Millions of Britons are trapped in transport poverty owing to a lack of alternatives to car ownership, with some spending nearly a fifth of their pre-tax income keeping a car on the road, a study has found.
Those who own a car spend on average 13% of their gross income on it, above the 10% generally seen as the indicator of transport poverty. For those paying for their car with a finance or loan deal this proportion rises to 19%.
So, lower the tax on petrol and thereby alleviate transport poverty.
….cycle industry campaign group Bike Is Best
Amazingly, that’s not the solution they come up with.
What about the tens of millions of Britons trapped in foie gras poverty?
And of course, Sadiq Khan is planning to inflict ULEZ on them too inside the entire M25. That’ll help.
Sadiq’s ULEZ is just a grift. My car like lots of others won’t pass his rules. If the M25 is impassable, which seems to happen every other day, most of the routes to bypass that are inside the M25. Cue lots of charges, and fines as many drivers won’t realise.
I cycle and drive one of the biggest things stop me from cycling more is fear of cycle theft.
Save the planet – shoot bike thieves and see less pollution
The state steals more than 10% of my income and tries to justify the theft by calling it “tax”.
Ending the scourge of tax poverty is yet another campaign we won’t be seeing in the grauniad.
Oh yes, great, I’ll cycle to work 55 miles away. Yay!
Cycling to work would be a piece of cake for me. Downhill all the way! Weeeee!
Cycling back, on the other hand, almost entirely uphill after a 12 hr shift, in the cold, rainy, dark British weather is a sure fire way to end up having a bloody heart attack. Or getting squished. And I don’t particularly think an hour long cycle (average) at each end of the day is going to be fun. Effective 14hr shift? No thanks.
One day, maybe, the politicos will realise that we don’t all live in nice, flat London where there are good public transports round the clock.
I live in
hopevain longing.Ironically, if you take the actual costs of bus or train services, they’re more expensive than owning a car.
Most people spend ridiculous amounts on car ownership because they bought new with no down payment.
Otherwise it’s insurance, tax, and gas – which isn’t going to come out to 20 percent of your gross unless you’re driving for the hell of it a lot.
I drive a massive truck with a low paying job and I don’t even hit 20 percent.
“owing to a lack of alternatives to car ownership”
Yes, exactly. There aren’t any. A bicycle is not a viable alternative to a seven-seat MPV, and there is no way to make it so.
I’ve been saying this for years: for decades now they’ve been trying to discourage people from using cars, whether it be with taxation, “traffic calming”, road closures, parking restrictions, “low emissions“ zones, or whatever, and the entire excercise has been an abject failure. More people are buying cars than ever. They’re rolling with all these punches and sticking with their cars despite everything. And what’s the lesson the smartarse class takes away from this? Continue with the failed policies, only harder.
It’s not working. It’s not going to work. It’s never going to work. If it ever did, it would destroy the economy. Britain’s city centres are already turning into ghost towns. (Which seems to mystify the smartarses. Blame the internet.) A modern society requires motorised personal transport to function. Deal with it, and stop trying to strangle the country to death.
The Times carries the answer: an electric car.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-ive-pulled-the-plug-on-my-electric-car-dwgs9l9hl
Anyone have a copy of that times article?
Or a way past the paywall?
Agammamon,
“Ironically, if you take the actual costs of bus or train services, they’re more expensive than owning a car.”
It depends how often you use it. I got my driving down to almost nothing with remote work. Amazon/Wine Society/Paxton and Whitfield deliver a lot of stuff I need. I can walk to a co-op and cafes. I replaced a second car with 2-3 bus journeys per week and the odd train or coach journey. And the main two places I go by train (Bath and London) are easier or cheaper anyway than driving. Bus works out about £50/month. I’m pretty sure that’s cheaper than even running my old Renault.
If I really need a car for a day, I’ll hire one.
Have you checked out the price of bicycles lately?
BonM4, Klaus would be proud “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.
Ironically, if you take the actual costs of bus or train services, they’re more expensive than owning a car.
More expensive and less convenient?
Wow! Where do I sign? /Sarc
If I want to use public transport and get to my shift start on time in the morning, I actually have to leave the night before and sleep at the bus station…
Solid pass, thanks.
Just another reason why people drive.
Bloody politicos thinking everyone works office hours like them…
As I watch my family strike out on foot across the fields into driving rain and gathering darkness, my wife holding each child’s hand, our new year plans in ruins, while I do what I can to make our dead car safe before abandoning it a mile short of home, full of luggage on a country lane, it occurs to me not for the first time that if we are going to save the planet we will have to find another way. Because electric cars are not the answer.
Yes, it’s the Jaguar again. My doomed bloody £65,000 iPace that has done nothing but fail at everything it was supposed to do for more than two years now, completely dead this time, its lifeless corpse blocking the single-track road.
I can’t even roll it to a safer spot because it can’t be put in neutral. For when an electric car dies, it dies hard. And then lies there as big and grey and not-going-anywhere as the poacher-slain bull elephant I once saw rotting by a roadside in northern Kenya. Just a bit less smelly.
Two out of three roadside chargers are broken or busy at any one time
Two out of three roadside chargers are broken or busy at any one time
ALAMY
Not that this is unusual. Since I bought my eco dream car in late 2020, in a deluded Thunbergian frenzy, it has spent more time off the road than on it, beached at the dealership for months at a time on account of innumerable electrical calamities, while I galumph around in the big diesel “courtesy cars” they send me under the terms of the warranty.
But this time I don’t want one. And I don’t want my own car back either. I have asked the guys who sold it to me to sell it again, as soon as it is fixed, to the first mug who walks into the shop. Because I am going back to petrol while there is still time.
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And if the government really does ban new wet fuel cars after 2030, then we will eventually have to go back to horses. Because the electric vehicle industry is no readier to get a family home from Cornwall at Christmas time (as I was trying to do) than it is to fly us all to Jupiter. The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking. Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage. It’s no wonder Tesla shares are down 71 per cent. It’s all a huge fraud. And, for me, it’s over.
Yet the new owner of my “preloved” premium electric vehicle, fired with a messianic desire to make a better world for his children, will not know this. He will be delighted with his purchase and overjoyed to find there are still six months of warranty left, little suspecting that once that has expired — and with it the free repairs and replacement cars for those long spells off road — he will be functionally carless.
He will be over the moon to learn that it has “a range of up to 292 miles”. No need to tell him what that really means is “220 miles”. Why electric carmakers are allowed to tell these lies is a mystery to me. As it soon will be to him.
Although for the first few days he won’t worry especially. He’ll think he can just nip into a fuel station and charge it up again. Ho ho ho. No need to tell him that two out of three roadside chargers in this country are broken or busy at any one time. Or that the built-in “find my nearest charge point” function doesn’t work, has never worked, and isn’t meant to work.
Or that apps like Zap-Map don’t work either because the chargers they send you to are always either busy or broken or require a membership card you don’t have or an app you can’t download because there’s no 5G here, in the middle of nowhere, where you will now probably die.
Or that the Society of Motor Manufacturers said this week that only 23 new chargers are being installed nationwide each day, of the 100 per day that were promised (as a proud early adopter, I told myself that charging would become easier as the network grew, but it hasn’t grown, while the number of e-drivers has tripled, so it’s actually harder now than it was two years ago).
There are, of course, plus sides to electric ownership. Such as the camaraderie when we encounter each other, tired and weeping at yet another service station with only two chargers, one of which still has the “this fault has been reported” sign on it from when you were here last August, and the other is of the measly 3kWh variety, which means you will have to spend the night in a Travelodge while your stupid drum lazily inhales enough juice to get home.
Together, in the benighted charging zone, we leccy drivers laugh about what fools we are and drool over the diesel hatchbacks nonchalantly filling up across the way (“imagine getting to a fuel station and knowing for sure you will be able to refuel!”) and talk in the hour-long queue at Exeter services about the petrol car we will buy as soon as we get home.
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We filled up there last week on the way back from Cornwall, adding two hours to our four-hour journey, by which time Esther wasn’t speaking to me. She’s been telling me to get rid of the iPace since it ruined last summer’s holidays in both Wales and Devon (“If you won’t let us fly any more, at least buy a car that can get us to the places we’re still allowed to go!”).
But I kept begging her to give me one last chance, as if I’d refused to give up a mistress, rather than a dull family car. Until this time, a couple of miles from home, when a message flashed up on the dash: “Assisted braking not available — proceed with caution.” Then: “Steering control unavailable.”
And then, as I inched off the dual carriageway at our turnoff, begging it to make the last mile, children weeping at the scary noises coming from both car and father: “Gearbox fault detected.” CLUNK. WHIRRR. CRACK.
And dead. Nothing. Poached elephant. I called Jaguar Assist (there is a button in the roof that does it directly — most useful feature on the car) who told me they could have a mechanic there in four hours (who would laugh and say, “Can’t help you, pal. You’ve got a software issue there. I’m just a car mechanic. And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.”)
So Esther and the kids headed for home across the sleety wastes, a vision of post-apocalyptic misery like something out of Cormac McCarthy, while I saw out 2022 waiting for a tow-truck. Again.
But don’t let that put you off. I see in the paper that electric car sales are at record levels and production is struggling to keep up with demand. So why not buy mine? It’s clean as a whistle and boasts super-low mileage. After all, it’s hardly been driven . . .
Excellent article. And in the Times as well – I can’t help thinking that this feels like a turning point. Because it’s not about the direct running cost (topical in the current environment), it casts increasing doubt on the rest of it too – reliability, infrastructure (declining relatively, rather than improving), etc.
Cheers, Tim
Think I’ll be sticking with my dinosaur juice run vehicles for a while.
One solution would be to cut the overstaffing and overpayment (particularly of drivers) in the transport sectors and then reduce fares …
There is a Laffer curve for bus fares but it is heavily distorted by the OAP bus pass – I have travelled on buses with no fare-paying passengers
I’m not sure the buses round here *ever* have fare-paying passengers. They’re either OAPs or students.