Published on 12, July, 2020
I think it's stupid that we have cars. They're a massive waste of money. They make public spaces less accessible. It's harder for children to play on the street or to walk where you want to go. They've led to high streets becoming more empty as cars go to large out-of-town supermarkets.
Sometimes people die in car crashes, needlessly, leaving families devestated.
People who can't drive are discriminated against. We have to rely on infrequent bus and rail services that are sometimes overpriced.
All the money spent on buying a car, the insurance, MOT, tax, maintenance and repairs, petrol, imagine what that money could do if those cars weren't there. It would give people money to spend on building better buildings, facilities, public transport, social services, healthcare, education.
Lets say hypotheticly you live in northerly subburbe of city A and want to go into northerly suburbe of a city B 10 miles east. By bus you get a bus south to city center A. Change to another bus east to city center B then change to another bus north to subburbe B. By car you just drive east. If we want to get bus journy times towards car times, the same order of magnatude, We need more routes between subburbes, we also need more frequent busses. But with all those extra busses on the road a lot of them will be mostly empty, with less than 10 pasengers even. We might as well make them smaller ... but wait we already have small busses for just a few pasengers ... they're called taxis. Only no one can aford them. Now if the goverment wanted to subserdise ride share taxis so they could compeat with bus prices I'd be all for it. But they won't because the cost in terms of subserdies would be astranomical.
I live in one suburb of Glasgow and my work location is on the other side of town.
To get there by public transport I’d have a 5 minute walk to the bus stop, waiting anything up to 20 minutes for a bus, then half an hour or so into the city centre, then walk to the train station, wait on a train, get the train to near my work then walk up to the office. That could take up to 1.5 hours.
Or I could drive door to door in around 20-25 minutes.