Cars - a liberty issue

‘Who’ll Kill King Car?’ read the graffito on the wall of Balliol College when I first came to Oxford in 1971. Now it is Green and therefore Right (aka Left) to persecute the private motorist.

Yet freedom of movement is a key part of our modern liberties. The loss of the automobile will have a big impact on how we live.

And we are indeed gradually going to lose the car. In Neil Oliver’s latest video he talks about a trip with his son through the wilds of Scotland. It is one that would not easily be repeated using an electric car with its more limited range and lack of re-charging stations - and a nationwide power grid on that scale isn’t going to happen.

Once we’ve changed over, rural areas are going to become isolated. Holiday destinations too - think of all the coast and country areas we visit today, and how they will be affected. (How will the US cope, built as it is around happy motoring?)

Electric cars are a fantasy about ‘Livin’ la vida eco.’ Do you remember that UK car ad showing one driving through Monument Valley (I think) that magically becomes flooded with clean water and leaping dolphins?

They are hellish expensive, in two ways. The first is in terms of money (another fantasy): maybe £50,000 to buy, plus costing more to insure and soon subject to road tax like ordinary vehicles.

Money isn’t real and distorts our perception, so let’s turn to the physical world. If I ‘go green’ I’ll have to scrap and recycle my existing diesel car and then there will be the need for extra energy and materials to make and deliver the EV. Besides, some of the elements are mined in parts of the world with dubious employment practices.

No, we’re looking at a more restricted life, one I remember from childhood. In the UK until some time in the 1960s, most homes did not have a car.

The simple-minded solution, if you are government, is to punish the driver. How dare you, an ordinary person, assume the freedom to roam the streets in a horseless carriage? Get back in your boring box, peasant!

The alternative requires intelligent planning. It can be done, but do we have rulers with the brains and heart to do it?

I refer, of course, to public transport. The Conservative Minister for Transport Ernest Marples oversaw a heavy pruning of railway routes in the 1960s, while having a personal financial interest in road construction companies. Instead of going ahead with a glamorous High Speed 2 route, perhaps the funding could be spent better on reopening lines to outlying areas, or connecting northern cities to each other rather than further encouraging traffic with London (stimulating more ribbon development).

Another system that needs rolling back (or at least reforming) is the privatisation of buses and coaches that took off in the 1980s, when everything was supposed to be run as a business - like banks, the NHS, schools and so on.

The freedom to travel in the way that we are used to - and it is a liberty, not a right enforceable in law - is a public amenity, at least within this country (surely foreign travel will also become more expensive and the package holidays may be affected - back to Le Touquet and the South of France for the well-to-do?)

So, we need a plan to preserve accessibility, as far as possible; not ‘15 minute cities’! Electric cars are a nonsense - or a luxury unaffordable for most - but electric buses, coaches and trains, these make sense. Imagine the streets free of car clutter and served by quiet, clean mass transportation; the spaciousness, the fresh air.

And it need to be affordable, so subsidised. The tax money invested in transport would be more than offset by savings on the car system (and the cost of deaths and accidents, speed traps and all the rest).

At the moment cars can be more convenient than mass transportation - and cheaper, partly because roads are subsidised!

For example, I looked for a midweek day excursion from Birmingham to Liverpool (c. 100 miles each way). The journey lasts almost exactly as long by rail as for car, what with time spent on the platform waiting for connexions. As to costs:

Using average annual expenses and mileage for a car, the trip would cost under £100. For two people, London Northwest Railway would charge £44 if we accepted restricted times but £138 otherwise - and even more for some of the earlier starts. If the party was 5 people it would definitely be cheaper to use the motor! Hardly a slam-dunk argument for public transport.

If our governments - national and local - value our freedom and the economic stimulus of wide accessibility, they should move away from punitive and pettifogging methods and develop systems that are so extended convenient and affordable that we can do without King Car.