Beating our Saabs into Car-shares

Recently there has been a running report on BBC News about the possibility of road charging – taxing people on the amount of driving they do in response to increased road congestion and carbon emissions. The intention of road charging, of course, is to get people to leave their cars and take to public transport – a laudable objective indeed. Not unnaturally, the people they followed complained that they couldn’t possibly give up their cars and vans; whatever other people did, they would have to stick to their tin boxes.

My first reaction was, equally naturally, to think “They would say that, wouldn’t they.” Nobody wants to give up their cars and my feeling was that these people were really saying “I could give it up but I’m too damn lazy and selfish to do so.”

But a little thought (always worth considering) changed my view. These people really would find it difficult to switch from private transport to public. One was a rep who drove around all day, meeting clients. Unless he happened to live in somewhere like London with a good transport infrastructure, how would a rep get to people who live many miles apart, even assuming he doesn’t have to carry much more than a briefcase?

Of course, there are plenty of examples of selfish car use such as the school run when the children actually live just a bike ride or bus ride away. I am guilty of making my own share of journeys where I could use alternative transport. But there are many cases where the car is not only the easiest choice but often the only.

On the BBC a few weeks back, there was a series about an ordinary woman becoming Prime Minister – “The Amazing Mrs Pritchard”. Being an ‘ordinary woman’, she came up with some radical ideas, one of which was a “Green Wednesday” when nobody, with a few exceptions, would be allowed to use their cars. All must use public transport. Apart from the fact that this measure was instigated in a week, I began to wonder just how feasible it would be.

The fact is really that we haven’t just become selfish and lazy (although there is a certain amount of that) but that our lifestyles have evolved to the new freedom of travel. The rep as we now know him did not exist a hundred years ago – he simply couldn’t have done the job. We created fast personal transport and that created the rep’s profession; the rep didn’t simply change to using that fast personal transport. In the past, companies would have kept all their jobs local so that customers and businesses could easily visit each other by foot or horseback. Longer dealings would have been left for rare, major transactions. It is the same with commuters. People would not have lived fifty miles from their workplace and commuted everyday because it would have been simply impossible. If you needed to travel a long distance for a job, you would have stayed for a week or more within easy commuting distance.

So I can see a real problem with the green desire to get people out of their cars through taxes and increased public transport. We have to do more than that; we have to change our whole society. Reps would either have to stick to local customers or change to non-physical interactions such as the Internet. Commuters would have to move closer to work or take out temporary lodgings nearby during the week. Apart from the cost of such actions, I suspect it will be very difficult to make such transformations in the short time left before peak oil hits.