Proposal to ban private cars from public roads
- Thread starter teuchter
- Start date
Demand based pricing on national rail (i.e. 'Advance' fares).
Lemon Eddy
Disliked by dwyer
Any chance we could decide this one with a vote on Teuchter's proposal?
All those who think this is a great idea, say aye...
All those who think this is a great idea, say aye...
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
I agree with the basic concept, but don't go with the idea of banning of private cars as the best way to get there.
I certainly think that the solution to transport, and in fact most of the global issues we face, lie in the sharing of possessions as opposed to outright ownership, and the resulting competition over increasingly scarce resources. This of course is most evident in transport, and in particular motorised transport.
In owning a private automobile it causes all sorts of issues that car share operations like Street Car (Zip Car) solve.
- 95% of the time a car is parked! It still takes up space, often on public roads.
- People tend to buy cars that are too big for most of the journeys they make, to fully accommodate for the one time a week, month, year when we need a bigger car. This is also a waste.
- As Teucher states, because we need to spend up front on yearly insurance, MOT, and of course buying the thing, the marginal cost of motoring is relatively low, so people tend to use it more often than necessary.
It is also true that a Car Share club offers all the benefits of having a car when it is needed when it is the most convenient mode, when you need to carry heavy loads, when the weather makes it difficult or the destination is inconvenient due to time or location, and if we had many more car share cars all over the country they would be just as accessible as having your own private car.
But of course as we can see from this thread there is a massive resistance to any suggestion of 'taking away my car' "I want a car on my drive" etc..
I think the problem here is that all the 'costs' of private ownership are to society at large, while the benefits of ownership are to the individual.
The answer I think lies not in 'banning' private cars from driving on the public roads, but simply slowly removing parking spaces for 'private' cars and replacing them with public share car only spaces.
If companies were taxed heavily on the 'private' spaces they provide, but share car spaces were untaxed.
If breaks were given to car share companies on things like VED, while 'private' cars were asked to make up the difference.
If something like the car scrappage scheme were implemented to encourage people to sell their cars to car share companies, in return for membership and mileage in shared cars.
Then pretty soon people who wanted to have their own 'private' car and drive it on 'public' roads would only be allowed to park it in 'private' parking spaces.
It would become less convenient and more expensive to drive 'private' cars than 'shared' cars, then the few people that continued to drive their own 'private' cars, anywhere outside of the most rural places, where I think you need private transport, would look as foolish as someone who owned their own supermarket shopping trolley.
I certainly think that the solution to transport, and in fact most of the global issues we face, lie in the sharing of possessions as opposed to outright ownership, and the resulting competition over increasingly scarce resources. This of course is most evident in transport, and in particular motorised transport.
In owning a private automobile it causes all sorts of issues that car share operations like Street Car (Zip Car) solve.
- 95% of the time a car is parked! It still takes up space, often on public roads.
- People tend to buy cars that are too big for most of the journeys they make, to fully accommodate for the one time a week, month, year when we need a bigger car. This is also a waste.
- As Teucher states, because we need to spend up front on yearly insurance, MOT, and of course buying the thing, the marginal cost of motoring is relatively low, so people tend to use it more often than necessary.
It is also true that a Car Share club offers all the benefits of having a car when it is needed when it is the most convenient mode, when you need to carry heavy loads, when the weather makes it difficult or the destination is inconvenient due to time or location, and if we had many more car share cars all over the country they would be just as accessible as having your own private car.
But of course as we can see from this thread there is a massive resistance to any suggestion of 'taking away my car' "I want a car on my drive" etc..
I think the problem here is that all the 'costs' of private ownership are to society at large, while the benefits of ownership are to the individual.
The answer I think lies not in 'banning' private cars from driving on the public roads, but simply slowly removing parking spaces for 'private' cars and replacing them with public share car only spaces.
If companies were taxed heavily on the 'private' spaces they provide, but share car spaces were untaxed.
If breaks were given to car share companies on things like VED, while 'private' cars were asked to make up the difference.
If something like the car scrappage scheme were implemented to encourage people to sell their cars to car share companies, in return for membership and mileage in shared cars.
Then pretty soon people who wanted to have their own 'private' car and drive it on 'public' roads would only be allowed to park it in 'private' parking spaces.
It would become less convenient and more expensive to drive 'private' cars than 'shared' cars, then the few people that continued to drive their own 'private' cars, anywhere outside of the most rural places, where I think you need private transport, would look as foolish as someone who owned their own supermarket shopping trolley.
The reason for wanting a car on my drive is nothing to do with any inherent love of private ownership, though. It's because I live in a village of 200 people that is a good 4 miles away from the nearest settlement. There are some buses... three a day. One each per day to three different destinations. Taking permanent ownership of a vehicle is the only way I'm remotely likely to have access to transport. There is no way that there would be access to a car on an "as and when I need it" basis. The nearest one would likely be many miles away.
The point is that StreetCar and the like are all very well when you live in a densely populated area. But areas currently poorly served by public transport are going to end up equally poorly served by this public car ownership scheme. There are reasons that we only get three buses a day. Some of those reasons are down to the proliferation of cars. But some of those reasons are down to the fact that so few people live in the area, it'll never be economic to run regular public transport there.
The point is that StreetCar and the like are all very well when you live in a densely populated area. But areas currently poorly served by public transport are going to end up equally poorly served by this public car ownership scheme. There are reasons that we only get three buses a day. Some of those reasons are down to the proliferation of cars. But some of those reasons are down to the fact that so few people live in the area, it'll never be economic to run regular public transport there.
marty21
One on one? You're crazy.
I think the idea is we all are all forcibly moved to be close to transport hubs
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Kabbes, nothing would change for you except that your car costs might rise because you'd be hiring a car most of the time.
I don't think it's entirely unfair that you would pay a bit of a premium for living the lifestyle you do, which arguably uses a larger portion of shared resources than someone living in a town. You've chosen to live somewhere where you are dependant on a car and which is remote from your place of work. I know this can get into complicated arguments about how much choice people have over where they live ... and I certainly wouldn't rule out some kind of measures that reduced the hire costs for, say, people in low paid agricultural jobs or whatever.
Looking at what you say about the bus though: you say there are about 200 people in your village. I'll pull a number out of my hat and say that 50 of them are commuters and most of them go to the same train station as you do each day, and probably at about the same time. If there is a bus route to that station that passes through 3 or 4 villages like yours on the way, then there may be 200 people all going the same way at about the same time each morning and evening. Once you have numbers like that, it starts to look feasible to have a bus service, perhaps 2 or 3 buses each morning and evening spaced half an hour apart or co-ordinated with train times.
At the moment, if such a bus service were introduced it would probably not get used because of a) the marginal cost thing and b) because you don't want to risk getting home after the last bus has gone and being stranded at the station.
However, with the car share scheme both of those concerns would be removed. If you came home after the last bus you would simply use one of the share-cars to get home. I don't think it's unrealistic to imagine a scenario where you would use the bus for the 70% of your journeys that fall within the peak commuting times, and the car-share scheme for the other 30%. So, you would reduce the amount you'd have to pay for the car-share (maybe even less than you pay for your car at present), you wouldn't be any less mobile than you are now, there would be a better bus service than there is at the moment, those in your village who can't currently afford a car would be much more mobile, and there would be less cars tearing around your green and pleasant country lanes. Everyone's a winner, no?
I don't know enough about the particulars of your village to know how realistic the above is, of course, but I'm sure you can see that there must be lots of places around the country where something like that could work out.
I don't think it's entirely unfair that you would pay a bit of a premium for living the lifestyle you do, which arguably uses a larger portion of shared resources than someone living in a town. You've chosen to live somewhere where you are dependant on a car and which is remote from your place of work. I know this can get into complicated arguments about how much choice people have over where they live ... and I certainly wouldn't rule out some kind of measures that reduced the hire costs for, say, people in low paid agricultural jobs or whatever.
Looking at what you say about the bus though: you say there are about 200 people in your village. I'll pull a number out of my hat and say that 50 of them are commuters and most of them go to the same train station as you do each day, and probably at about the same time. If there is a bus route to that station that passes through 3 or 4 villages like yours on the way, then there may be 200 people all going the same way at about the same time each morning and evening. Once you have numbers like that, it starts to look feasible to have a bus service, perhaps 2 or 3 buses each morning and evening spaced half an hour apart or co-ordinated with train times.
At the moment, if such a bus service were introduced it would probably not get used because of a) the marginal cost thing and b) because you don't want to risk getting home after the last bus has gone and being stranded at the station.
However, with the car share scheme both of those concerns would be removed. If you came home after the last bus you would simply use one of the share-cars to get home. I don't think it's unrealistic to imagine a scenario where you would use the bus for the 70% of your journeys that fall within the peak commuting times, and the car-share scheme for the other 30%. So, you would reduce the amount you'd have to pay for the car-share (maybe even less than you pay for your car at present), you wouldn't be any less mobile than you are now, there would be a better bus service than there is at the moment, those in your village who can't currently afford a car would be much more mobile, and there would be less cars tearing around your green and pleasant country lanes. Everyone's a winner, no?
I don't know enough about the particulars of your village to know how realistic the above is, of course, but I'm sure you can see that there must be lots of places around the country where something like that could work out.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Buy a horse & cart.
So, basically this will only work if people are forced into it against their will? Either by "slowly" removing their parking places, or charging them punitive amounts of money. And why do it "slowly" anyway - in the forlorn hope that people won't notice that they are being skanked?
I just don't see the point in this convoluted scheme. Most people like having their own car - they are used to driving it, they know they've looked after it (or not), they can leave their stuff, their music, etc in it, their baby seat in the back to pop the kid(s) into, without having to faff about for each trip.
It will never happen for all these reasons and more. Although I do think "Streetcar" schemes are good for occasional vehicle users.
Giles..
I already pay a premium. £4000 per year in rail costs, for a start. But OK...
You'll be lucky if there are 10 of us, actually. Most work from home (like my wife) or work in jobs in the local community. I know those from the Big City like to think that only London has jobs, but it ain't the case.
And as for the same time -- well, if you define "at the same time" to be within a 2 hour window then possibly. But most of us prefer a little more precision than that.
There are no villages between us and the nearest town. None. And there are no other villages that would pass through ours on the way to the town. The one bus a day that goes to the town goes a really roundabout route to pick everybody up, which is probably one reason why it is just one a day.
I think you badly overestimate the density of the population. There is no doubt that many people (several thousand? Possibly) use Dorking train station of a morning. But probably more than half come from the town itself (and walk to the station) and the others come from a very widespread 360-degree radius, where it would be very hard to guarantee access to a car when needed.
I don't think you have the critical mass necessary to make it work in this area. There are lots of people living in the general area and there are lots of people that commute into London -- both taken as a given. So on the face of it, you'd think it could get somewhere. And, to be fair to you, for lots of those people it probably WOULD have a degree of success. But there would also be a very significant minority for whom it would not work. I'm not sure how big a failure proportion you'd be happy with, but it better be a reasonable one.
And this is an area with lots of commuters. Take it out to a REALLY rural area and it would be a total non-starter.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Fair enough if there isn't the critical mass in your particular circumstance. There would be places it wouldn't change much. I wouldn't particularly count those instances as "failures" - just places where things would have to carry on pretty much as before (although, perhaps with a slight difference in that a few of the commuter cars parked at Dorking station could be used by others during the day instead of sitting there idle). For wealthy commuters, I don't really care if things become a bit more expensive. For certain others, I'd be happy to incorporate some kind of adjustment to the pricing to keep costs iin line with the way they are now.
If I wanted to really annoy people I could say that it would be priced such that people would be forced to live more densely. But I'm not going to, because there are plenty of reasons not to do this, but also because part of the point of this scheme is that it should be less painful to introduce than the alternatives like fuel duty hikes (and my feeling is that for a fuel duty increase to have any real impact, it would have to be a really big one).
Really where this scheme would make the biggest difference is in suburban areas and small towns. And there a lot of people that live in these kinds of places, who currently make a lot of car journeys.
If I wanted to really annoy people I could say that it would be priced such that people would be forced to live more densely. But I'm not going to, because there are plenty of reasons not to do this, but also because part of the point of this scheme is that it should be less painful to introduce than the alternatives like fuel duty hikes (and my feeling is that for a fuel duty increase to have any real impact, it would have to be a really big one).
Really where this scheme would make the biggest difference is in suburban areas and small towns. And there a lot of people that live in these kinds of places, who currently make a lot of car journeys.
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
Why? For the simple reason that we are running out of resources, we need to share what we have, if we can make a system more efficient, just as convenient, cheaper and better, you'd soon forget about the little conveniences of leaving your own stuff in the vehicle you use.
Big picture: 7 billion people, one planet... sharing is the only game in town. Or war?
Little picture: More efficient transport system = fewer cars = more pleasant, less polluted, safer towns and cities.
"It'll Never Happen!!" Why slowly? Well smoking in pubs took time... slowly... office, airplanes, trains now pubs. I used to smoke in pubs and was against any form of ban, now I realise how much better pubs are without the smoke, and am happy to go to the garden for the occasional tab.
Changing attitudes and behaviour takes time, but it can and will happen.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Not sure if that's necessarily true. If you were to live in an equivalent house, close enough to your work that you didn't have to buy a £4000 season ticket (and I think I'm right in saying that SE England season tickets are subsidised), you'd probably pay at least that much in increased rent/mortgage/whatever. Probably more.
Absolutely - for the daftness of a shared car scheme to work, the only solution is to move everyone into concentrated ghettoes. It worked fine for the National Socialists so it should work as an enabler for the shared car scheme.
Just one snag - we live in a democracy and parties who thump the tub with LoonyTunes policies that are also supported by 0.00000000000001% of the electorate tend not to get elected.
For this mad car -sharing scheme to work, you would need as many cars as there are now to accommodate the number of people wanting them, so I don't really see how this would save resources. The number of cars would be around the same, and the number of miles driven (and so roughly, fuel used) would be around the same. Where are the resources saved? I already have a car, it has already been made. If I carry on using it for the rest of my life, the only further resources it will use is fuel (and some spare parts and stuff) so I don't see how making me use "street car" vehicles is any improvement, for me or for anyone else. I wouldn't vote for it, or even go along with it, really.
The thing about your comment about "changing behaviour" is that you are happy to use legal force to make people change their behaviour. This is coercion and I am not in favour of it. And doing it "slowly" is just sneaky - at least have the cojones to be upfront and open about what you want to make people do, see if people vote for you.
Rather than sneak around, getting little regulations and new taxes through on the sly, without ever standing up and telling people what you are trying to do.
Giles..
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Read the thread
It's outrageous isn't it. Next we know, they'll be coercing us into not drink-driving and stopping at red lights! I mean, the whole point of publicly owned stuff is that individuals can just do what they want with it!
The parking places at Dorking station are thoughtfully numbered, so I checked into it for you, teuchter. There appears to be about 250 of them, implying that about 250 people per day drive to the station for commuting purposes. It probably covers a radius of about 7-8 miles, with quite a few dozen villages included in that. You can do with this information as you will.
Lemon Eddy
Disliked by dwyer
Anyone?
Excellent - I'm off to have a shottie in one of our Harriers before we sell them off to some 3rd world bog hole.
roryer
道可道非常道，名可名非常名
Car Sharing / Car-clubs (Street Car, city car club, whizgo, zipcar, etc.) remove all fixed costs of car ownership (purchase, VED, MOT, repairs, insurance) and instead heap them onto the marginal cost.
The advantage to the individual is that you don't need to pay so much upfront, while still having access to a car when it is really needed. They also remove all the hassle of owning a car like repairs and parking.
The effect of this, and why it helps, is that on average people who share cars drive a fraction as much as those who privately own one.
When you pay the full cost for each journey, people tend not to drive 250m down the road for a pint of milk. They walk or cycle instead. Public Transport then becomes cheaper per-mile etc.
Think of it like having a pay as you go mobile, as opposed to a contract with unlimited minutes, you tend to keep your calls a bit shorter and to the point, and save your pointless gossip for face to face chats down the pub. When we consider that half of all journeys made by car in urban areas are within easy walking or cycling distance, you can see how much traffic would be taken off the roads.
Second, since cars are parked 95% of the time on average, there is an awful lot of waste in the system. It is currently estimated that one car club car to replace 6 privately owned automobiles.
The global lead comes from Germany and cities like Bremen, where they have fully integrated car sharing into their PT system, with car club cars all over the city, and concentrated in stations around the PT nodes. They have 10% of their licensed drivers registered to their city scheme.
Why go slow? You are right to point out that most people in the UK already have private motorised vehicles, well at least there are about 360 per 1000 head of the UK population.
You are also right to point out that about 30% of the emissions of a motor vehicle is in it's production. Since about 5% of cars retire from the fleet each year, this should be the target to convert to car club members.
As Teucher asked: Do you feel you have the right to drive at any speed in a residential zone? Around a school? Drink and drive?
How about smoke in a public place?
All of these used behaviour change strategies of push (taxes and fines) and pull (marketing and incentives) to bring about the modern consensus.
It is very difficult to explain the benefits of a scheme, but the benefits can be seen in time; for instance in Stockholm more than 60% opposed the congestion charge, after a 6 months trial it was passed by referendum.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Once again... read the thread.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Looking at google maps I reckon the effective catchment area is probably a bit less than a 7-8 mile radius because there are several other stations within 8 miles: Gomshall, Westhumble, Holmwood, Betchworth, Reigate, Ockley, Leatherhead. And in Dorking itself there are three rail stations - Dorking West, Dorking, Dorking West.
The attached map covers roughly what I reckon is the catchment area for Dorking - this stretches half the way to the nearest similarly sized or bigger town in each direction, so halfway to Leatherhead in the north, Guildford in the west, Redhill in the east, Horsham in the south.
The purple dots are railway stations.
Then I've drawn some possible bus routes. Obviously I don't really know the area so it's mainly guesswork but the idea would be to have the minimum number of routes serving the largest proportion of the population. I reckon you could operate what I've shown with about 6 buses. The pale red shaded areas show what is within about 1km of each bus route. This represents a walk of 10-15 minutes which I reckon is reasonable. It's how long it takes me to walk to the tube station from my house in Brixton anyway.
I'm going to say that that shaded area covers 75% of the population in the catchment area, as most of the population will be in the villages, and most of the village are covered by my bus routes.
You say there are 250 parking spaces at Dorking station. There are 6 other stations on my map. I'm going to say that each of them has 150 parking spaces. So I'm going to say that within the map area, there are 1150 cars driven to train stations each day for onward commuting. The cars at Dorking station represent people who drive to Dorking station for onward journeys. To that you need to add all the people that work in Dorking. You said that more people work locally than commute, so I'm going to say that 500 people drive to Dorking to jobs there.
So, 1650 car journeys.
Each of my bus routes is around 7 miles long, so say the journey takes about 15mins, then you can run a half-hourly service on each route with one vehicle.
1650 car journeys spread over 6 routes = 275 people per bus route. If you ran 4 services each morning and evening on each route, so spread over a 2 hr period (and co-ordinated with train departure times), each service on each route would have potentially 68 and three quarters of a passenger. If only half of those people used it, you are still talking about 30 people or so which is a perfectly decent number to fill up a bus with.
Obviously all this amateur lunchbreak transport planning is based on some fairly gung-ho guesswork, but the point is, that you aren't left at the end with totally infeasible numbers. Feel free to pick holes in it nonetheless though.
Unfortunately, all your good work is for naught.
Gomshall, Holmwood, Betchworth, Ockley, Dorking West and Dorking Deepdene all have trains that only go once every few hours and/or don't go into London.
Of your list, the only reasonable alternatives are Leatherhead and Westhumble, which are on the same line. Westhumble is a tiny station that basically picks up people that live in Westhumble and Mickleham only. About 2 people get on the train there. Leatherhead is a proper mainline station though, I'll give you that one. But it's not very accessible to those who live south of Box Hill/Ranmore.
Please rework your analysis taking these facts into account. And stop pretending that you know more about where I live than I do, or you'll once again end up having to redo everything you've done. I already told you that Dorking station serves all the surrounding villages -- why the fuck would you question me on this?
For instance this:
All of them except Leatherhead and Reigate are tiny. They barely have car parks at all, let alone 150 spaces. Deepdene has no car park at all, in fact. The car parks that they do have, such as they are, are always almost empty because the stations are barely used. I think you can probably count about 20 regularly used space between the lot of them.
Leatherhead has about 100 spaces, which are always occupied. But Leatherhead has other car parks that also serve the station. Indeed, I think it's fair to exclude everything north of Box Hill and Ranmore Common from your analysis of Dorking. And everything east of Betchworth and west of Gomshall (people west of Gomshall would drive to Guildford). But include everything else in this radius.
Basically, the 250 spaces of Dorking -- call it 300 for everything if you really must -- really do serve everything in a radius of Dorking that stretches to Box Hill in the north, Capel in the south, Betchworth in the east and Gomshall in the west. It's a very big area.
Why assume? Why not ask?
All of them except Leatherhead and Reigate are tiny. They barely have car parks at all, let alone 150 spaces. Deepdene has no car park at all, in fact. The car parks that they do have, such as they are, are always almost empty because the stations are barely used. I think you can probably count about 20 regularly used space between the lot of them.
Leatherhead has about 100 spaces, which are always occupied. But Leatherhead has other car parks that also serve the station. Indeed, I think it's fair to exclude everything north of Box Hill and Ranmore Common from your analysis of Dorking. And everything east of Betchworth and west of Gomshall (people west of Gomshall would drive to Guildford). But include everything else in this radius.
Basically, the 250 spaces of Dorking -- call it 300 for everything if you really must -- really do serve everything in a radius of Dorking that stretches to Box Hill in the north, Capel in the south, Betchworth in the east and Gomshall in the west. It's a very big area.
