the price to discourage those 2km car journeys.

chomolly – what is needed is not to do that overnight but over a long period – 10 – 20 years. Slowly take the subsidy from cars into public transport and then price cars out while using the revenue to improve public transport

It make commuting less viable as well so will have added good effects like making commuter villages affordable again and so on

Yes, that was where I was going. The trouble is, we tend not to do that. We will continue down the road we are on (no pun intended) until we are completely stuffed and then we’ll look around for a solution to the immediately problem, not the real problem.
If we create viable options now, we need do nothing else.

Although if we make commuting less viable, who will live in the affordable commuter villages?

The people who work in the area that at the moment have to commute from towns

Part of my family come from a small rural parish in shropshire where they have a farm. They have lived in the parish since the 16th century at least. The owners of the farm retired and had two sons. there are two cottages on the farm. the two sons could not afford to buy anything in the parish or even close to it as it has become commuter territory for Birmingham. the parents ended up giving one cottage each to the boys so they could continue to live and work on the farm and moved to birmingham themselves.

Before cars, people lived convenient for work

People got a job in a local factory and worked there all their lives, and the wives didn’t work.

So good for transport, not great for life experiences IMO. I’d go mad.

The people who work in the area that at the moment have to commute from towns

Oh, right. They’ll become villages again. I wouldn’t guarantee they’ll be any more affordable though. Retirees, footballers, high tech types will probably see to that!

People got a job in a local factory and worked there all their lives, and the wives didn’t work.

First part true, second part not so much. One side of my family didn’t travel more than a few miles from where they started nearly 200 years previously. You could wave at about 30 relatives on one bus route.
The wives all worked though, they had to.

So good for transport, not great for life experiences IMO. I’d go mad.

These day with telecommuting etc, you can have all the good but avoid most of the bad.

Some of the answers were early in the thread.
I commute a whole 2 miles to my office, pick up a van and then travel the UK and a bit of Europe. I do around 30 kmiles a year. Traffic isn’t that bad but then I like to start early and finish early.
That’s fine until I turn up at offices where I can’t disturb the staff as they’ll be on the phones so can I arrive at 5pm?
So I then have to travel in rush hour, add to the the queues just because companies insist the staff are there, when in this day and age it’s just not needed.
I’ll be using equipment that weighs approximately 60kg so public transport is out.
The office monkeys can I assume use a phone/computer that since the 1980s pretty much every home has.
So why the need to travel into a major town/city to operate those devices?