We live on a small island full of dense urban and suburban areas yet have an American-centric attitude when it comes to cars and driving, public transport is poor outside of London, including the cities, to say the least.
It's the mentality that having a car gives you freedom and independence when in reality it's anything but, it's a huge money hole and driving in English cities is extremely stressful. I look at the public transport systems they have in The Netherlands, Germany and even France and absolutely cringe at the state of ours in comparison. It's an absolute travesty.
I bought a car recently after years of not needing one, because public transport in my area has gone to shit since the pandemic. It's not big expensive stuff that would take billions of pounds worth of new infrastructure to fix - it's mainly a shortage of bus drivers. One of the bus services I used went from a reliable half-hourly service to an hourly service that is often very late or cancelled. The last bus of the day was at just after 6pm, so if that didn't turn up I'd be stranded and begging for a lift or paying for a taxi. You just can't plan your life around a service that bad.
If it weren't for the fact that insurance costs have skyrocketed, running my car would be cheaper than public transport. Obviously getting a new car on PCP is massively expensive, but you can run an old hatchback for tuppence ha'penny.
A lot of people just don't have the luxury of using public transport. The sort of people who work in city centre offices often forget that millions of people work on industrial estates in the middle of nowhere, start their shift hours after the buses have finished or lug around half a ton of tools. If you look at the traffic in that image, about half of it is vans and HGVs.
I'm a big advocate for public transport and cycling, we clearly could take a lot of journeys off the road with a bit of investment and some creative thinking, but we should also recognise that the roads are vital national infrastructure.
>It's the mentality that having a car gives you freedom and independence when in reality it's anything but
You are going to have to qualify that statement lad, because it absolutely does. Yes, it's expensive and everyone wishes it wasn't, but it undeniably gives you more independence. Frankly I don't know how I'd even get my shopping done without the car. I suppose nowadays you could just rely on delivery services, but it illustrates the point. I'd be stuck at home a lot more of the time if I didn't have the car.
The other issue is it doesn't matter how good public transport is, it will never be so good that it replaces vehicle ownership. Public transport can be very good at serving commuters and getting people in and out of town for their weekend recreational activities, but if, say, I want to go visit a friend in a different part of town, it's invariably a massive faff that requires getting one bus into town, and another bus out of town, when it would take 15 minutes to drive.
I see a lot of the same issue with the anti-car evangelist crowd as you see with the evangelical anti-smoking crowd who irrationally hate vapes. They make the perfect the enemy of the good. It would be great if we could get people onto public transport or working from home for the work week, stop the school mums causing gridlock when they live a five minute walk away, and only use their cars for recreation. But people are always going to want a car to take the family on trips or whatever, and frankly I think anyone who wants to take that away from people is a bit of a bastard.
What I will say is that when I were a lad (early 90s) that our little street had a car on every driveway, but that was it - typically everyone managed with one family car. Obviously the world is very different now, we could still afford stay at home wives and people all worked in the same factory (well, shipyard here) so it was incredibly likely you had another three mates on the estate you could pick up on the way to work.
It also doesn't help that cars are fucking massive now. My grandparents did have two cars, a mini and a rover metro, which combined took up less room than the average modern car. People will argue that cars are bigger now for safety legislation reasons, but in actual fact it's just that consumerism is so rampant that a Toyota Aygo is defacto considered a car for starting out in, and useless for anything else, and not like the minis and hatchbacks of old that were simply just the car you bought and kept running forever.
Even up here in Newcastle where we have a metro system, it's woefully unreliable and doesn't serve everyone, I'm between two stations and it's a 30 minute walk to either. Our estate used to have a bus into town every ten minutes for most of the day, now we have one an hour, and it costs £5.60 for a return. It costs about £2 an hour on average to park in the city, so it's hard not to just jump in the car every time.
>I'd be stuck at home a lot more of the time if I didn't have the car.
If you don't have freedom without a car then it's not freedom. Don't get me wrong, you are right, but you also highlight the problem here.
For decades, governments have poured money into roads, while ignoring public transport. Public transport is so crap now that it's hardly going to win anyone over. Equally, the government seems to only believe that it can build huge Deano-box estates or huge retail parks, so more and more people tend to live far away from anything. Old people find this out the hard way when they lose the ability to drive.
Aside from London and a few other places, you (generally) only use public transport if you're poor. It is often unpleasant and untidy, and is not a very comfortable journey. We do have the choice to make public transport nice, to the point where it could rival the car. Some places in Europe, and East Asian countries, do this very well. Things are clean, arrive on time, and seem to want you there.
If we had a cheap and clean high speed rail system with 'luggage in advance of travel', a lot more people would be willing to take it. It's possible, it can and should be done, and it would be, if the powers that be were halfway serious about reducing traffic. To come round to where I started: freedom would be having a car and good safe public transport.
>People will argue that cars are bigger now for safety legislation reasons, but in actual fact it's just that consumerism is so rampant
Why aren't they the same thing? Large companies want restrictions. It stifles their competition, and 'forces' people to buy a more expensive product. If they made normal-sized (or attractive) cars again they'd dominate the market.
>>464479 Cars let you outsource their costs in a fairly opaque way: The opportunity cost of having a downtown carpark rather than a business disappears into the aether, the cost of fuel and driver-time goes to the car owner, who might budget the first but not the second. The cost to the state of subsidising roads seems like an expense for "everyone", rather than specifically for motorists. (after all, even without cars you'd still have streets, and what's a street but a wee road?), and so on and so on.
Meanwhile with a bus or a train you run into the problem that you've got one or two big balance sheets you can put together, and they'll appear to be bleeding money when you do so, and so the government will come along looking for efficiency savings (Rail), or the private sector will only run the profitable bits. (Bus) Partially, of course, it's also ideological: we used to have a layer of local government dedicated purely to making public transport work smoothly, the "Passenger transport executive". A nice little idea, but they were rendered impotent by bus deregulation and privatisation. So the ideology went: why have some clueless nerd planning public transport for a region when you can just leave it to the market? Why have the council dictate a bus must run to the industrial estate in time for people to use it to get to work when you can just let Arriva decide whether that'll turn a profit or not? It's not a totally mental idea - but if it was a pragmatic decision rather than a purely ideological one, you'd have to find it curious that precious old Transport for London was exempted and allowed to continue with old-style integrated transport planning... (Bus operation was privatised in 1989, but schedules, prices, etc, were all still set by TFL. now, supposedly, they're looking at bringing operations back in house too.)
I really want to support public transport. but when a train can't even achieve the very basic requirment of even being cheaper than a private company coach. I question the very fundemental economics of their existance for anything other then moving freight around. they can't even run cheaper than a plane for moving from one end of the country to the other a lot of the time and they can cost 100 milion upfront.
Despite being a very fit person who enjoys walking for more than an hour in either direction to get places I recently got a car and it just objectively improves my life. If I was disabled I imagine not having a car would directly corispond to living a worse quality of life.
In theory it really wouldn't be that hard to get everyone to use public trainsport more, you would subsidse the shit out of it til it was highly regular and people found it cheaper than anything else. I assume the economics of this just don't balance out (or big car park is paying to make sure the system doesn't change) which is why we are stuck with it in a shit place, there just aren't enough people a lot of the time to justify running a decent service outside of city centers. now that I think about it we as a country tried that, it lead to a masive speculation bubble, mass public train networks are the NFTs of the 19th century not to be trusted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
If it was possible to get our shit together with railway networks we would have evidently have done it by now we gave it a decent try right at the very begining and it failed.
>>464625 Part of the problem is how we approach rail transport. We think the main job of a railway is to run trains, which is counterintuitively quite stupid. The trick to running a profitable railway is to run a real estate company and a bunch of retail companies, then build a railway to increase the value of your real estate and retail portfolio, then build more real estate and retail businesses around your railway line, then improve the railway... And so on and so on forever. That's what Japan's private (non JR) railways do, it's what Hong Kong's MTR Corp does, and to a degree it's what our own private railways did historically - that's why BR wound up owning a bunch of hotels. It's a brilliant system because railways really do create a lot of value, but you can't recover it at the farebox. If good rail links can turn worthless land into prime real estate, the solution is obvious: let the railway company own the real estate! Then it's profitable for them to give areas good rail links even though the trains themselves don't bring in that much cash.
But somewhere along the line we picked up the idea that a railway should be operated like a bus company or an airline, and our entire attitude and regulatory environment is designed around this flawed assumption.
I think that problem is secondary to the wider problems we have with planning and development. The Japan/Hong Kong model involves a lot of financial risk, but it becomes intolerably risky in the British context where NIMBY residents have huge scope to block or delay major projects. If you look at why HS2 went so far over-budget, you can see why a private investor would be so reluctant to gamble on being able to build both a railway and a shitload of property served by that railway.
There's a parallel universe in which we can solve transport and housing in one fell swoop by essentially replicating the Metropolitan railway extensions - bundle the easements for a railway with planning permission to build garden suburbs around the stations. My only hope is that the incoming Labour government are actually serious about reforming planning law.
>>464625 You might want to watch the preceding hour-and-a-half of that film before you start modeling yourelf or the nation on Richard E. Grant's character.
I bought a house near very good transport links to major cities, I walk everywhere or get public transport and my neighbours or others think I'm really odd or treat it as student like living.
I'm a fully grown man with a partner and we have good jobs, a mortgage, live perfectly normal adult lives. I cannot stand commuting by car and think it's utterly depressing, and I think casual exercise from walking by default is really really good for my general overall health.
Attitudes are very strange to cars, people tie up huge amounts of their identities in them and it's all to sit in massive queues, create pollution and never actually experience the world around them.
I'm also a tight so and so, so I do enjoy the hundreds a months it saves. I always rent a car if I absolutely need one (rarely) or if I have to get somewhere odd or at odd hours pay for a taxi. Even if it cost a fortune, it's still cheaper than the random monthly costs.
Sadly the railway stop near me has people that live locally but want to pave over green spaces/nature/recreation areas so they can park more cars. I'll never understand it but UK in general is very car centric and people often argue that because public transport has been neglected, there's no point even trying to improve it.
>>465333 Oh also don't get me started on the bizarre arms race for people in my cute village to get ever bigger cars that our roads aren't built for so they can drive to the supermarket and back.
There are points where two cars can't find down the road so people will just mount the pavement with you on it and beep for you to move so the cars can pass, like they have a god given right.
Unfortunately I've stopped trying to convince people because saying 'cars shouldn't be so centric to everyday life' is taken as a personal sleight, so I just enjoy the money saved and the fitness benefits.
One of the jobs I've applied for recently is at a depot just around the corner from me, and I really hope I get it just because it will just be great not having to spend £80+ on petrol every month to commute, and just being able to use my car for leisure.
>>465332 >>466671 Hydrogen is pretty much still a meme. There are a few places that are trying it with trains and buses, but while it does have the bonus that the emissions are mostly water, there are still concerns about sourcing (setting aside that you're driving a mini-Hindenburg if your storage cells aren't designed properly).
There's a whole spectrum of colours to describe hydrogen sourcing, but the theory that we can substantially reduce our emissions by using hydrogen is pretty much entirely based on the assumption that we would be using "green" hydrogen, obtained from electrolysis of water (effectively the converse operation to what happens in the fuel cell), powered by renewables. "Black" and "brown" hydrogen come from burning coal and lignite respectively, and "grey" is obtained from the by-products of burning natural gas. "Grey" hydrogen isn't too bad, because the process is something you can just bolt on to gas power stations, and so it has minimal carbon impact as it would be a by-product of a thing we're already doing, but ultimately still depends on burning gas, and isn't the "green" vision that's being sold. There's also the doubly memetic "blue" hydrogen, which is what happens if you do the "grey" process but also do carbon capture for maximum imaginary power. There are some other colours, but they're either similar to the above or theoretical to some degree between "shower thought" and "fever dream".
The biggest issue is that the entire thing is sold on the basis of using "green" hydrogen, while pretty much all of the systems currently in use or being demonstrated are actually using "grey" or "brown" hydrogen.
The Toyota Mirai is the only hydrogen-fuelled car currently on sale. It costs £20,000 more than a Tesla Model 3, it has less range and it's significantly slower. In theory you can order a Mirai in the UK, but I've got no idea who would actually buy one.
Hydrogen is a dead-end technology, even if you could buy green hydrogen at every petrol station. The energy density of hydrogen is poor - hydrogen just does not want to be densely packed - as is the power density of fuel cells. Nobody has made meaningful progress on either issue in a decade, while batteries just keep getting better and cheaper.
