It's about time that we really added up the price we pay for our cars. Not just financial & in terms of air quality. Just think about the amount of land that is taken up with roads & parking.
Knight Frank did a survey for the government in 2020 showing that there are 103,000 public and private surface car parks across the country, which comprise a land area of 20,000 hectares. Of this, some 7,555 hectares are owned by the public sector.
https://www.knightfrank.com/research/article/2020-07-15-government-owned-car-parks-could-hold-the-key-to-110000-new-homes
Their estimate suggests that this alone could yield 2.1 million homes. Releasing this land could provide much needed new housing & generate income for the government. I found watching "Britain's Housing Crisis" - BBC deeply disturbing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001rkn5/britains-housing-crisis-what-went-wrong
The Standard did an interesting article for World Car free Day 2019
https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/property-news/world-car-free-day-2019-80-000-homes-could-be-built-on-london-car-parking-spaces-within-a-mile-of-a-tube-or-train-station-a133491.html
Parked cars take up two per cent of space in London — land worth £172 billion on which much-needed homes could be built. There are 868 car parks in London within a mile of a train or Tube station
Acording to the RAC 18 million (65%) of Britain’s 27.6 million households have – or have potential to have enough off-street parking to accommodate at least one car or van.
https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/cars-parked-23-hours-a-day
All of this seems ridiculous when you consider that the average car or van in England is driven just 4% of the time, a figure that has barely changed in 25 years.
We have become wedded to our cars. We put up with the high financial cost & the frustration of traffic congestion & frequent gridlock. We struggle to find parking. We tolerate poor air quality which causes short & long term health problems. In 2021, 10 of the 43 UK national reporting zones suffered with illegal levels of NO2 pollution. This is twice as many as in 2020, when lockdowns led to a temporary dip in NO2 levels across the country. The World Health Organization (WHO) last year radically overhauled their pollution guidelines. The recommended guideline for annual average NO2 pollution is now 10 µg/m - four times lower than the UK’s current legal limit.
https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/news/uk-air-pollution-how-clean-is-the-air-you-breathe/
This is a complex issue encompassing multiple areas of our lives - Health, Housing, Infrastructure, Finance & possibly more. But we are literally using up precious land & adversely impacting our health for the privelege of owning our own cars. A working integrated transport system is vital to our survival as a functioning nation & to each of us individually.
Until we have that, the problems will simply grow exponentially. According to Wikipedia the UK has a road network totalling about 262,300 miles (422,100 km) of paved roads—246,500 miles (396,700 km) in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and 15,800 miles (25,500 km) in Northern Ireland, but I doubt that is up to date.
We are literally letting vehicles dictate health & land use because successive governments have known all of this for years. They have had all the information about housing & transport issues, but do not have the guts to action what will be difficult policies to really tackle this. All political decision making on this has been populist & short-termist because the politicians want to remain in power instead if doing what is best for the people of the UK. I haven't even touched on the cost of road maintenence.
It has got to stop.
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