teuchter
je suis teuchter
This proposal is based on the following premise:
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In the UK we have become too dependent on the private motor car as a means of transport. Almost everywhere in the country, outside of London and possibly with a few exceptions in the central parts of other cities, anyone who does not own or have access to a car is put at a significant disadvantage. In some places public transport is virtually non-existent; in some places it exists but journey times and frequencies are poor.
As well as putting non-car owners at a disadvantage, a car-dependent society has lots of other negative consequences - social, environmental, and health related. These issues have been discussed at length elsewhere so I'm not going to start listing them all here.
We need to find ways of reducing our dependence on the private car.
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If you disagree with that basic premise, then can I request that you don't argue about it on this thread as it would simply be rehashing old ground. Assuming you agree that reducing our dependence on the private car would be a good thing, then tell me what you think of my proposal as a way of achieving this:
A simplistic way to look at reducing car dependence is to simply say that we provide more and better public transport. This assumes that if public transport alternatives are provided, people will simply switch to them and stop using their cars. However, the reality is, that most people will only switch to public transport if it becomes significantly more convenient for them. This means that in most cases, achieving a significant change relies on either providing a very good public transport infrastructure and/or introducing meaningful penalties to discourage private car use. But such moves are expensive in the short term and are generally unpopular politically, which means that they are unlikely to be made.
Therefore I have been thinking about other ways of achieving such a shift.
An important point in all of this is the nature of the costs of using a car.
The cost of owning and running a car is quite high - many car owners underestimate the true cost but it is generally accepted to be something like at least £2300 per year. This includes the cost of purchasing as well as running costs. However, once you have committed to owning a car, the marginal cost of using it (ie. the extra cost per mile once you have paid all the fixed costs that you have to pay whether you actually use it or not) is quite cheap, and often a fair bit cheaper than public transport fares.
This is one of the reasons why it is hard to shift car drivers onto public transport. Once they have invested in car ownership it becomes economical for them to use the car instead of alternatives.
It's this fact which has lead to the relatively recent appearance of car sharing clubs like Streetcar. They are aimed at people who only want to use a car occasionally - not enough to justify the cost of actually owning one. These people generally live in places where public transport options are good enough that they can cater for the majority of their journeys - the most obvious example being London. These schemes seem to be growing, which indicates that they are viable, at least in denser urban areas.
My proposal is that these schemes are massively expanded to cover the whole of the country, and in effect become part of the public transport system. Obviously, in many areas this would need to be subsidised, at least initially. However, these are the same areas in which public transport is already subsidised, and it might be that a pragmatic view would be to cease, for example, very lightly loaded rural bus services, and divert the funding to subsidy for the car sharing scheme. The shared cars would be used by people to get them to the nearest "viable" public transport hub where they could continue their journey by bus or train.
So far, hopefully, those who fear rabid "anti-car" proposals will be with me as what I am really saying is that being realistic, we have to accept that cars are a necessary part of an effective transport network, and see them as augmenting other modes, rather than something to be eliminated from the system altogether.
The next bit they might not be so keen on but here goes.
One of the aims of this system would be to reduce the disadvantage that non-car owners currently experience: for those journeys (or journey segments) which simply aren't practical by public transport, they can use a car just like those who can afford to (or choose to) own one.
But the other aim is to deal with the current situation where car owners use their car to make journeys (or journey segments) which would be perfectly practical by public transport, simply because the marginal cost for them, having already invested in car ownership, is lower than the public transport fare. Making a car-sharing scheme available nationwide would not really change anything for them, unless the cost of a journey made by share-car plus PT became lower than their marginal cost for using their own car - and my guess is that that just wouldn't be achievable.
Of course, I could hope that over the longer term, lots of people would sell their car and use the car-share scheme instead. But, unless doing this would save them a substantial amount, my hunch is that they would just accept the extra cost of owning their private car in return for the benefits for them of doing so. You might say, so what, but then the scheme would not achieve its aim of reducing car use overall.
My proposal therefore is that private cars simply be banned from using the public roads, effectively making ownership of a car redundant other than purely as a hobby. Enough car-share cars would be made available that everyone could have access to one whenever they wanted. Use of the share-cars would be priced simply by the mile. Now we would have a situation where the choice between using a car or a train or a bus would not be distorted in cost terms by the fact that many users already own a car, as at present. This would help to make certain bus services, for example, viable financially. Some of them might in fact be the ones that had previously been withdrawn in order to divert subsidy to the initial stages of the car-share scheme.
It would also make it easier to introduce new public transport services without the "leap of faith" obstacle we have at present. By this I mean: at the moment, if you are going to introduce a new bus service (for example), it is a bit of a gamble as to whether it will take off. If you just run two services a day, no-one's going to use it - if you run it every 15 mins then people probably will use it but obviously you've got to have the confidence that they will before committing a large amount of investment to start running such a service from day one. In conjunction with a car-sharing scheme you could introduce new services more gently: for example, you could run a bus service in peak commuting hours, and people could use it during those times, and simply use a share-car if they stayed late at work or whatever (whereas at present, a bus service that runs at peak times only is no use to people who might often, but not always, want to come home during those hours).
I can't see that people who currently own a car should have any valid objections to what I am proposing. They would retain the same freedom of movement, because the system would ensure that a car was available to them when they wanted it. They could even use the car for journeys that could also be made by PT, if the were happy paying the premium. The aim would be to price the scheme such that the costs of travelling x number of miles per year would be less than it would cost them to do the same at present. I believe this would be feasible on the basis that the total number of cars in the country would be reduced because they would be being used more efficiently (ie. less time sitting idle in people's driveways or in car parks) and there could possibly also be efficiencies gained by buying those cars in bulk.
The system would encourage the development of decent public transport so they would have better public transport options than they do now, and everyone would enjoy the multitudinous benefits of having fewer cars on the roads generally. The only objections would be from those who see their car ownership as a kind of hobby and driving as a leisure activity, to which my response is, tough, the wider benefits to everyone would totally outweigh all that. Possibly we could throw in a few state-sponsored racetracks around the country for the petrolheads to go and play on at the weekends.
I will now sit back and wait for U75 pick my idea apart at the seams.
