Playing out in the street. It's the future!

I think your numbers are rather high unless you think that everyone drives top end, nearly new cars…

I agree with the sentiment though. I seem to recall a great discussion on here about true cost of ownership back in the days of TJ 🙂

Maybe a bit high on average, yep, fair enough

One challenging thing is the way car ownership’s sunk costs are internalised, so people only see the price of £1 parking and a dribble of fuel, rather than the actual daily cost of owning their car (a tenner in depreciation, say).

Once you own the car, the tax, insurance, servicing and depreciation are there anyway, regardless of whether or not we drive into town.

I think your numbers are rather high unless you think that everyone drives top end, nearly new cars…

Maybe a bit high on average, yep, fair enough

We just bought a new, to us, car. It cost £2500 (and has 103000 miles on the clock).

We sold our old car for £1000 less than we bought it for, after owning it for three years, so about a pound a day depreciation. That’s £7 a week, which is less than the bus fare 🙂

A week’s depreciation: £70

Depends on what you drive and how long you keep it for. I tend to view a car as a means to an end rather than an asset. I don’t buy new and will run it for as long as I can.

My car has 120,000 miles on the clock and depreciation is very small. But the majority of cars out there are newer and are depreciating much more.

I own a car so I can live somewhere my kids can play out in the street 🙂

And the fields, woods and hills.

It’s a bit of a conundrum really.

Plus you need to nag your council about bus prices. A family busabout here is a fiver 🙂

my brother & his family tried to go car free – sadly found it too difficult to keep up & that is with a city based family where both parents were keen cyclists, so really isn’t going to happen anytime soon :(. Really saddens me when I see how little freedom kids seem to have these days, as a kid growing up in the sticks I had pretty much freedom to roam anywhere within a radius of 1.5 miles of the house before I was even 9yrs old.

Plus you need to nag your council about bus prices. A family busabout here is a fiver

You’d have thought living in the only town that was both a Sustainable Transport Demonstration Town and a Cycling Demonstration Town (twice!) would mean that I wouldn’t have to do this. Sadly not.

To be fair, there probably are family tickets we could use, but they’re still not going to be cheaper than driving and parking.

We used to have a brilliant bus service, until the Darlington Bus War.

I own a car so I can live somewhere my kids can play out in the street

And the fields, woods and hills.

I live in the North East, so I can buy a 3 bedroom house for the price of a flat elsewhere, in a street with a nature reserve at the end 🙂

So, I’ve never built my life around owning a car. I applied for jobs that didn’t require driving and were nearby

You did it – but does that mean everyoe can do it?

It doesn’t need everyone to do it. It’d be good if a lot more people did it.

Really saddens me when I see how little freedom kids seem to have these days, as a kid growing up in the sticks I had pretty much freedom to roam anywhere within a radius of 1.5 miles of the house before I was even 9yrs old.

In the sticks, that is still the case.

In the sticks, that is still the case.

If only… http://www.thisissurreytoday.co.uk/Children-banned-walking-cycling-North-Downs/story-18210883-detail/story.html#axzz2b6ykysJN

You did it – but does that mean everyoe can do it?

There are probably people who can’t, but it’s a lot less than many would claim.

Example: in Darlington 30% of journeys undertaken are short enough to do by bike, require no movement of anything too heavy or bulky to be carried by bike, are undertaken by people who are healthy enough to make the journey by bike, and by people who own a bike.

Meanwhile, 2% of trips are taken by bike.

We don’t need everyone to do it. We just need to encourage those that can.

We already subsidise the bejeezus out of private motoring, so why not?

And if those in receipt of this subsidy (by being given free parking on public land) pay something towards it, then we could make public transport cheaper.

in Darlington 30% of journeys undertaken are short enough to do by bike, require no movement of anything too heavy or bulky to be carried by bike, are undertaken by people who are healthy enough to make the journey by bike, and by people who own a bike.

Now does that mean 30% of each person’s journeys, or that all of 30% of people’s journeys?

If you make 30% of journeys by bike then you still may need a car…

If only…

That’s hardly nationwide. Plus how the hell is it enforceable?

Now does that mean 30% of each person’s journeys, or that all of 30% of people’s journeys?

If you make 30% of journeys by bike then you still may need a car…

It’s 30% of people’s journeys. Some might still need a car, others won’t. It might allow some families to drop to one car instead of two.

Have you looked into how many car-free households there are? It might surprise you.

It might allow some families to drop to one car instead of two.

It might, yes, but it might not 🙂

Have you looked into how many car-free households there are? It might surprise you.

I doubt it. But it’s clearly not enough, is it? Because we are on here complaining about street parking and cars driving about.

zzzzzzzzz

Decent car-sharing schemes would be cheaper in many cases. Seems a double problem – too much cachet and status attached to cars, and few decent sharing options.

As part of the Cycle Demonstration Town project, some reasonable infrastructure was built. This enables my 54-year-old mam, who hasn’t ridden a bike for 30 years, to cycle to the town centre and to leave the car at home.

If this was replicated across the whole town (and country), there could be huge gains made.

Unfortunately, the council’s own report on the CDT project lists putting times on signage, instead of distances, as their greatest achievement; and they wasted loads of cash on jute shopping bags and leaflets instead of building the infrastructure.

It might, yes, but it might not

**** it, let’s not bother then.

zzzzzzzzz

😛

terrahawk – Member
zzzzzzzzz

+1

For anyone interested in this (not terrahawk), I can recommend Car Sick by Lynn Sloman.

You should also watch this film what I am in 🙂

**** it, let’s not bother then.

Or maybe we could do something that would be more likley to have an effect 🙂

Such as?

Good question!

I’d focus on the following:

1) Heavily subsidised PT and hopefully some innovative solutions like, I dunno.. minibus routes where you put your name, starting point and end point down (for commuting) and a central computer decides on an appropriate vehicle and route to serve the most people for the least money and acceptable time…

2) Heavily promoting and giving incentives to remote working. We need to change our mentalities here. Grants for installing proper remote working stations in people’s homes, for example.

3) Subsidised car rental schemes with lots of local depots for weekend trips etc.

Of course, that requires a significant politial shift for the UK population*.. not easy.

* apart from the computer controlled bus routing idea.. that’s not a bad idea actually.

1. The taxi-bus idea is a good one, for rural areas. Lynn Sloman discusses it a lot in her book
2. Remote working will only ever work for a minority of people, I’d guess. More flexibility in working hours would make a big difference to getting kids to school, as parents would have time to take them, plus it would smooth demand for road space.
3. City car short-term hire would be a great solution.

A change of the urban default speed to 20 would have a huge impact, as would high-quality segregated infrastructure. A reduction of the permeability of urban areas to motor traffic should also be brought in – my traffic-free commute should be more direct than the driving alternative.

I think people aren’t going to have less cars until either a) they become unaffordable or b) a more attractive alternative exists (perhaps by making the car less attractive via disincentives).

Once someone has a car a chunk of the cost is fixed, so actually cost per journey drops with more use.

Side issue, what stops people from cycling when the journey is viable:
1 it rains a lot in this country. yuk, especially yuk if wearing a suit or smart clothing.
2 it’s damned dangerous and they don’t want to finish the day as a parapelgic
3 can’t be bothered getting hot and sweaty, don’t like cycling or exercise
4 it’s a load of faff locking it up, and any reasonable bike will get nicked anyway
5 can’t carry any reasonable amount of shopping

The taxi-bus idea is a good one, for rural areas

I don’t see why it wouldn’t work in urban areas either – you’d pay a fair price for it but I reckon with the cost of parking in some places you’d be laughing.

2. Remote working will only ever work for a minority of people, I’d guess.

Hmm, I dunno. If we really wanted to do it collectively I’m sure we could – adjust attitudes, research on ideas that would help – I think it could be done far better than it is now. I bet you could even have some machines at people’s houses if they had the space. You could also change people’s working practises quite a bit. For example, your IT dept could be based entirely at home and they may like to work on call 24/5 say with maybe 80 hours per month standard time.. so you could essentially doss about at home as long as you were there to fix things when they went wrong (note that’s just an illustration rather than a fully formed proposal).

What about building developments with car parks nearby rather than outside your house, and have a little wagon that clicks into a tiny garage by the carpark and by your house, so you can bring your shopping to the house etc. A slight pain, but the payoff is a car-free living space. You could also have a bus stop (or monorail/vacuum tube/whatever) come right by the house, that would really enocurage pepole to get the bus 🙂

Side issue, what stops people from cycling when the journey is viable:

I realise there are ways around a lot of this (leave a shirt at work .. get a cargo bike and so on), but that’s all too much faff except for the dedicated. The keen cyclist (that’s us!) are not the people who need persuading to cycle more.

Side issue, what stops people from cycling when the journey is viable:
1 it rains a lot in this country. yuk, especially yuk if wearing a suit or smart clothing.
2 it’s damned dangerous and they don’t want to finish the day as a parapelgic
3 can’t be bothered getting hot and sweaty, don’t like cycling or exercise
4 it’s a load of faff locking it up, and any reasonable bike will get nicked anyway
5 can’t carry any reasonable amount of shopping

For me (and I realise I’m someone who cycles already so not the target audience) the solutions to those are:

1) it doesn’t rain nearly as much as people think it does. (Count how many rainy commutes you actually do in your car). And when it does there are plenty of excellent waterproof available. Or just get wet. It doesn’t hurt.

2) investigate segregated traffic-free paths. Not available to everyone obviously, but I can ride almost door-to-door on my 11 mile commute and only spend a few hundred yards on road if I want.

3) yeah, but for every one of them there is another that drives to the gym.

4) persuade the workplace to provide secure bike parking. I did!

5) use panniers for small amount of shopping. For bigger loads get home delivery. Or use a car. No one says it has to be a 100% conversion.

No one says it has to be a 100% conversion.

Ah, but, for us to have car-free streets, it does. Even people who use their car once a month still have to park it somewhere.

Ah, but, for us to have car-free streets, it does.

Not really. We have two cars. Only one gets parked on the road. If we could cut down to one car then that’s one little bit of a car-free street right there.

But we’re mostly talking about old fashioned terraces, aren’t we, so for those not to be car-lined you’d have to go carless.

Anyway I thought you cycled to work?

I do. And I live in an old-fashioned terrace. But luckily it is also a cul-de-sac and only has houses on one side with off-street parking on the other 😀

But yeah, I’m part of the problem. I mostly cycle to work, but I still have a car.

Side issue, what stops most people from cycling most of the time when the journey is viable:
[strike]1 it rains a lot in this country. yuk, especially yuk if wearing a suit or smart clothing.
2 it’s damned dangerous and they don’t want to finish the day as a parapelgic
3 can’t be bothered getting hot and sweaty, don’t like cycling or exercise
4 it’s a load of faff locking it up, and any reasonable bike will get nicked anyway
5 can’t carry any reasonable amount of shopping[/strike]

1 They can’t be arsed.

(particularly in the context of a certain government minister responsible for such things, who looks substantially the wrong side of a BMI of 40, and vocally advocates being able to drive to the pie shop, park outside the pie shop, and buy all of the pies)
FTFY

Amen.