[Closed] Driving: What is the tipping point?

Don't know but I'll read that over lunch tomorrow cos it's too long for 1250 am.

I'm with you on not using a car unless necessary, but I doubt a cycling forum represents the general public there. The<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;"> reactions I get from people who learn I walk 3 miles to work are telling. People with no mobility or fitness issues who just don't seem to see walking or cycling as real options for transport.</span>

I'd love to get rid of the car entirely but public transport isn't a practical replacement for longer distances. Trains are fine if I want to go to London for the day but useless if I want to take my bike anywhere interesting.

Maybe it's not too many cars, but too many bloated cars.

The likes of a Suzuki Carryvan comes in a 6 seater version and takes less space than a mini. It's extremely space efficient.

The Japanese Kei car size is more appropriate for UK cities which evolved before the car.

Perhaps if parking spaces were designed for smaller cars and only a few expensive large carparks were available for the fat cars it would change things a bit.

Good manners when driving helps too.

Definitely too many cars. Boils down to selfish convenience. They are the ultimate in go anywhere any time convenience. But we are very adept at completely overlooking the detrimental effects of excessive car use like air pollution, noise, obesity and lack of excercise, climate change, and the deaths and injuries from accidents. I’m not sure there’s a solution. I’m a driver by the way and try to limit the number of journeys I make but often wonder how we got to this situation.

If we make it as a species for another hundred years or so, people will look back in confusion at the era of the car. They bring out the absolute worst in people.

We're selfish and short sighted though, so I don't see it changing too quickly.

I do agree with your rant, but we've created a society where housing / work / amenities are not always close together and in many households both adults need to work to pay for said housing. Car usage and ownership are a consequence of those things.

The government could start to tackle all of those issues, but they're not because each would take a generation to shift and the government works on a 1-5 year timescale, even less at the moment. Enraging the car gammons is not likely to be a vote winner. See also the personal care crisis that has been kicked down the road.

It’s bloody INSANE!!!

Yup...the problem is it's also normal, and therefore (in general) people accept it and don't question it.

I hate driving these days, it's just tiresome and avoid it as much as possible, and the less you drive, the more you hate it when you do have to.

Because public transport is expensive and shit in a lot of places. Daughters looking at uni places at the moment and we look at train prices to and from each uni, some of them are eye watering. Buses around here are again expensive and shit, if the four of us go out then it is most definitely cheaper to drive.

The world is set up around vehicle use and would be impossible to change unless we all want to change what jobs we do, what food we eat, where we live etc etc

What’s bad traffic anyhow? Can’t say I have been in a traffic jam for months.

Completely agree. I wish I could cycle to work but it’s too far away - wanted to move closer to allow this but my wife wanted to be closer to her family for the kids which is sort of fair enough I guess. I hate cars and driving. A big money and stress pit. Looked into cycling to the station and getting the train in but even for a short trip season ticket prices are insane and I can’t take a proper bike on as my stop is on the London Euston line.

To be fair SR you were travelling in the wrong direction during rush hour on one of Cardiffs buisiest commuter routes . That journey has been a total pain for the last 30 years or more.

What would be really nice is if you could use your bike for jotting around and it would still be there if you nipped into a shop to get something.

I would use my bike more to get around if it was not a major security mission every time you wanted to let it out of your sight.

Doesn't even matter if its a crap bike, it will still get nicked.

Before cars, people lived convenient for work, and kids wouldn't have 3 activities in 3 places on the same night. (Not having a pop, we are the same)

The car has enabled these lifestyle choices. Yes, fewer cars and better public transport would be great, but until people think "I'm want to live 2 miles from work in an urban environment so I can walk/cycle everywhere and compromise/create our leisure activities to suit" it won't change.

Banning any new housing not on brownfield sites would be a start. There's enough earmarked brownfield space to meet our housing needs.

There's an over reliance on cars for certain. But cars don't drive themselves. My personal problem is more how many people we seem to think the planet can sustain. This isn't a jab at you SaxonR, just my own take on it.

It's the modern world. I now commute 5 minutes by bike my neighbour works in the same place drives. Town is quite with comparatively little traffic but it is increasing.
I put a camera in pointing at my garage both neighbours drive past it. I was surprised that a lot of their trips are sub 15mins out and back some regular ones were 7minutes. I can't even fathom what they are doing a d why walking wouldn't be as quick.

I'd love them to introduce a charge for overnight parking on the road. Getting from my house to the main road is like doing a ski slalom most days!

The selfishness drives me crazy. FOr example, my neighbour has built an extension on their parking area, so now they leave three cars and a van on the road all the time. ****ing infuriating tbh. One's usually left on the green space outside my house so that's always churned up and looking shitty as well.
I don't see why they should get free use of the road as a car park.

I put a camera in pointing at my garage both neighbours drive past it. I was surprised that a lot of their trips are sub 15mins out and back some regular ones were 7minutes. I can’t even fathom what they are doing a d why walking wouldn’t be as quick.

Some of our neighbours drive to shop to get milk, paper, pick up takeaway etc.

Closest shop and a very nice fish and chip shop are precisely 4 minutes walk. Sainsbury's local is 10minutes walk. Some folk are mega, mega lazy.

We have an OS map on a wall from circa 1963.

The M6 ends at Stafford.

I look at it and can see that I could reach so many places based on the railways shown on the map. They criss cross the entire area.

Dr Beeching was employed by bent Tory Transport Minster Ernest Marples - a bloke with "interests" in a road construction company.

Other: We looked a renting near Wolverhampton.

Somewhere in internetland there was a "Vision for cycling" type document, for Wolverhampton.

The gist was to push those to the east of the city towards bike commutes as they were "close to market" (verbatim, IIRC).

I took this as meaning "poor", so they could more easily be "persuaded" to bike as it was "cheap", whilst the more affluent west wouldn't be as likely give up there boxy safe space, status symbol, important peoples carrier wagons.

However, simply by only allowing boarding school education we could solve road congestion overnight. Cos when the little princes and princesses aren't being driven to their knowledge factories, the roads are, by comparison, empty.

So, in summary: Jacob Rees Mogg FTW.

There is not too many cars on the road at all, I think there are over three times the road miles vs' end to end length of cars on the road so plenty of space, just everyone wants to be in the same spaces at once.

What would be really nice is if you could use your bike for jotting around and it would still be there if you nipped into a shop to get something.

I would use my bike more to get around if it was not a major security mission every time you wanted to let it out of your sight.

Doesn’t even matter if its a crap bike, it will still get nicked.

Depends where you live and how long you leave it. I shop at Lidls up the road and leave my singlespeed and trailer outside with a cheapo D-lock, no problem. Local newsagent I sometimes pop into on the way to work or home, leave my Tripster outside unlocked. etc...

I was riding across the m'way bridge last night actually, it's pretty close to my house and there is constant white noise from the cars. For some reason I imagined cars being eliminated/replaced.. and how beautifully quiet it would be. When the planet explodes and our wonderfully inventive species is killed off. Probably.

There is not too many cars on the road at all

I've read some stupid words on here in my time.. but lordy (!), that is a classic. 😆

However, simply by only allowing boarding school education we could solve road congestion overnight. Cos when the little princes and princesses aren’t being driven to their knowledge factories, the roads are, by comparison, empty.

Might that be because the folk that drive them around are on holiday somewhere?

“Man in car complains about traffic” could be a Daily Mash story 😀

The selfishness drives me crazy. FOr example, my neighbour has built an extension on their parking area, so now they leave three cars and a van on the road all the time. **** infuriating tbh.

That could be an issue for your local planning authority. Round my way the planners are getting very hot on having adequate off road parking, I don't think they would let you build over a parking area.

It really did strike me how drastically different the roads are during summer holidays. I bike 3.5k to work and in the holidays rarely have to pass a single car. Soon as schools started again there's 3 queues I without fail have to filter past. I honestly don't know where everyone has gone? Surely most still have to go to work during summer?

I could get on board with the boarding school idea (but I don't have/want kids)

tldr;
"Too many cars are stopping me using my car".

Haven't used a car for a journey less than four or five miles for years. Long felt that journeys should be charged by the mile, with large penalties for short journeys that could be easily walked or ridden. Maybe Geraldine will think about walking the quarter mile to the shop to buy milk instead of getting in the car to do it if she knows it'll cost her a tenner.

Roll the money into fleets of electric buses. Bin diesel trains for electric replacements. Car sharing.

Won't happen. Car ownership is divine right in UK.

It depends entirely on where you live.

The contrast:

My sister lives in central London where public transport is fantastic. Last month she sold her car as she just doesn't use it. It's a 3-year-old VW Golf. In those 3 years, she had put 7,000 miles on the clock. All those miles were from weekends away and day trips out at weekends. On a day to day basis, it never turned a wheel for weeks at a time. She has now joined a car-share scheme for the rare occasions she needs a car.

I live in the hills in East Lancashire. Public transport is basically non-existent. I was recently working in Burnley - a total of 14 miles away and a town, so hardly somewhere obscure or remote. I'd commute on the bike a couple of times a week, or drive. My car had to go in for an MOT and service so I had a look to see if I could travel that 14 miles by public transport. I couldn't.

Well... I could if I was prepared to travel a ridiculously convoluted route involving multiple changes and taking literally hours. The times involved would have meant I could not possibly get to work for a 9 o clock start.

If you live anywhere outside our major cities, then you genuinely need a car because the public transport network simply doesn't exist

Definitely too many cars, but the answer isn't just to rely on people volunteering to use alternate modes of transport, it has to be making them use them. For example, at a simple level cars could be given a banding, and on Mondays cars in band A are not allowed on the road. Tuesday band B, and so on. Obviously it will need to be more refined, and there will need to be a way to deal with those who can afford to buy a car in each band, but it cannot be beyond the wit of man (I will not say our Government!) to come up with a system. The French managed something similar in Paris when pollution got too bad, I believe.

When I was young I would cycle or get the bus to my activities (Judo and Badminton were 3 miles away, skatepark around 5).
My mum didn't drive and my dad usually finished work around 7. Less cars on the road back then too, is that a coincidence...

I commute to Glasgow via public transport every working day. I leave my house at 6.30am and get into my lab around 8am - 8.15am. I travel into the city on the local bus service. It's slow, expensive and oh my, you do encounter some characters on it. Once I'm in the city, I travel from the centre out to the west end either by the subway if it's pishing down or on a Nextbike. Return journey is much the same, although the 'character encounters' are more frequent.

What I see every morning, is traffic snarling up and coming to an almost standstill on the motorway about 3 miles from the city centre. In the winter, this can extend out to about 7 miles. In the mornings, when I look up from the book I'm reading or amazon prime episode I'm watching, while sitting on my nearly empty bus, I can look into the cars and without exaggeration, I'd say that less than 1 in 20 have more than one person in them.

People think my commute is a horror show, (which it actually kind of is as I'm currently watching downloaded episodes of Preacher in the mornings on my Amazon Fire), but I would go mad if I was sitting on my trying to drive a car through that nightmare.

I always make a point of thanking the bus driver every time I get off. I can't see why anyone would want to drive into or around a city.

Any form of road charging is simply hitting the poorer car owners worst. If you want the roads to be the preserve of the Audi-owning middle classes, carry right on, but it sounds a bit gammony/brexity to me.

Points already made;

Since WW2 we've allowed our society to develop into separate work and living spaces. Shopping is often put of town.

Our kids have more opportunities for activities but these are, again, often not near where we live.

A one-size-fits-all solution can't take into account both urban and rural needs.

It will take decades of new policies to resolve this. And we don't do that sort of planning with 5 year governments.

Having any more than 2 children and then complaining about this countries resource usage is a bit hypocritical.

The answer isn't necessarily better transport infrastructure, it could be drasticaly reduced by better communication infrastructure, and more crucially, an acceptance by employers that it's ok for people to work from home if they are able.

I share an office with about 10 other people. 6 of those spend all day sat behind a desk looking at a computer.

The other 4 ( and me) are required  to physically attend sites but usually arrange those journeys to be at off peak times to "avoid the traffic"  so we all work from the office during those times

So, first thing in the morning and last thing in the working day , there are 11 cars commuting to our office for no other reason than " that's where our desks are"

I don't have a desktop computer or a landline desk phone. I don't need physical access to any files or resources that I couldn't get at home. I have better broadband at home than we have at work.

If we took all of these people out of the rush hour and left the roads and trains to people who do actually need to travel  for work then I'm sure that the world would be a very different place.

an acceptance by employers that it’s ok for people to work form home if they are able.

This very much, I am lucky to work for a company where 90% of staff work remotely. But still some managers are obsessed with putting bums on seats in our Cambridge office even though everyone else in those peoples teams is sat at home working.

Before cars, people lived convenient for work, and kids wouldn’t have 3 activities in 3 places on the same night. (Not having a pop, we are the same)

The car has enabled these lifestyle choices. Yes, fewer cars and better public transport would be great, but until people think “I’m want to live 2 miles from work in an urban environment so I can walk/cycle everywhere and compromise/create our leisure activities to suit” it won’t change.

Banning any new housing not on brownfield sites would be a start. There’s enough earmarked brownfield space to meet our housing needs.

I'm not really talking about 'before cars' so much as in the 'good old days' but I don't think this is a 1-way direction of cars just enabling.

Most of my childhood activities were either not organised or involved me getting there and back by bike or running. (largely down to if there was anywhere safe to lock a bike) ... to get to secondary school I got a bus, primary I walked with my little brother... shopping I'd go to a corner shop or something.

I used to run to organised activity and meet mates who got there the same way.

All of these seem now to be highly discouraged ... bordering on child abuse to let your kid walk/ride to primary school alone (school refuse to accept kid anyway)...

Whenever I'm confused about how America feels about guns, I look at how we feel about cars.

We know that they're bad for the drivers. We know that they're dangerous to people outside them. We know that they degrade the local environment. We know that they're bad for quality of life. We know that they're damaging the global environment. We scream about freedom if anyone suggests alternatives.

I am curtailing freedom to suggest that the government should invest in public transport infrastructure in order to reduce car use

Don't be silly, governments don't invest in public transport, they subsidise it. Spending public money to enable car dependency is investment.

Any form of road charging is simply hitting the poorer car owners worst. If you want the roads to be the preserve of the Audi-owning middle classes, carry right on, but it sounds a bit gammony/brexity to me.

The poorest are currently being compelled to spend their money on car ownership, because the alternatives are too dangerous or expensive.

Cars are fine. People are the problem. Reduce the population by half and we're good.

The poorest are currently being compelled to spend their money on car ownership, because the alternatives are too dangerous or expensive.

That's part of the circular argument that will take decades of change to resolve.

IMHO there is no tipping point, people were still driving around parts of London at an average speed slower than walking pre-congestion charge. People still drive in NYC which is worse, often pedestrians are travelling faster than traffic.

Cardiff is getting very close to gridlock, a few weeks ago I passed a Van broken down in lane 2 of the A470 just as it merges with traffic coming off the M4 at Coryton. A Police car was just arriving as I passed, no more than a few minutes had passed. It was the middle of the day, not rush hour, but in those few minutes traffic on the M4 was backed up for a junction and a half East Bound.

We've got the usual old City problems, it's grown around cars, we've got lots of car parks, but few train stations. The Taff Trail is great for cycling if where you're going it near it, but the rest of our cycle network is limited to a few ignored red lanes at the edge of roads.

SaxonRider only lives a few miles from me, so I know his pain. We're in the process of looking for a new house, but we've got a teenage Son, he doesn't want to move schools a year before GCSEs and I don't blame him, and I don't want to have to drive him cross-town on top of our Daughter. I'm too scared to let him cycle, the route would be lethal that time of morning, and public transport is a nightmare. Works okay, well if you can face being packed in like cattle, if you want to go from any of the suburbs to the city, but if you want to travel a relatively short distance of 6 miles from suburb to suburb it's nay impossible.

If you accept that every house will have two or more cars, the problem is the huge numbers of houses being built on greenfield sites. Everybody would like to see more houses built on brownfield sites but there are two problems: scum neighbours and proximity of facilities - the old days of the neighbourhood shops, pubs, cinemas and whatever are long gone. The only time it works is in booming cities like Manchester where there are local shops and facilities for younger residents and there's an over-supply of new-built city apartments, although unfortunately 75% of those (so I'm told) are being sold to investors from places like China wanting a safe haven for their lolly.

Well whoever suggested to you that providing improved public transport is curtailing freedom is an idiot, so they can safely be ignored. Same goes for cycling infrastructure. Do it and let people choose.

Cars are fine. People are the problem. Reduce the population by half and we’re good.

As long as that reduction is all the Brexiters and Tories then yes we certainly would be good.

Any form of road charging is simply hitting the poorer car owners worst. If you want the roads to be the preserve of the Audi-owning middle classes

Link it to the VED band (in particular the "prestige" penalty bit). It should be disruptively expensive to EVERYONE to drive short journeys (except motability etc obviously).

The government could start to tackle all of those issues,

Why wait for the government to do anything?

Change your habits, get people to change theirs.

I honestly don't think there ever will be a solution. Urban population booming as is car ownership, yet in 99% of places there just isn't the space to add any extra traffic capacity.

No government is ever going to implement wide-ranging punitive action or "waste" significant money on public transport etc as it wouldn't be popular.

All you can do I think is look out for yourself, adjust your work/lifestyle to avoid car journeys at peak times, let everyone else get stressed 😎

Agree with the OP

I'm so lucky that my local independent shops have everything I need and a 5 minute walk away.

Driving a car for me isn't an enjoyable experience. Too many people ignoring basic rules of the road and they don't care about anyone else. They're too quick to be aggressive if you drive at the speed limit, or don't do something quickly enough.

Agree with comments about public transport being too expensive. Also the comments about building on green belt, where you have to have a car because there are no facilities, or public transport. There are plenty of brownfield sites, where the much needed affordable housing can be built, with good infrastructure and amenities.

We're thinking of selling our car, but will still need one.

It's annoying to see a close neighbour walk her children to school, yet the neighbour next door fires up the old diesel Cayenne to take her child to the same school and always bobs to the shops in it.

For me it's the worry about pollution levels. Since building the A555 airport relief road, the pollution levels in the surrounding area (that includes us) have rocketed. The locals have clubbed together to buy equipment to measure it.

“Man in car complains about traffic” could be a Daily Mash story

It's more like "Man in car complains traffic makes it difficult to drive his multiple children to discretionary activities in 3 different locations" - and you have to bear in mind SR's probably one of the more self-aware people complaining about traffic levels.

There are no easy ways back from where we are to something more sustainable, pricing strategies are probably the best bet but would have to be led by massive improvement in public transport or it would simply be pricing poorer citizens out of mobility. And with so much vested interest in the status quo I can't see anything like that making headway. I'm not optimistic tbh.

Why wait for the government to do anything?

Change your habits, get people to change theirs.

My child's primary school won't accept unaccompanied kids.
Neither will most of his activities.

Loads of other stuff is "must be accompanied by an adult" ... or "your child must be dropped off and picked up by an adult"

an acceptance by employers that it’s ok for people to work form home if they are able.

xora

This very much, I am lucky to work for a company where 90% of staff work remotely. But still some managers are obsessed with putting bums on seats in our Cambridge office even though everyone else in those peoples teams is sat at home working.

I personally found the problem with that is working on your own all day is depression-inducing levels of loneliness/boredom. One or two days a week might work.

From my house to my son’s football and my daughter’s ballet (they’re in the same direction), it was, without exaggeration, bumper-to-bumper cars in both directions.

The question is - who are all those other drivers and where have they driven from. For you the journey is congested from home to destination - thats why you regularly make the decision to travel by other means. But for the majority of other people in that queue will have travelled from further afield because cities by their nature draw in large numbers of people from their hinterland everyday- they live or work further from their destination than you do. They're the cause of the congestion - but for them the congestion is only a blip in a longer trouble free  journey. They see the city as the cause of the congestion and it reinforces their idea that their life in the suburbs and satellite towns is more convenient even though they can only make it work if they drive- they don't dwell on the  incovenience of travelling in a city being something they've brought with them.

Anyway. Its all because of women's liberation.

🙂

As the band slaves once said.

"You're not sat in traffic. You are traffic"

I personally found the problem with that is working on your own all day is depression-inducing levels of loneliness/boredom.

I've often thought  there will ultimately be a market for  local high street remote working offices. We need to use all those boarded up shops for something, right?

Places you can walk to from your house with desks and chairs and fast internet where  you can work remotely from your employer, close to home but still interact with other people, all doing the same thing, throughout the day.

The remote office provider  could provide a report to your employer of your attendance and timekeeping to keep them happy that you're not spending your day watching Homes under the Hammer or furiously masturbating.

part of the problem is all these unnecessary journeys, such as taking your kids to activities that require driving in rush hour....(I have 2 young ones, I'll probably end up being the same)

Big culture shift needed:
Bring in charge per mile
Bring in offpeak / peak costs
Enforce staggered starts/ends across cities for schools / councils etc where possible
Give employees the right to vary start and end times where possible
Incentivise companies to reduce miles travelled by employees (home working etc..)
Decentralise London / other big cities, starting with civil service
Big incentives like super cheap business rates for dispersed employers
invest in better cycling / scootering infrastructure
subsidise season tickets for buses and trains

They were planning on a commuter zone type thing for my city, Southampton, which I was really looking forward to - mainly aimed at diesals, so we bought a cheap petrol (see behaviour change...due to cost). But then they have shelved it for some rubbish reason. I'm sure it would have had an impact in improving the cities air pollution. (though the big issue is still the cruise ships not having onshore power..)

The whole country has been designed around car ownership and use, and *most* people will always take the easiest option.

It'll take a generation to change, and very strong leadership, or some kind of oil/energy crisis.

to keep them happy that you’re not spending your day watching Homes under the Hammer or furiously masturbating

I'm hoping they'd be OK with cheerfully masturbating.

I’m hoping they’d be OK with cheerfully masturbating.

...well, i suppose you are getting paid for it.

We need to use all those boarded up shops for something, right?

more housing?
good idea by the way, though not just the high street, any commercial site that needs redeveloping - all the disappearing local corner shops / pubs etc... could be used. Mix with some sort of youth club and your tackling a couple of social problems with one stone

here is not too many cars on the road at all
I’ve read some stupid words on here in my time.. but lordy (!), that is a classic. 😆

Nice one. Take part of what I said and ridicule it. Nice way to conduct a sensible constructive discussion. My actual point which you've not picked up on, was that the problem was not necessarily the quantity of cars on the road but the concentration. You have miles of tailbacks on some roads, but empty roads just a stones throw away. If the traffic was shared more equally on the existing infrastructure (let alone building more) then the congestion could easily be eased in many parts of the country. Ovviously not London. London is screwed but there is hope elsewhere in the country.

And despite your ignorant dismissal the fact remains There IS plenty of space on the road network...just not linking where people are and where they need to get to. There are many ways to tackle this before you get to the draconian suggestion of banning cars which truly is stupid.

Cars are brilliant things, they give people freedom, convenience and enable them to be more productive in their lives which are things people will always value and place increasing value on going forward. We can look at our habits...there is no sensible reason in this day and age to concentrate people in large cities, living and working there causing these high population densities. Spread things out a bit. reduce the concentration. 93% of our land is untouched. We have 60 million people crammed into less than 7% of the land area. I think we can invest in a small amount of land which could make a huge difference. Small things like companies staggering their start and finish times can help to ease congestion in local areas at rush hours.

And a cracker is our local council seems to think that morning rush hour is the best time to send out their road gutter sweeping trucks to clear the gutters and drains causing miles of tailbacks in the morning rush hour. Not sure who's bright ideal in the local council offices that was.

I’ve often thought there will ultimately be a market for local high street remote working offices. We need to use all those boarded up shops for something, right?

Places you can walk to from your house with desks and chairs and fast internet where you can work remotely from your employer, close to home but still interact with other people, all doing the same thing, throughout the day.

This will only work if people can drive close to it and park easily. After all, town and city centres are not exactly renowned for being places that people walk to and from are they (see the traffic in any city at a weekend!)

So, this looks like a problem for a person living in a major city, going along a main commuter route, almost thinking that everyone else is insane for doing what they themselves are also doing. If only the others weren't, surely there would be less cars to get in the way of theirs....
My commute was lovely. From the car parked on my drive, beautiful sunshine and fairly empty roads, listening to the Infinite monkey cage pod cast about dinosaurs as I drove down the Cheddar Gorge and then into my parking place at work. Completely stress free. I suspect I'd feel differently if I lived in a city again, but then I didn't bother having a car when I last did live in a city... It's also be a little difficult to have all my staff working remotely as there is a factory full of expensive machinery that sort of has to stay in the same place!

Hello SaxonRider, no, you're not wrong and yes, it is insane.

Got rid of my car nearly twenty years ago and haven't looked back. I have to rent or borrow a couple of times a year at most, and I HATE it. Around 50% of urban space is dedicated to cars, and that seems to be invisible to most people. If it's not frustrated people crawling around in bumper-to-bumper single occupancy boxes, it's idiots distracted by their phones. From the the roads to the facebook comments, there's something about driving that fundamentally seems to break people's brains.

Its all total bollocks. I worry about cycling with my children to school, there are cars everywhere, the narrow path between two fields gets blocked by people walking or cycling and gets overgrown with nettles, the council only have the funding to cut it once a year (yes I do log it with them that it needs a cut) but the grass verges along the side of the road get cut all the time. The design / funding for everything is all just wrong for alternatives to driving so it just encourages car use. I work a few miles from home (in an NHS acute hospital) cycling is is viewed as a very very strange thing to do, car parking on site is a huge revenue earner and everyone just sucks up the cost and hassle of parking as there aren't enough spaces. On the way in its often bedlam at some places as I pass two primary and two high schools, cars, trucks and buses blocking each others path buses and school kids trying to cross the roads anywhere possible. The school doesn't help as you often have to carry a homemade cardboard castle, a PE kit, lunch, school bag and a trumpet in with you.

I hate driving these days, it’s just tiresome and avoid it as much as possible, and the less you drive, the more you hate it when you do have to.

This. Ignoring trips up north to see relatives and friends, my mileage has dropped from 7000 miles per year to around 1000. I use the bike for almost everything. It now feels shameful to sue the car for short trips or even to commute.

I haven't read it all, I'll catch up later in my break.

But I "had" to drop my car off at the garage this morning, they wanted it for 9am. And the traffic was terrible! I'm lucky that most of commuting is outside rush hour, I couldn't sit in that every day.

I am however guilty of using the car a lot for convenience, it's a 40ish minute walk in to town and I do find I often just jump in the car to make a quick and easy trip. Luckily where I live isn't congested badly - yet.

I really should make more of an effort to walk and jump on the bike instead.

Public transport to work is do able but not easy, I can't get there in time for a lot of my shifts and what take under 45 minutes in the car becomes at least 1hr15 by train & walking.

I did choose to move 30 miles from work though so.... I guess I I'm part of the problem. And I can't work from home as I need to look out the window.

My actual point which you’ve not picked up on, was that the problem was not necessarily the quantity of cars on the road but the concentration.

Oh, I picked up on it. Just thought it was ridiculous. Doesn't matter [i]where[/i] the hell all these cars are, there are too many of them. Polluting cities, killing and injuring people, stopping other forms of transport from being feasible... etc etc. Too many cars. FUll ****ing stop.

Why, oh why can’t we just look at places with good transport infrastructure and imitate them?

Because we've built a world where people believe that owning personal motorised transport is a right and, at the same time, built our lifestyles and infrastructure around it.

It's so heavily entrenched that instead of looking at alternatives to cars full stop, we're simply switching technologies. So we'll have roads clogged with electric cars still producing tyre rubber debris and brake dust and complete with sustainability issues all of their own - how many batteries? How many charging stations? How many acres of charging points per motorway service area? How much additional load on the National Grid?

It won't stop until we both change our life expectations and behaviour - no, you don't have to drive to the Lake District to go for a bike ride and you're entitled to do it either. And we provide efficient public transport and infrastructure that makes cycling and walking attractive for short journeys.

The omly way that's going to happen is from the top as an uncompromising, committed government policy. Don't hold your breath. First past the post means the Greens have minimal influence over national policy and for other parties, it's all just peripheral.

Tipping point? Probably somewhere down the line when we've actually made the planet uninhabitable so we can have more phones, more concrete, more plastic etc. Oh, and more cars obviously. And bigger roads to drive them on.

The shockingly inadequate state of public transport is to blame for a lot of road congestion. Gti Junior is working in that London for his 3rd year and is really impressed with the transport in the south-east although even that gets shaky from time to time when trains or buses don't turn up. By comparison rail services in the north are a disaster.

Many formerly small villages that were cut off by Beeching now have enough estate dwellers that the lines could be reopened and run as commuter lines with fast, light, modern rail vehicles.

The London commuters who have found alternative ways to travel :

http://<a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/cleanair/the-london-commuters-who-have-found-alternative-ways-to-travel-a4237826.html

Many formerly small villages that were cut off by Beeching now have enough estate dwellers that the lines could be reopened and run as commuter lines with fast, light, modern rail vehicles.

https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/reopening-bere-alston-tavistock-railway-3311504

£93,000,000 apparently to reinstate ~5 miles of track

Many formerly small villages that were cut off by Beeching now have enough estate dwellers that the lines could be reopened and run as commuter lines with fast, light, modern rail vehicles.

£93,000,000 apparently to reinstate ~5 miles of track

Thats because someone has to pay for the committees to scrutinize the committees to scrutinize the committees ...

Instead of just getting on with the projects. Its the same fate that befalls any infrastructure project in this country.

Cars are fine. People are the problem. Reduce the population by half and we’re good.

As long as that reduction is all the Brexiters and Tories then yes we certainly would be good.

Given the average ages of Tory / Leave voters that's what's happening.

It was said that if the vote had happened a few months later then Remain would have won simply becase of Leave voters dying, or being too infirm to vote and more Reamin voters being old enough to vote.

I personally found the problem with that is working on your own all day is depression-inducing levels of loneliness/boredom. One or two days a week might work.

Yep, as Perchy says, what we need to do is build alternative frameworks that get around those issues in different ways - local communal offices, social groups etc.

I listened to an interesting podcast a while back where they spoke to the mayor of a Spanish city that had successfully banned cars. One of the most telling bits was when they asked him if this wasn't unpopular. His response was that yes, initially it was, but if you provide viable alternatives, people forget about that, use those alternatives and appreciate how much more pleasant it is living in a car-free space.

I live in a town which was semi-shut down to cars by the recent Whaley Bridge dam thing and, in all honesty, it made the whole place feel so much nicer. People were walking to the shops and work rather than driving because they had to and there was an indefinable calmness about it all. Folk actually talked to each other and interacted rather than competing for road space.

I think the bigger issue is that the whole 'cars are freedom' culture is part of a huge ecological crisis. It's goes far beyond congestion and pollution - traffic particles in unborn babies, is that the acceptable price to pay for individual freedom to drive to the shops etc?

Given the average ages of Tory / Leave voters that’s what’s happening.

It was said that if the vote had happened a few months later then Remain would have won simply becase of Leave voters dying, or being too infirm to vote and more Reamin voters being old enough to vote.

I love how everything, eventually, leads to Brexit.

Local councils need to make cycling infrastructure MUCH MUCH better and safer, and actually plan it out logically. Yeah it’s been said a thousand times already. But it’s true. And not happening!

To say I love cycling is an understatement. I do think about bikes most of the time. But I do hate cycling my bike to work now. I’ve been commuting by bike for 8 years, and am truly sick of it. As a very experienced and capable cyclist, I am nearly squished too often. But I let it go and get on with my day. You are never going to convince someone who is normally 99% inactive, and unfit and not cycled for years, to go and play with the traffic like we do.

There’s often bad accidents involving squished cyclists on the same route I use. You see it shared on social media. And you also see the responses from the general public. That response in the comments section is more terrifying. Really! You’ve got zero chance of convincing anyone out of their cars when they see all this lot.

It’s not a major city, it’s just a seaside town - Bournemouth. But it’s utter gridlock carnage in rush-hour traffic, and the cycling infrastructure is terrible and dangerously (un)planned.

If we’re to have any chance of encouraging people to cycle short journeys. They HAVE to build proper, segregated/separated cycle lanes. Lanes that don’t just stop randomly 20ft from the horrendous roundabout where all the poor cyclists are getting squished and reported in the local press. I often wonder, do the idiots who plan these partial lanes ever ride a bike, or give a #### at all.

I’m on the verge of embarking in bangernomics, and getting myself a little crap car to commute in I'm that sick of it. Trying to resist it. But if nobody else cares….

people drive because of the status symbol of the car. Look at all the VW vans on here as an example.

The secondary issue is public transport and the councils encouraging this to businesses. Its cheaper for me to tax (550 quid) insure and run (at 10mpg) a car than it is for me to use a bus for the year! thats not right. The answer isnt to price people out of cars with tax but to make transport cheaper and better. Thats the only way youll get people out of cars.

The question is – who are all those other drivers and where have they driven from. For you the journey is congested from home to destination – thats why you regularly make the decision to travel by other means. But for the majority of other people in that queue will have travelled from further afield because cities by their nature draw in large numbers of people from their hinterland everyday- they live or work further from their destination than you do. They’re the cause of the congestion – but for them the congestion is only a blip in a longer trouble free journey. They see the city as the cause of the congestion and it reinforces their idea that their life in the suburbs and satellite towns is more convenient even though they can only make it work if they drive- they don’t dwell on the incovenience of travelling in a city being something they’ve brought with them.

^^This^^ x1000000000000!

Urban/Suburban/Rural dwelling, car ownership and public transport access/use are seldom raised as a point for consideration in all of this. That is probably because everyone is looking for a single local, magic bullet to sort the issue. Spending on public transport and cycle/ped routes within a large town or city centre won't change the fact that a significant amount of the congestion is caused by people traveling in from outer suburbs or further outlying towns/villages where linking bus services are minimal/sporadic and of course probably funded/operated by a different organisation and so those people will default to using a car...

The other thing is the way we have incorporated the car into our culture it's not just the "freedom" side of things, not being a car driver can be quite socially excluding when all of your peers simply assume you'll be able to magically appear for an event 5/10/20 miles away. And of course the car has become as much a statement of personal success and status you couldn't possibly let the neighbours think you 'only' have one or drive an old one.... No wonder they're heavily marketed and subsidised, our culture is built around car ownership and use; you need to break that part of the culture as much as sorting the logistics moving your workforce about and eliminating unnecessary journeys...

people drive because of the status symbol of the car. Look at all the VW vans on here as an example.

I'm not sure they do. They might choose their car based on some desire show their status, but I'd imagine it's mostly convenience. Some people (myself included) even enjoy driving.

It’s more like “Man in car complains traffic makes it difficult to drive his multiple children to discretionary activities in 3 different locations”

Oh, I fully recognise the sad irony of what I was posting. To be clear, though: I was not furiously judging others for being in my way; I was despairing over the fact that I was one in a (seeming) million of vehicles all trying to desperately get to their all-important destination.

I, and my lifestyle unquestionably contribute to the problem; I just try to minimise what I contribute to an absolute minimum level.

Ultimately, though, when I ask about the "tipping point", I am really just wondering aloud if all the others on the road don't also despair... I mean, who could possibly not want to pull a Michael Douglas in Falling Down, when having to do that every single day?!? Or if not a Michael Douglas, then at least try to be part of a solution?