Debate: My car is a necessity!
Mick Duncan's anti-car article, (Solidarity 3/22) says that car journeys under five miles are made by lazy people - people driving to the corner shop or going off to the gym.
I drive my toddler two miles to nursery. If I didn't, the journey would take me an hour. A very aggravating hour, as well - on a chock-full single-decker bus with no space for pushchairs and nobody willing to stand up so you don't fall over due to the antics of a bored-witless small person.
After dropping off my daughter I then drive three miles to work. If I didn't, that journey would also take me an hour (making a two hour journey in total to get to work).
If you take into account the time we need in the morning for my daughter to get herself dressed, pretend to eat her toast and be dragged away from the Adventures of Noddy, we would need to get up at 5.30am in order for me to get to work on time. But perhaps I'm just being lazy?
Better public transport would help, but in the case of getting to nursery, or doing heavy shopping the quality of my life is much better if I can use a car (or maybe taxi, but they're expensive).
Given the high and ever rising costs of public transport, it is often both more convenient and much cheaper to drive. Congestion charging is really saying to me: you use you car because getting across London by public transport is expensive and difficult so now your choice is to be poorer still and even more stressed out, or not travel at all.
Livingstone's message is: congestion is a problem in central London for tourists and business, so the poor are going to have to keep out. Brilliant.
Jane Sprigg, Lambeth
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Under 5 Miles?
I don't know about journeys under 5 miles, but I do see people often driving literally a few hundred yards. The problems around schools are horrendous everywhere. At the primary school that my kids went to parents would arrive half an hour before school-time in order to find a space on the road and then sit there with the kids in the car. The result was that there was then no space for anyone else to drop their kids off,a nd the road was quickly congested and dangerous for those kids who were actually walking to school.
Nor was this a case of people simply dropping off their kids on the way to work as I used to do, because many of the cars sat there after the kids had gone into the playground, and some even after the kids had gone into school. The irrationality of the situation is astounding. Part of the problem is that many schools have over the last 20 years been closed. The pretext has always been falling school roles, and it is likely that another round of school closures will begin now on the same pretext. The second argument used has been that larger schools allow a wider range of subjects and the use of more specialised teachers.
Both arguments are fallacious. Alongside falling school roles has gone no reduction in and in some cases increasing class sizes. State schools are miles away from the kind of pupil teacher ratios in private schools, and the function of socialists should be to argue that state provision should be better than that in fee-paying schools. Secondly, there is no reason why specialists teachers cannot be employed to serve a number of smaller schools rather than combining the kids from these schools into one large one. It is much more efficient for a teacher to have to move between schools than for hundreds of kids to have to travel several miles every day when they could have walked to a school based near to their homes.
Experience also seems to demonstrate that just as large anonymous housing estates tend to generate anti-social behaviour, large anonymous schools tend to have the same kinds of effects. Socialists should resist school closures and instead argue for the development of smaller community based schools with low pupil teacher ratios. After all such a demand would be consistent with the "Sustainability" policies of most Local Authorities which currently sit unobserved on shelves in Council offices. In the meantime there are alternatives to individual car journeys to schools. In Staffordshire an experiment in introducing Yellow School buses in certain areas has been introduced. Where a school is served by a school bus there is clearly no reason for parents to drop off kids by car, and so it makes it easier to introduce and enforce parking restrictions around the school. Last year I was part of a working group on the Council looking at its use of transport. One of the proposals I made was in realtion to these buses. The Council curently pays about millions of pounds to First and other bus companies to subsidise unprofitable routes etc. District Councils within the County also pay out millions of pounds to the same companies to cover bus passes etc. A yellow bus costs around £70,000, so if the millions currently spent on subsidies to the profits of the bus companies went on buying yellow buses not only could sufficient buses be bought in order to transport every child to school in the County, but these buses would for most of the day be free for use in other purposes such as feyying around Social Services clients, taking people to hospital, or better serving the needs of pensioners or people in rural communities.
There are in fact many, many ways in which reliance on the car could be reduced. All that is required is some discussion and some ability to implement the results. It is the latter which is the problem, but it is fighting for that ability which is what socialism is all about.
Arthur Bough