And expensive. Even with the fuel prices it's cheaper, comfortable and more reliable for me to drive and park in town than it is to get the bus. My local operator is beyond useless at the moment
Often only if you have to have a car anyway and are buying tickets day by day. Often an annual season ticket for a town is sub £1,000, few can own a car for less than £1,500 per year (and those who do are likely doing fairly low milage) as the average is over £3,000 per year (remembering that's for all costs including purchase, maintenance, insurance, parking, etc.)
Of course the number of people driving, and therefore creating congestion, is making it worse as the bus companies need more buses and more staff to run the same frequency of service.
That's not too say that they shouldn't be better, but we are too easily convinced to drive when that shouldn't be our default mode of travel. With very high fuel prices and a cost of living crisis (in addition to a shortage of cars pushing their prices every higher) yet we continue on with using cars for trips which would be better undertaken by walking and cycling.
Yesterday there was a need for me to drive to work rather than walk. The school run took longer and we probably walked almost as far (visiting 3 different settings, but driving between the three would have been slower still) as if we walked. Whilst I'm not keen to repeat that process far too many people are.
Unfortunately I doubt that's likely to change any time during 2022, or 2023 or even before 2030.
Of course if we did use or cars a little less across the whole of the EU then there's a good chance that imports of fuel from Russia could have been part of the sanctions. We've had since the war in Chechnya in 2000 or even 8 years later the invasion of Georgia in 2008 to reduce our car use. We even were sent a reminder in 2014 with Crimea (6 years after that). 8 years on there's the invasion of Ukraine. If we (as the West) are still fairly reliant on Russian fuel in 2026 (which is 4 years away) then don't be surprised if we find ourselves with another Russian lead war within a few years (yes electric cars will help a little, however we need to do more than just that).
Of course little will change as life is easy and we've all brought into the lie that cars being us unlimited benefits (they do bring us benefits but only to a point; and I'm saying that as someone who designs roads and the industry knows that trying to design for almost unrestricted car use will never be possible) and we can't see how our over reliance is harming is. Congestion which stops ambulances getting to people to save their lives (before you even consider the time we waste say in congestion), the amount of money government and business spend on roads, cars which cause about 5 deaths a day through collisions, pollution which is harming individuals as well as contributing to causing climate change* which is warming there planet rapidly and that's before you consider the harm being done to us all due to the lack of exercise.
*It is likely that man-made emissions are, at the very least, meaning that the level of carbon in the atmosphere is higher than the planet could deal with and therefore changing climate faster than ecosystems can adjust to, even if natural emissions are higher.
For instance of man-made emissions account for 20 and natural emissions are 85, yet the planet can only deal with 100 then whilst the natural emissions are the biggest contributor that still doesn't excuse us from producing more when we could produce less.
Even if we produced 18 rather than 20 then it would likely slow down any impacts that we would be having. The problem is that even if that was the situation in (say) 2010 we've been increasing our emissions globally (even though nationally there's been some good progress in some areas, although not transport where it's worse; even though cars are more efficient then ever), which means that we are accelerating the impact.
As such we're now needing to reduce from (say) 25 which means that we've got to do more and go faster than if we took this more seriously even 5 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. The changes 30 years ago would have likely have been fairly limited compared to what we are likely to do in the next few years anyway (likely significant wind farm development and much more solar generation).
There's even an argument that the impact of the cost of living crisis would have been dulled. As whilst Covid would have still impacted on oil and gas production the world would have been less reliant on it and therefore there wouldn't have been the level of increased demand for it (which has pushed up process) as the economy recovered after Covid. However even if those prices had increased we'd have been insulated from much of the increase due to it being used less.
For example if 15p or of every pound we spend is related to energy, if of that we spend 3p on Hydrocarbons and the price doubles that's a smaller impact than if we're spending 7p on Hydrocarbons and the price increases by 50%.
Likewise if the amount spent on energy reduces (due to having more efficient houses and vehicles) then that also insulates is from energy cost increases.
www.gov.uk
