Moving around, staying in the same place

I really enjoyed reading Dan Hill's piece on Small Vehicles of Sandhamn this week. Our family spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing our vehicle choices, trying to interpolate between what we all know about the hideous carbon cost of car travel, what I learn through my work as a planner about mobility trends and possible approaches to reducing car use, and what the pressures are of living in a rural house with two early teenage kids, and working in jobs that involve site visits and physical stuff in a way that few 'professional', supposedly desk-based jobs do.

Every year at about this time, we sit down and look at the new weekly schedule to try and organise the logistics with the aim of minimising the amount of car use. Its a fiendish job that involves a lot of tortuous negotiation and trade-offs, and refinements (usually, more car use) once the flaws in the perfect plan are exposed through being tried out in practice.

School: not exactly too far to cycle but simply not safe enough on the busy roads with inconsiderate drivers, and there's no offroad or segregated bike route. Plus there are a surprising number of steep inclines on the way, and, depending on the day, the kids need to transport clarinets, lunchbags and sports kit alongside their heavy school bags of books. They can take the free school bus, but the bus stop is a 20 minute walk away on unsurfaced footpaths - lovely when the weather is dry, and in the afternoon on the way home, but adds 20 mins in the morning to what is already a silly time to have to catch the bus, plus bad in mud. (The school bus takes an absurdly route in order to serve as many villages as possible, meaning what would be a 10 minute car ride takes 40 mins). Our compromise is to drive them to the bus stop in the morning and for them to walk home as much as possible, or to get the public bus into town and ride home with us after we finish work.

Work: we have our wonderful studio in the centre of the nearby town - 7 miles away. And of course, like everyone, we've learnt we don't need to go in there all the time to be effective. T is a machine and will gladly cycle - or even run - into work. I'm pathetic: I went through a phase of cycling in or out, when we attempted a mobility model based on Brompton bikes plus car, but it wore off. I default to car, my excuse being that as someone has to drive the kids to the bus stop, I may as well then just continue into town. Then there are site visits - not all of which are exactly convenient by non-car modes. Our town has fast mainline services to London, but we are increasingly focusing on local work which is rarely served by trains, and local public buses are absolutely hopeless.

Activities: both kids have activities that take up a fair amount of time outside school. Some are accessible by public transport (except for the last leg from station/bus stop to home), others are an easy cycle ride from home. But put these in combination with school and work, train timetables and dark winter nights, and you can see how the car becomes the fallback far more often than you would like. Then there's all the other stuff of life: visiting friends and family, going out in the evening, going on holiday. Plus shopping and errands and this and that. Every year we try to do better but as the kids grow up and their activities change, every year is a different set of logistics to juggle.

Our modes of transport: as a family we have two Brompton bikes, two kids bikes (slightly outgrown) two road bikes, a gravel bike, a couple of commuter bikes, a moped and, yes, to our massive frustration, two cars. STILL. Soon to be augmented with our first ebike, when the insanely long order backlog finally gets solved (5 months and waiting).

We are typical of our friends around the area who live in villages, in terms of the things we need to travel to, but we do try harder than most to limit our car use. We reluctantly bought a petrol car for the long journeys - family that are further away than the range of an electric, some holidays - and convinced ourselves it was OK because we wouldn't use it for anything else. We have the small runaround car which we tell ourselves will be replaced with an electric in the very near future. We wonder if we could replace it entirely with e-bikes but on a day like today, for example, when half the family is on the other side of the country visiting relatives, and the other half have been invited to lunch locally, we would just have to have refused to do one or the other unless we had two cars.

So I read about the small vehicles of Sandhamn and I wonder what kind of cluster of vehicles would best work for a family like ours, in a place with the road and footpath network character of rural Essex. The biggest barrier to more everyday cycling is the behaviour of vehicle drivers on the main roads, which rules out bike or ebike transport for anyone lacking the physical size or confidence to take them on. This creates a self-reinforcing pattern - the lack of non-car users on the roads and lanes means drivers don't expect them to be there and most don't want them there. We could solve this through more segregated cycle routes - and they would need to be physically segregated, not just some lines on the side of the road, for us to feel our kids were safe. But that is major stuff - widening roads, tearing out hedgerows. I could see campaigners tying themselves into logical knots so they could oppose such a thing.

We could try to encourage more vehicle pooling and sharing - particularly in the village cores, as this would be less effective on lanes of scattered homes like ours. A bank of vehicles that could include lawnmowers, ecargo-bikes, small vans - could that work to reduce car ownership down to one per house? It's almost inconceivable to imagine the cultural shift this would entail. People here love their vehicles. We aren't Sweden or Japan.

We could make car ownership really difficult. It's notable that Dan's three case studies of places with very different mobility models - Tokyo, Sandhamn and Venice - have externally imposed restrictions. Being an island or an archipelago; or in the case of Tokyo, in a country where you can't buy a car unless you can prove you have an off street parking space. The Ile de Re - another small vehicle haven - is an island, and closer to home, Mersea Island has some of the same emergent low-speed culture.

But we aren't on a small island [well...erm... Ed.] so what regulation and cost barriers can be employed? The simple fact is we have to get our rural and suburban populations off their cars if we are to have a hope in hell of limiting climate change. So give everyone a voucher covering the full cost of an ebike or a contribution to an e-vehicle, while telling them that, in a year's time, they can no longer have more than one fuel-powered vehicle registered to their address, business vehicles no exception. I would do it if I were PM for a day, but imagine the uproar in the Daily Mail. 

Tomorrow school starts, and the minor A road at the bottom of our lane will be a noisy river of vehicles, impatiently queuing at the traffic lights where the road narrows to a single lane to get over a historic bridge. I'll drop the kids at the bus stop and then sit in idling traffic on the way into work, alone in a five seater car, thinking how much quicker that stretch would be on a bike. I'll pick up a child from an after school activity, sitting in more idling traffic on the way, and drive home. Each of us in an under-utilised vehicle taking up space and running down the climate clock. Each the product of decisions, barriers, fears and laziness which feels impossible to untangle. 

I want the archipelago of small electric and manual vehicles that can support our collective endeavours. I want to bequeath good active travel habits to our kids along with good diets and tooth brushing. But this needs some brave and bloody minded action on the part of government. And I'm fairly sick of waiting for it.