{"id":2266,"date":"2015-08-28T08:12:02","date_gmt":"2015-08-28T07:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbeylandsresidents.org.uk\/?p=2266"},"modified":"2017-11-24T13:31:46","modified_gmt":"2017-11-24T13:31:46","slug":"the-hegemony-of-the-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourlocality.org\/abbeylands\/the-hegemony-of-the-car\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hegemony of the Car"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"… may be over, but you’d be forgiven for thinking, like me, that there’s little evidence of that around here, as\u00a0the average size of car seems to be increasing, proportionally to the increase in body mass and average speeds too.<\/p>\n

Cars and related infrastructure don’t just dominate \u00a0landscapes, but have a stranglehold on the\u00a0household economy in a surprisingly large way. So after\u00a0rent and mortgage payments, transport costs are the single biggest expenditure, and you’ve probably guessed for most of us it the\u00a0car that eats up most of that expenditure. \u00a0Buy why? It can’t be\u00a0all about status and sex? Surely\u00a0the implicit sexuality of car ownership has been\u00a0displaced by the other things? Apart from anything else cars no longer look sexy like they did until the 50s. [1. The\u00a0late 40s dream\u00a0to\u00a0own an apartment, a car, and plenty of women as encapsulated in \u201cDeath of a Salesman” Arthur Miller (1949) (Happy’s Dream) ]<\/p>\n

\"\"
Thanks to the Economist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Cars, and we hardly need the the Economist to remind us, are integral to modern life. They account for 70% of all journeys not made on foot in the OECD.\u00a0There’s a billion of them\u00a0worldwide and the Economist gloomily reports\u00a0there’ll be 2 billion by 2020.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, as\u00a0most places in the developed world have reached capacity, and policies shift to support other modes, in cities at least, so presumably all the growth will be in the developing world. And in Dunbar. For way too long politicians and local authorities have\u00a0prioritised car travel over other more sustainable travel options, as if there were no tomorrow. The rare exceptions and token gestures hardly amount to a trend.<\/p>\n

But should we blame the transport department and politicians or finger\u00a0strategic\u00a0planners? Or is the planning system just\u00a0broke? For most of the last\u00a0half the last century, planning policy has focused around cars, and despite changes in policy, it still does by encouraging a style of surburban development that is wholly and hopelessly reliant upon it. The phenomenon isn’t just a problem of\u00a0traditional suburbia with almost\u00a0every community in the UK affected, sometimes doubling and trebling the size of towns and villages, everywhere within an hour or so of commute and also beyond. Until now\u00a0the\u00a0population of the centre of bigger cities has shrunk to make way for more lucrative development or High Street desolation. Only now has the\u00a0depopulation of city centres reached a turning point, with new\u00a0growth in city living, again, perhaps as the ennui of suburban living begins to weigh heavy.<\/p>\n

So, for\u00a0every suburban home you build you are probably creating 2, perhaps more commuters. The thinking here is that\u00a0future residential developments should have sufficient parking provision to match the car ownership of residents, subject to road capacity considerations (200 homes might be the threshold for a transport assessment, so don’t get you knickers in a twist over 20 or even 50.) Parking standards for community facilities, however should be\u00a0limited to operational requirements. The expectation is that users of community facilities will generally be expected to use public transport and car parks, or so conventional theory would suggest. But\u00a0predict and provide theories of planning are not just unfashionable, they are\u00a0hopelessly flawed. Building more roads generates more traffic. Who knows what the investment in public transport would generate economically, if politicians acted a bit more rationally, as they do in most metropolitan areas, where public transport is used as an economic development lever.<\/p>\n

Just because round here only the old, the poor and the dispossessed use the bus isn’t reason not to re-imagine public transport. Even remote rural areas can have a vibrant service, so long as the model doesn’t ape the urban one, or masquerades as a rural service.\u00a0If you create a service with labyrinthine routing and Byzantine timetabling- designed around administrative convenience and to pick up easy city fares at the other end, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that the service is more about keeping competition at bay. In the UK\u00a0it feels like buses are part of a Government program to get people to learn to drive, so they can get back to work and off benefits (it is a day trip to sign on). It may not be sexy driving that car any more, but it sure ain’t sexy getting the bus [1. Someone, better informed than me, tried to disabuse me of that and claimed that public transport is great for forming relationships, and definitely\u00a0better than most dating agencies for it\u00a0costs a lot less.]<\/p>\n

So, the\u00a0occasional initiative to promote Community Transport, and most recently East Lothian on the Move, ostensibly to develop a Local Transport Strategy is of course welcome, but the reality is that the more that is\u00a0invested in options for the private car, the less goes into\u00a0public transport. For now the car is so hard wired into decision making that we’re unlikely to get weaned off it any time soon.<\/p>\n

To my mind a\u00a0transport policy should probably do a number of things<\/p>\n