What do you want in the place of cars?

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icowden

Veteran
Location
Surrey
We have one bus every two hours Monday-Saturday (7:25 Am to 7:25pm), no Sunday service. Return buses are also every 2 hours, leaving an hour and 10 minutes after the arrival (they continue to Llantwit Mjaor before returning), so we need to either get everything done in 70 minutes, or we wait over 3 hours.
This.

I live in Surrey not far from Kingston but bus services have been cut and cut and cut again. I took the car for a service / repair the other day. There is a bus that goes from right outside the service centre to fairly close to my house.

It cost me £1.80 to travel 3.3 miles in 44 minutes. I could have walked in about 54 minutes. On bike, it would have taken me 13 mins (but I couldn't get the bike in the car). Driving took 8 minutes.

There is a big difference between 44 minutes and 8 minutes.

When I used to live in Southfields I could get to Piccadilly Circus in 25 to 30 mins whereas driving would take 45 minutes to 90 minutes. That's the reason that you don't need a car in Greater London.
 
There are people who cannot drive eg. Medical reasons.
(And thousands who practically can't due to poverty - some of whom are cleaning our hospitals and fixing our roads!!)

Funny how both of these groups are entirely ignored until there's some possible restriction on driving, and then suddenly the car lobby is all "What about poor and disabled people?"
 
You have a rather rose tinted view of how far children can live from schools. Also Cars are often not allowed in schools. They are allowed past schools. Your ban would be unachievable.

You don't ban taking people to school by car, just dropping them off by the gate. That way the school doesn't get too crowded, and people who live a couple of kilometres away will know they still have to walk, thus making car use less attractive for the lazy.

People from further afield can drive to a short distance away and walk the rest of the way, just like people on public transport have to do...
 

Joffey

Big Dosser
Location
Yorkshire
You have a rather rose tinted view of how far children can live from schools. Also Cars are often not allowed in schools. They are allowed past schools. Your ban would be unachievable.

They can live miles away. Most that I know who do live miles away get the bus. Parents don’t like a 30 mile round trip on a morning to drop Jimmy off in Darlington on a morning.
 

icowden

Veteran
Location
Surrey
They can live miles away. Most that I know who do live miles away get the bus. Parents don’t like a 30 mile round trip on a morning to drop Jimmy off in Darlington on a morning.
True. I retract my previous. It's often those that live too close to warrant a coach / bus but too far to walk. To be fair, most of the kids round here walk or cycle to school.

My own don't but that's because the school has had to ban cycling due to safety (the school is on a private road off a narrow 40mph road). The annoying thing is that there is a perfectly safe route through the private Burwood Park Estate then the private Burhill Estate and golf course This would link Cobham with Walton on safe well maintained roads ideal for children and adults cycling.

As it is there is a long term plan to introduce proper cycling infrastructure as there is no safe route between Cobham and Walton. So hopefully in the future cycling might become an option.
 

classic33

Leg End Member
That's how I came to stop driving, the DVLA Medical Centre had my licence for ~5 months, and by the time I got it back again I'd grown used to doing without it.


Most do.

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If the only ones with cars were those living in the country the majority of cars would be off the road. Much the same must be true for disability.
Why?
 
Gotcha. You just annoy the people who live in the next road over.

The best way to annoy the people in the next road over would be to maintain the status quo.

This is due to the long known (and carefully ignored) phenomenon of induced demand: the easier we make it to use a certain form of transport, the more people use it; or as one person put it "You sow roads, you reap traffic". In the case of schools, if you make no attempts to reduce cars at schools, then more people will drive and the problem will soon spill into the next road over because the road by the school is full.

The reverse has also been observed due to Induced Demand; making it harder to drive somewhere will reduce the number of cars making the journey. In thise case, making it harder to drive close to a school will mean less people do it, especially if you make it easier to get there in other ways.

For example in our village school, making a one way system and banning non residents cars on certian streets, while making it possible to cycle and walk direcly, has the potential to reduce traffic on school runs, just because people will usually take the easier option.

In practice, you can either benefit car users or benefit everyone else; it's a zero sum game. Fortunately this means that by making it less convenient for drivers you automatically make it easier to use other forms of transport.

We need to think more creatively to get rid of cars, not dismiss new ideas without trying them.
 
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Alex321

Guru
Location
South Wales
Are you saying that people with a disability only live in a city or town?

I'm waiting on the answer from @presta, as to what he actually meant.

Of course I'm not suggesting that, and neither was he.

The suggestion is that if we limited cars to only those who either lived outside towns or were disabled or both, then there would be far fewer cars on the road, as the majority of people don't fit into either of those groups.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Gotcha. You just annoy the people who live in the next road over.
I used to live in one of those next streets over, complete with painted footprints to show the walking bus the route to school. Any minor parking and queuing problems on our street were preferable to the jams for more people getting out of the village, plus fights and occasional casualties caused by motorists on the older, narrower, pavementless through road past the school gate.
 
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