Current Affairs

We have gone far beyond a love affair with the car, the motor car, the automobile, we are beyond the comfortable love of wedded bliss and we have reached the time when divorce must be considered, with all the compromises and new freedoms that implies…

The Love Affair

And it was a Love affair to begin with! Admittedly, one that could only be pursued by the rich – the freedom given to those Edwardian pioneers, to go further than on horseback, to travel in a group, and oh! the speed – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows – “Poop, poop!”! Then came The First World War with lorries and ambulances. The interwar years when cars spread to the middle classes and finally, after The Second World War, we were truly wedded to the car, cars for all but the poorest and our world and lives changing beyond recognition.

Urban Sprawl and the Escape to the Country…

How were we seduced into these changes and what form did they take? It’s a tale of city and countryside, of congestion and the freedom of “the open road”. We live, mostly, in cities and towns but we dream, most of us, of living in the country. How many people drive 4-wheel drive monsters that were originally designed for country-dwelling landowners but became must-have status symbols of the urban elite – Chelsea Tractors as they are known – how many of those owners ever go off-road or ever use their 4-wheel drive? Incidentally, these huge cars, often justified as being safer for your family (if you can afford them)- take an unjustified amount of both materials and energy to construct, so that’s a very un-Green and inequitable contribution to Climate Change right there!

Levelling Up

Recent changes in internet technology and in working practices stimulated by the Covid lockdown, mean that we can work wherever we want to – from home or at the office, the office usually being in the city and the home wherever we choose or can afford. But in this respect, those who live in the country, are still disadvantaged since the high-speed optical transmission available in cities, has not always yet reached the countryside. There is a clamour from rural populations for a levelling up so that the commuters, enabled post-war, by the motor car to live outside the cities, and commute in to work, may not be disadvantaged by slower broadband, that they may take full advantage of living in the country.

There are other things not available in the rural areas, such as supermarkets – another phenomenon that grew with the car, because even if you live in the city, the supermarket, unlike the corner shop, is likely to be some distance away from home and how else are you to manage to get a weekly shop home without a car? Food, DIY, furnishings, and any kind of specialist shops are in the urban environment and unavailable out in the country – at least if you want to touch and feel goods – because we now have online shopping. Assuming your broadband is fast enough for shopping online, you can order things online, have them delivered (by motor vehicle – anything from a lorry to a private car) and if it does not match the expectation (that touch and feel would have obviated) you can send it back, by vehicle again – still it’s better to have one vehicle doing a round of rural locations than dozens of rural dwellers motoring into town and back… This leads to other, less obvious environmental impacts – clothing retailers are very poor at standardising garment sizes so consumers may order a minimum of three items to bracket their size and having tried them on, return two of them, which the retailer cannot be bothered to repack and resell – best case they go to a third-party retailer like TK Maxx – worst case, they go to landfill, still in their torn-open plastic bags. 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.

The Suburban Deserts…

It is not just country- dwellers who are dependent on cars – as the car became more widely owned between the war – ribbon development spread out along the arterial roads stretching out from the cities towards those aspirational countryside locations and post-Second World War, the spaces between those roads were infilled with suburban housing estates. These estates were not provided with shops or pubs and buses –  buses still modelled on earlier urban trams, did not, on the whole, extend their routes into these estates (as they do now, using smaller buses) – so another “driver” towards mass ownership of the car. There is now guidance on how to design housing estates in order to be bus-friendly but it depends on local authorities being prepared to press this home.

-and “Liberation”

Once you had a car, many other uses for it became apparent and were catered to, holidays at the coast demanded an ever-improving road network and the upgrading of A-roads to motorways and with car ferries and later, the Euro-Tunnel, motorists could even take their cars abroad if only to stock up with beer and fags on a day trip to France. How much was saved when the petrol was factored in, I wonder? Trips to the dump, car-boot sales, lazy trips to the corner shop, driving the kids to school, sometimes even when the distance is walkable and the exercise would do both kids and parents good, Z-cars (car crime demands police cars), driving to watch motor racing, banger racing, picnics in the rain, dogging, actually making babies, babies being born and too many people dying in cars– and so it goes on – the love affair was over and we became truly wedded to our cars.

Divorce

Divorce is going to be painful and it is going to have to happen, because there can no longer be any doubt that climate change is happening and happening faster and more damagingly than we imagined possible. The time for tinkering about with lightbulb replacement is past, we must all take more serious steps towards doing our bit to arrest the worsening problems affecting rich and poor countries alike, though the effect on poor countries is worse and the contributory factors of any kind of mitigation lie with the rich ones. Changing lightbulbs was, initially, a costly outlay because the energy-efficient bulbs were not cheap, but then came LED and suddenly lighting fixtures themselves changed and every public building must change colour constantly at night. However, even changing lightbulbs was a struggle to sell to people initially – because of the cost – even if the long-term effect was a saving – it was cash upfront and savings later and we humans are not good at deferred gratification. If lightbulbs were hard, how much harder will it be to make serious changes in our car usage? No wedded person wants to get divorced, not least because of the massive cost both financial and emotional and this divorce is no different – when you blow up a life together, it’s hard to believe there might even be any upside, or be able to see beyond the chaos to a new and settled life…

Like a divorce, changing our relationship with the car is not going to be a single, simple matter, no more than you can change housing, separate finances, account for custody of children, divvy up the record collection, who gets the dog, who keeps the friends, let alone the emotional toll, good breakups, the bad breakups, the goodbye sex, the loss of support and confidant –  divorce is messy and the solutions are multi-faceted and often unique to each couple and it will be no different with the car. Going electric is only a part of the story and presently, a dubious part at that – so let’s examine some of the many parts that might contribute to the solution.

Social Changes

There are two avenues to be considered – the technological and the behavioural and neither is easy or straightforward. Taking the social first, there have been studies showing that already, some people would save money by ditching their own cars and simply hiring a car for those occasions that they need them – holidays, weddings, big shopping trips but many would question the use of the word “simply” because nothing is without any cost – yes you would need to plan ahead and make a booking but is that really so onerous? Yes – you would no longer have a status symbol that you feel reflects something about you sitting on your drive and some people might think you “gone down in the world” for leaving the ranks of the car owners – but then again, many would applaud you…

Good Government – Hands On or Hands Off?

Another example of the need for social attitude change is the term “Public Transport” which now carries a whiff of class distinction – let us rechristen it as Green Transport or Make a Friend Transport – for in the words of a British railway advert – “Let the Train Take the Strain!” – I can vouch for this as after breaking hip in a car crash, I was unable to drive for at least a year and enjoyed travelling by bus to my nearest city, some 35 miles away so much, that I didn’t return to driving a car for five years. Not only was I able to more fully enjoy the beautiful scenery where I lived back then, but the bus afforded me the opportunity to meet people I would otherwise not chanced to talk to… By contrast, the Conservative party here in the UK, took great pride in announcing via posters at railway stations, how the UK had the lowest subsidy for railways of any country, however the list that the poster detailed, might have been the list of railway operators from best to worst, with the UK at the bottom. The Conservatives are the party of the car and they also adopted, as part of Neoliberalism, the idea that for governments to govern – to make considered decisions about what works best for the country and nudge or even legislate for it – is a bad thing and that market forces (read unabashed greed and profiteering) should determine the course of things. They sold off (euphemism – De-nationalised) British Rail, breaking it up into a series of franchises operated by the highest bidder and disastrously, made the rails themselves, the purview of another company. Operating for profit almost always means cutting corners and this, plus the disjuncture between infrastructure and operators, contributed, in large part to many incidents, the worst of which was the Reading Station crash in which six people died and sixty-one were injured.  Major rail crashes also occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Stonehaven.

There are already schemes bringing commuters together such as Car Pooling where people who work together, or in nearby home/job locations, share car and/or petrol expenses – what if we took this idea further wherein people within a given neighbourhood would belong to a co-owned carpool and could book a car suitable for “the day that’s in it “– a small runaround for taking and collecting the kids from school or doing the weekly shop and an estate car for that annual holiday – perhaps even a sports car to impress on that first date… There might need to be changes to insurance rules to facilitate such schemes but it’s not insuperable. In Canada, the distances to be travelled are vast and although it is illegal to hitchhike anywhere except at a petrol station, it is common to accept passengers who pay their share of the petrol. All these ideas are facilitated by online connections – either informal or actual websites, and this demonstrates both that people are willing to co-operate for a change benefitting the environment, even if there are some small inconveniences in co-ordinating themselves and secondly that these things, once mooted, can be organised from the grassroots up – with a minimum of governmental interference but perhaps the odd facilitation.

The Lessons of Oxford

I grew up in Oxford and would naturally have ridden a bicycle as soon as I was old enough even if I hadn’t had a father who became a crusader for “Intermediate Technology” (simple rather than high-tech solutions). I never learned to drive until I was 35 and had stopped living in London where I continued to ride a bicycle when possible or took public transport – busses or trains if the weather was inclement. If more people took to bikes and public transport, there would be fewer cars on the road and the benefits would be safer cycling, healthier bodies as well as the immediate environmental benefits – think Amsterdam or Oxford. Oxford has embraced and been the testbed for every measure to try and reign in the motor car. First it built a Ring Road or Bypass coupled with creating one-way streets that made it less attractive to go through the centre. Far from killing commerce in towns, many places have discovered that a more car-free city centre is such a boon that it promotes shopping, eating and sightseeing! Next, Oxford introduced bus lanes (which also facilitate bicycles and taxis) and shortly after, Park-and-Ride schemes. The latest scheme in Oxford has however, brought a backlash, not exclusively from those immediately affected (or benefitted, depending on your point of view) but as a rallying point for car defenders from far and wide who see Oxford’s latest experiment as the thin edge of the wedge – the enforcing of automotive divorce. What is this dastardly attack on the institution of marriage to the car? It stems from the idea of the “Fifteen Minute City” That every city be divided into neighbourhoods within which all the essential needs for living – shops, pubs, meeting places, bus routes out – should all be found within a fifteen-minute walking distance – innocuous you might think, but Oxford’s implementation – a retrospective planning measure, is to ring-fence such neighbourhoods with car-barriers to limit ingress and egress for cars – and this has been seen by some as a totally unwarranted attack, not just on car owners, but on their very human rights! Protesters were not merely local residents but car supporters from far and wide who flocked to oppose the dastardly council who dared to challenge the rights of the motorist! In our necessary divorce from the motor car – a front line has been drawn… True, such cellular enclaves have been devised before by town planners – anyone who has visited a friend in the suburbs of that planned city, Milton Keynes, will know the nightmare of entering such a cell and then not being able to find the way out. Not least, this is because the suburban cells of Milton Keynes were designed without the shops and facilities that would have made them into 15-minute solutions but would also have provided landmarks for navigation in a sea of identical housing. Planning for the future means making sure that housing estates are more than just housing, that the cars are parked or garaged around the outside of neighbourhoods, or at least, like the mews coach-houses of old – at the back of the houses with pedestrian thoroughfares leading to shops et al, at the front. Private developers are particularly notorious for neglecting to build any community facilities and merely cramming as many houses with concomitant roads, drives and garages as it takes to carry the occupants out of their housing only ghetto. Reto-fitting is, as Oxford has discovered, more challenging still…

Technological Options

Turning to the technological options for environmental solutions to divorce us from the CO2 emitting motor cars, vans and lorries – “What of the electric vehicle?” I hear you say. Setting aside the fact that you still have to generate the electricity to power electric vehicles and all the difficulties in weaning power generation off fossil fuels, there are major flaws in the current approach to electric cars.

The current generation of electric cars is predicated on the idea that people want a car that does exactly the same things as the cars they will be giving up – carry five people, travel at 70 miles per hour or more, have a capacious boot, carry forward all the crumple zone technology which keeps us safe, up to a point, in the event of a crash – and it is worth remembering that it has been determined that once over 30 m.p.h. – there is very little that a driver can do to influence the outcome of a crash and also, that the speed of impact in a collision between two cars is the sum of their two speeds so two cars travelling at 30 m.p.h. smash together at 60 m.p.h. Of course, if we travelled much slower, then such high-speed collisions and the ingenious and weighty crumple zones which have been designed to protect us in such events, would be less necessary.

What has disappointed me about these new electric cars is that they look exactly as before, take the same massive amount of energy and share of Earth’s resources to construct, worse if you think of the issues around Lithium for the batteries and they are, at this stage affordable only by the relatively rich. I had imagined a wholly new style of lightweight runarounds – cars perhaps a little like the Smart cars – economical two-seaters, but if you want to achieve all the old requirements of a car listed above, then you have to go big – as big as existing cars, because you cannot fit a big enough battery to supply the range or speed to carry the weigh of all that crumple zone protective steel in a small car. It just can’t be done, and in any case, the first adopters of electric cars are the better off and it has been much easier to sell them the idea of going green by simply changing to a “greener” propulsion of an equally capable large car rather than that of a small one which they are not in the market for anyway.

Small is Beautifull…¹

If we accept the reality that people who live and mostly drive only in cities, neither need a high-performance large car nor can utilise the capacities of such cars due to congestion slowing things down, then would it not be better, for when you need to use a car, to have a small electric vehicle! There is a class of cars termed Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (how friendly does that sound!)  which are small, light weight, much less greedy in manufacturing and material costs, and travel at the modest speeds actually suitable for driving in urban environs. That they have not gained greater popularity is in part due to the hazard of driving such lightweight cars in a mix with larger, faster, heavier beasts and partly due to the failure to grasp the necessity of switching to such vehicles.

Electric cars are not a new idea, in fact, they were quite common until petrol engines gained ascendancy, what about the electric milk-float – operating with heavy lead-acid batteries rather than the current lighter-weight Lithium ones, these workhorses carried a good load, travelled at moderate speeds and had enough range to get the job done – proof that a realistic spec. for an urban vehicle is eminently possible!

How Do We Get There From Here?

What if, instead of trying to change habits by applying punitive Low Emission and Congestion Charges to big cities (which become rallying points for the motoring rights lobby) we take joined-up government decisions to promote cities being small electric vehicle zones? What does joined up mean in this context? It means first promoting the manufacture of such vehicles up to and past the point of mass adoption, facilitating charging points by legislation where necessary (ie. all new homes to include them), and only then enforcing the adoption of the small vehicles in cities. Those who want to retain their old-style monsters might be forced to leave them in outskirt car parks and continue their journeys inward with a small vehicle or a bus. To get there from here is never going to be a single simple solution but always many parts that will eventually be greater than the sum of those parts.

My vision of the future is that there will be a two-tier division between town and country and it will probably reflect the difference in wealth that already exists between many (but not all) rural dwellers and those who live in towns and cities. Having said that, there will be a levelling up in many ways –  more bus routes in town and out; smaller electric busses, electric vehicles in town and even in the country, they could be used to get to the station or connect with a bus route; status will not be judged by the car you own, in fact, ownership might not be the prime model.

New Ways of Doing Things

In Liverpool they have a company operating a fleet of electric scooters that registered users can pick up and use wherever they find them and are charged by distance travelled. All GPS locatable, the company goes round at night and collects the scooters to take back to base for recharging. Imagine how this might work for Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles. For sure you couldn’t go around with a car transporter picking them up at night – but wait! There are other clever technological solutions available! Firstly, if you operate a reasonably expensive drone, the last thing you want is for it to run out of power and crash miles away from you – so they have a sensor such that when they only have just enough power to get back to you – that’s exactly what they do – turn tail and use GPS to automatically get themselves back to you. Combine that with driverless cars – and a company could automatically retrieve vehicles back to base and deliver them to customers’ doorsteps for whenever they have been ordered. One of the issues around driverless technology is that it is aiming to be used in current type motor cars up to and including a mix of lorries and cars on motorways – imagine how much safer it would be if the technology were used to control new, slower, lighter vehicles around town.

There are so many aspects of our necessary divorce from the motorcar as we now use it and just as the effects of the growth of the car brought incremental consequences, so the solution to how to adopt a new relationship must also be incremental and multi-faceted.
Let me leave you with one last anecdote that shows the interconnected nature of things. There are fleets of electric buses already operating and some of them are contributing to solving one of the problems of the regulation of power supply – especially renewable power supply which can be occasionally irregular. When the busses return to their depots after taking commuters home, they arrive back at the very peak time when those same commuters are cooking their suppers. So the buses can return whatever charge is left in their batteries to the grid and then later in the night, when the TV goes off, the buses recharge their batteries ready for the morning. Building storage batteries to smooth out the supply and demand for energy from renewable sources is one of the major drawbacks and costs to switching to those power sources but in this case, we can see how buses, and perhaps even private electrical vehicles could become part of the battery solution – food for thought…

What can you do?

The most useful thing that an individual can do at this moment is to examine the situation both personally and in terms of the wider picture – take an inventory of your own circumstances and figure out whether you could change things in your own relationship with the car as things stand now. If not – then what would need to change to make it possible for you – petition for more bus routes; wait for electric vehicles to get smaller and more affordable; buy a bike and start to use it for more than just leisure or exercise; discover car-sharers in your area or advertise if you can’t find any. So much depends on attitudinal change that you might start discussions with other people to explore the problems and solutions – knowledge and insight are vital to change.

And please, if you have responses, questions or opinions on what I have said – post a comment and start the discussion…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

1. – “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered” is the title of a book by  E F Schumacher.