Any examples or case studies where a community was actually persuaded to get out and walk/cycle/bus/share lifts more?

Last night I had a near melt down at another parent, which was final straw in me being frustrated at the usual sh*tty driving standards, parking, entitlement and more – of a set of drivers who ALL travel less than 1mile from extent of Dunblane to practice hall.

http://onejive.com/a-town-where-everybody-rides-a-bike-since-1898/

No, but it did get me thinking this morning as I was driving to work (usually ride but, anyway) A car followed me from near the area where I live and turned off about 1/2 mile away from work. Car share schemes/apps don’t work. Every car near enough has 1 person in it when you look, there must be some solution.

It’s because it’s wrong to fart in someone else’s car.

There are car free communities in the netherlands I believe and in Edinburgh there is at least one housing estate where car ownership is banned

BlaBlaCar is successful in France. 1.5 miilion journeys a month and rising.

I’m not sure it is possible without massive local and national government involvement. Not taking the car for short journeys needs to made easy and low hassle. This requires town planning to make sure estates are not out on a limb and hard for public transport to access efficiently. It requires good local amenities. It requires town and road planners actually thinking about walking and cycling rather than expecting people to have to do a 100m diversion to cross a road. The problem that in many towns and cities in the UK it is not just difficult not using a car, it difficult to not use a car!

When all you have is a hammer …

Being quite a big deal at work, I have my own parking space. Except I don’t use it. I’ve never used it. I get the train to work which takes 10 minutes whereas driving would be half an hour at rush hour.

So I emailed our facilities people to tell them just to release the space for general use. The phrase “does not compute” doesn’t even come close to describing the response. Trying to convince them that I don’t use it and don’t drive to work was unbelievably difficult. If I told them I lived on Mars I would’ve got a less incredulous response.

Car is king in this country and trying to convince people otherwise is a thankless task

My office has no parking near it, sometimes we get visitors asking for parking so we tell them to park in Sainsbury’s nearby. Or fill the meter and watch the time very carefully…
Quite a few people we know think that we’re poor and don’t drive because they only see us riding bicycles – and are surprised when they find out that we have 2 vehicles and I probably drive 15,000 miles+ a year…

In Harrogate they have big signs saying ‘Beat the Queues, Travel in Twos’. However this doesn’t help beat the queues, you just spend time stuck in the same queue but with someone you struggle to keep a conversation going with.

Unfortunately we don’t have the space in the UK to do what they do in some places in the USA and have dedicated ‘Two or More’ lanes (yes I know we have some, but not enough).

Zermatt in Switzerland has a no vehicle policy. All locals have to leave their cars in large underground carparks outside town and tourists all arrive on the train (maybe buses to outskirts??). Within the town all the vehicles in use (buses, deliveries etc) are EVs. Tis a nice place to visit for sure, though a bit disconcerting with the lack of typical big town noise.

The trouble as I see it is there is no real joined-up thinking about the problem in this country. Painting a white line down the side of a road does not make a viable bicycle lane for instance.

Some great tweets from the folk of Leeds last night following 5hr closure of the M1 at rush hour and almost total gridlock across most of the city. Many complaining about lack of road investment in the city, like somehow creating more road space and encouraging more cars onto the road will reduce traffic?!

I resisted the urge to respond saying that the traffic did look awful as I cycled past as usual 😀

Many complaining about lack of road investment

It is a common complaint, which is actually true we have not had sufficient road investment. What most people miss unless they travel by another form of transport is that the roads have done much better than any other form of transport where investment has been token at best.

I don’t see what the problem is actually. In 10-15 years we’ll all be in electric, self-driving cars. Onward from that it will become illegal to drive a car and then eventually you won’t even own a car, you’ll just summon one from the collective local compound via your communication device to take you where you want to go.

Car clubs are becoming more common, trouble is a lot of people are not very good at sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car-free_places

Which ones?

I think the Barbican Estate was built to be car free in the 1960s?

London generally has a very low rate of car ownership too, 70% of households in London have no car vs 25% for the UK I think.

entitlement

What would be an example of entitlement when driving a car?

I dunno – there’s a couple that live down the road from me that drive their daughter to school (same as my boy’s so I see them). The distance from their house to the school is 750m. Sorry, I know that’s not he point of the thread but when you see this happening every day, you really wonder what can be done to change a mindset like that.

They are both keen cyclists as well – she drives the daughter to school then drives back to the house and gets on her bike to ride to work. I can’t quite figure it out. 🙂

yourguitarhero – Member
tjagain » in Edinburgh there is at least one housing estate where car ownership is banned
Which ones?

Slateford Green development according to the Wikipedia link neilwheel posted…

The community of Amsterdam managed it, but it took over 400 children to die from car accidents in one year alone and a bunch of protesting:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bicycle-capital-world-transport-cycling-kindermoord

It’s an interesting story.

Cambridge is as close as I’ve seen in the UK. Bikes outnumber cars.

there’s a couple that live down the road from me that drive their daughter to school (same as my boy’s so I see them). The distance from their house to the school is 750m

My Mum lives within easy walking distance of three well-thought of private secondary schools and a primary school. Many of the pupils of these schools also live in the same area (although there’s a significant percentage of the secondary pupils come in from places like Wandsworth, Beckenham & Penge by coach which just adds to the traffic problems).

Every morning, the roads are absolutely solid with 4x4s trying to get as close as possible to the various school gates. The family opposite her house drive their daughter the 600m to the school gates and it takes them 15 minutes.

There has been a shift recently, a noticeable trend away from the Volvo XC90 and Porsche Cayenne (the 4×4 of choice, nothing so crude as a Range Rover) towards Smart Cars, Prius, Nissan Leaf etc and the primary school has been leading a charge towards cargo bikes but that’s been offset by an extremely vocal minority shouting about endangering children by putting them in such contraptions.

If only they understood that the reason the children were in any danger is because of the queue of 4x4s…

I’d hazard that Dunblane is a tricky demographic to convince.
A heady mix of entitled middle class Edinburgh and Glasgow commuters and wealthy retirees.
If my experience in the M&S Food car park is anything to go by – good luck with that. 😆

A lot of the reason why cars are more popular in the us and UK than Europe is geographic. We have quite a lot of urban sprawl and cities are less dense in the centre. It makes sense in Amsterdam to take the train into the main station then ride or walk because everything is within a few mile radius. Compare that with Manchester and you have 2 or 3 main
stations, an airport several miles away and the city spreads over quite a few miles.

there was a programme on bbc2 last night where kings Heath high st was ‘revolutionized’ for a day by replacing parking bays with trees, offering free bus travel and discouraging car use. it can work, but only if the demand is there and good alternatives are available. They’ve been cycling for years in China.

The Euros love their cars, and use them at every opportunity. But ‘some’ are prepared to use other less invasive systems of transport as well.
Small steps – I can remember cycling to work 20 years ago and I’d maybe see another cyclist once every 2 or 3 months. Now I see 10-15 cyclist each way everyday.

We have quite a lot of urban sprawl and cities…

I am not entirely sure this is true. Most of the cities I have been to in mainland Europe are pretty sprawling too, and as for the size of city centres most cities have several areas within the city centre.

I am in Hanover at the moment at it is definitely quite sprawling and has bad traffic at rush hour. I think the difference is when Hanover was flattened during the war, unlike the UK towns and cities, it seems to have been planned. There is a good tram system running up the centre of large roads with two lanes in each direction. All over the place the pavements are very wide with room for proper bike lanes. Plus many bike lanes away from traffic.

A big difference is the logical rule that if a bike lane follows parallel to a road it has the same right of way even when on a pavement. Another good rule is that on most back streets there is a priority to right rule this means everyone approaches junctions with care in case there someone about to arrive from the right.

What would be an example of entitlement when driving a car?

Last nights examples, bearing in mind there are 30 parking spaces within 100m, all on same road.

Driving on to pavement outside front door of hall so kid was as close as possible. Never mind they did so perpendicular and between two cars on double yellows, nearly hitting me and three kids. He was then upset that I suggested he should park up road and walk – he paid he car tax and council tax, and they hadn’t provided a car park (at 150 year old church hall).

Parking on pavement, as road is double yellow, on blind sharp corner, forcing children to walk on dark road to get past. Again upset that thier child and they would be at risk having to walk on a pavement with so many cars on… 🙄

what I am saying is continental cities are denser ie a lot more high rise and then the countryside is much more sparsely populated. In answer to the question ‘why do Brits use a car’, this is one reason. obv there are exceptions like the Ruhr and northern Italy and the highlands of Scotland are remote.

I digress – I want to focus on what I can do to start a community moving out of so many cars….

Imagine if everyone on Ramoyle left their handbrakes off…

Bentonville, Arkansas

Pinkbike article

Very off Road focused too

It would create more parking space around the Cathedral… 😆

But the Tappit may also damaged. 🙁

what I am saying is continental cities are denser ie a lot more high rise and then the countryside is much more sparsely populated.

I agree the countryside is frequently more sparsely populated but I don’t agree Continental cities are more high rise. I am just thinking across the large towns and small cities I have worked in across Europe of similar size to to towns and cities in the UK, (not big cities as we have a weird balance in the UK with one big city of London and lots of small cities, no medium sized ones) and they are no more / less high rise than uk large towns / small cities. I think within the large town and cities is primarily a case of decades of incredibly poor town planning.

Edinburgh is very densely populated and small in physical size. Any point in the city to any other in 40 mins by bike. It has a highish amount of cycle use for a UK city but pitiful by dutch standards

Edinburgh has hills!

Saying that Cardiff is the flattest city in GB and nt much cycling here either.

Hmm if the folk clogging up Dunblane with their cars left those cars behind they’d be able to spend more time in The Tappit easing congestion and keeping a good pub open. Win/Win.