Forum topic: Thursday newsletter:Help people in outer London switch from the car, says report

www.transportxtra.com/publications/local-transport-today/news/73935/help-people-in-outer-london-switch-from-the-car-says-report

I am interested to hear the views on this topic which links to a website that is written in rather vague terms apart from mentioning the new Super-Loop bus service but uses the word 'should' several times to describe various proposals to improve transport services and encourage people to use their cars less. One point they seem to have missed is that TfL are generally reducing bus services in both inner and outer London to save money lost during the pandemic and it doesn't seem as if they will get to pre-covid passenger levels anytime soon.

As for transport sharing schemes, these involve cars so that sounds like a contradiction. What I am also interested to know is which outer London areas they are referring to. There are some very isolated areas north of Enfield heading towards the M25 which are just about served by buses but given the level of train strikes which Mick Lynch says he is prepared to continue for another two years this leaves fewer reliable options.

As I see things, the advantage of car sharing schemes is less in the actual miles travelled, although I imagine there would be some slight benefit at the margin through less personal convenience / dropping totally unnecessary journeys, but more in space saved: if cars are 95% unused, then in a shared world and in theory 19 in every 20 cars could be removed (1:20). As it is, most people don’t drive through the night and others will want a car at the same time as another person, so I believe the working number is more in the 1:5 – 1:7 range, with an outlier of 1:12 developed by a GE executive a few years back based on support from data algorithms. That world frees up enormous resource: from road surfaces / kerbsides (public space), through buildings not requiring so much car parking facility, to personal capital which could be employed elsewhere (eg holidays), to huge quanta of materials used in the making of what would be unnecessary vehicles. Embedded carbon would also take a nosedive, a climate good. There seems little not to like once the intricacies of process are ironed out.
As for joined up thinking, I reckon we can by now safely conclude that it’s not a core-competency of the UK. (Not just buses but our train services fall short too.)

Karl, I remember a very long time ago when people working out of town used to do car shares to get to and from workplaces. This was easy to do because you knew the people already and just hooked up with somebody nearby. Wonder if this still goes on? More related to the original article which started this forum I did a bit of digging about car clubs and seems that they took off a bit in 2021 when the pandemic was tailing off but one reason given was that it was often by people who wanted to get rid of having a second car. There were however a sizeable number who didn't have a car at all. Looking today in Enfield it appears there is only one major car club Enterprise (as opposed to car hire) but at least the vehicles are all EV's.

This BBC article has a lot of the key stats and information about the schemes.

Since selling my car I mainly bike, walk or use public transport but for journeys that are only practical by car I use Hiya car sharing. It’s essentially AirBnB for vehicles. There’s a good range of cars though I usually need to jump on a bus to get to them.