{"id":3353,"date":"2018-09-16T10:35:25","date_gmt":"2018-09-16T09:35:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/?p=3353"},"modified":"2020-01-02T23:52:52","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T22:52:52","slug":"self-drive-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/?p=3353","title":{"rendered":"The end of the motor car?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cars dominate our world.\u00a0 We are addicted to them. They whizz us about, carry our goods and chattels and, for some of us, are our biggest status symbol.\u00a0 <\/span>Driving can be enjoyable but is often very frustrating as we often sit for long periods in traffic jams.\u00a0 In fact, cars have lots of downsides which we generally ignore.\u00a0 <\/span>Cars are not an efficient method of transport. Cars kill and maim us, both through road accidents and through their poisonous fumes.\u00a0 In 2017 there were 1,793 deaths, 24,831 serious injuries and a staggering total of 170,993 casualties of all severities in reported road traffic accidents. Air pollution causes 64,000 early deaths in the UK every year according to alarming new research.\u00a0 We tolerate these shocking statistics because we have been seduced by the convenience of cars, their appeal as shiny toys and to some extent our laziness.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Have you noticed how many cars there are parked on garage forecourts, and at ports? \u00a0Is your street\/High Street cluttered with cars? \u00a0Is your garden just a place to store your car? All these vehicles are not going anywhere. They’re just taking up space.\u00a0 <\/span>Cars spend most of their lives stationary, cluttering up our streets, our garage forecourts, our airports, our shopping centres, our docks.\u00a0 Vast areas of tarmac are used just for keeping these stationary vehicles; front gardens have been reduced to parking places in front of many houses; towns and cities house multi-storage car parks.\u00a0 \u00a0And they’re tying up capital, lots of it. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cars pollute our environment both with noise and with noxious gasses burning fossil fuels and outputting carbon dioxide.\u00a0 In fact transport is now the most polluting sector of the country accounting for 26% of the UK\u2019s greenhouse gas emissions.\u00a0 Because of these problems the government plans to phase out the production of diesel and petrol cars by 2040 although this date may well be brought down to 2035 and Labour is proposing a ban by 2030.<\/p>\n

Are electric cars the answer?\u00a0 The production of electric vehicles has risen dramatically.\u00a0 While only around 500 electric cars were registered per month during the first half of 2014, this rose to an average of 5,000 per month during 2018.\u00a0 However if all cars were electric the supply of electricity to charge them would mean a massive investment in electricity generation – renewable if we want to reach our targets. \u00a0 There are also concerns about the scarcity of the precious metals needed in the production of the huge numbers of extra batteries.\u00a0 All the other problems associated with private car ownership would still exist, roads would still be cluttered and so on.\u00a0 <\/span>A more workable solution would be to stop private ownership of cars entirely.\u00a0 Without privately owned cars we could reclaim our streets, car parks and gardens and instead walk, cycle, use public transport or taxis.<\/p>\n

The average cost of a car has been calculated to be almost \u00a3100 per week, including fuel, insurance, road tax and finance.\u00a0 The average use of a private car is just 9 hours\/week so each hour is costing over \u00a310. Brand new cars lose 60% of their value in the first three years.\u00a0 The cost of cars to the country is astronomical.\u00a0 Traffic jams alone are estimated to have cost \u00a38 billion pounds last year.\u00a0 The savings if they were banned could be used to provide decent public transport together with proper cycle tracks. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With our modern technology we can have an Uber or taxi waiting for us within minutes of registering a request – just as or more convenient than using our own cars.\u00a0 Imagine if private ownership of cars was banned and self-drive vehicle could be summoned to your front door from your mobile phone. \u00a0You would have all the advantages of owning a car and more. \u00a0If you had family staying or wanted to go somewhere with a group of friends you would book a larger vehicle. \u00a0You could be charged per distance transported for different size vehicles. If you chose to share, say for local journeys, your ‘bus’ would pick you up from your front door and drop you off at the supermarket, cinema or wherever your destination was.\u00a0 <\/span>If you were flying away your self-drive car would deposit you and your luggage at the drop off zone at the airport. No car park charges. \u00a0No worrying when you returned whether your car would start or whether the shuttle bus would keep you waiting.\u00a0 <\/span>Roads would become safer with all vehicles keeping to the speed limits and the correct distance from the vehicle in front. \u00a0Traffic would move faster because of this. \u00a0Journeys would be more pleasant as no-one would have to concentrate on driving. Because such vehicles would be in constant use many fewer would be required to do the same number of journeys.\u00a0 Technology could be developed to calculate either say the quickest or the cheapest way of getting from A to B depending on whether the passenger was prepared to share transport or not and whether they were transporting goods as well as themselves.\u00a0 Busses with their rigid routing and timetables could be replaced by vehicles requested on demand by persons making the same journey. Such measures would mean that far fewer vehicles will need to be made which would reduce the carbon footprint dramatically. \u00a0 When driverless vehicles become the norm, and they will in only a few years, journey costs will be considerably less than now because the driver\u2019s wages are currently a major proportion of the journey cost.<\/p>\n

There will be considerable resistance to ceasing private ownership as we love our cars and we\u2019re used to having one or more but this could be done without causing too much upheaval.\u00a0 Already in our big cities there are congestion charges and substantial parking charges for residents.\u00a0 These could be gradually increased making it uneconomic to own a car.\u00a0 Even now there is no need to own a car in places like London as the public transport is so good.\u00a0 Then private cars would be banned entirely from ever increasing areas of city centres.\u00a0 Smaller cities would then follow with the same policies and then towns would start charging more and more for residents parking and at the same time restrict private cars from more and more of the town and provide better and better public transport again making owning a car expensive and untenable.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt that our lives will have to change substantially over the next few years in order to reduce our carbon footprint and as transport is one of the main contributors to this we must consider ways of decreasing it urgently.\u00a0 Reducing and then eliminating private car ownership would be one of the most sensible ways of doing this as it solves so many other problems as well.\u00a0\u00a0The advent of self-drive cars and the demise of the privately owned vehicle can’t come soon enough. \u00a0It’s a no-brainer. \u00a0We’d have more convenience; it would be cheaper, we’d reclaim our gardens and streets; and it would be safer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cars dominate our world.\u00a0 We are addicted to them. They whizz us about, carry our goods and chattels and, for some of us, are our biggest status symbol.\u00a0 Driving can be enjoyable but is often very frustrating as we often … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3353"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3422,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3353\/revisions\/3422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/billandrews.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}