There was a time in my life when my attitude to cars was a bit like Toad of Toad Hall’s - all “toot toot!” and adrenalin rushes and racing down the highway at speeds that would raise a policeman’s eyebrow (or at least his breathalyser tube).
Forget 21st birthday parties and being able to vote at 18. For me, it was the golden age of 17, when you could pass a driving test and race off behind the wheel of some long-suffering adult’s car, when you really came of age. Every image I had of growing up was borrowed from the American car culture of the previous generation; as far as I was concerned, driving made you the director, producer and star of your own road movie. It signified: drive-in movies (even though there was no such thing in my bit of suburban London); drive-thru hamburger joints (ditto); and, of course, snogging in the back of the vast petrol tankers that once passed for cars in American culture (of which my only vicarious experience was watching Grease 70s.fast-rewind.com/grease.htm). If a boy didn’t have the keys to a car, even just his mum’s unglamorous nip-out-to-the-shops number, dangling from his finger, he just wasn’t potential boyfriend material.
I’ve had a lot of cars since. A bit like the seven ages of man, I’ve gone from tiny, flirty, battered red Mini in student days to sleek if uninteresting navy Renault 5 for first job to various strange foreign cars while working abroad to the lustrous Japanese microcar that was my pride and joy in my vast-disposable-income late-singleton days – a miniature red convertible with an engine the size of a hairdryer, so midget that you had to choose whether to put a handbag or a boyfriend in the passenger sea, but so glamorous that it made your hair look blonder and men routinely stop you at London traffic lights to say “haven’t I seen you on the telly, love?” Its name was the Suzuki Cappuccino, but I called it the frotheroonie. I wasn’t altogether surprised, though, to find that my friends all knew it as the tartmobile.
But all that car-worship is in the past now. After marrying and sprogging, I also traded in the tartmobile for a smallish greyish mess on wheels which I called the wifemobile until I realised it wasn’t even really mine but my husband’s. For, like many London families I know today, we don’t have his’n’hers cars, one with a big engine to prop up a conventional male ego, the other sweet and fluffy in a girlish colour. We just have the one – the smallest possible four-wheeler that can fit two children and two undersized bikes in the back along with a squished bag of shopping. We do our best not to use it, too. It’s a pain, because of the traffic jams and the congestion zone and the sheer impossibility of parking if you do manage to reach some urban destination outside your own tiny three-street parking zone. It sits neglected outside the house from Monday to Friday - no question of driving to work with all those hassles – and gets its only workout at weekends. And we’re slightly embarrassed to admit even to that, because of all the other people we know, also with children, who get by without having one at all. The patient bus-takers. The long-suffering Tube users. The happy bike users (who always have colds or turn up soaking wet after exposure to British weather). The smug scooter drivers (ditto, but wearing leather). And the holier-than-thou walkers (with jobs just down the road).
Now a new set of Department for Transport and Transport for London statistics reveal that we are not alone. Driving is out. About 40 per cent fewer people drive to work than did so a decade ago, down from 150,000 a day to 84,000. Only about 12 per cent of people working in the very centre of London still drive into work.
Public transport is in. Two-thirds more people travel by bus than a decade ago: up from 63,000 to 104,000, and the Tube, despite multiple meltdowns every time I get into it, not to mention bombings this summer, is also attracting ever more users – heading towards a billion a year.
TfL suggests smugly that falling vehicle numbers in the central London congestion zone is because more commuters are turning to two wheels (cycle use has doubled since 2000, from 59,000 to 110,000, and if the number of shops selling Vespas in desirable shades of pink and mint green is anything to go by it’s the same for scooters) – but mostly because public transport links have got better.
I beg to differ. They shouldn’t be complacent. Our public transport system is notorious worldwide. I know people from all over the world who, after thinking about moving to London and enjoying all that West End night life or edgy urban art or great football or tasty takeaway or whatever, have finally shaken their heads and said no – purely because they didn’t want a lifestyle in which getting claustrophobically stuck in places they didn’t want to be and charged through the nose for it into the bargain featured so prominently.
Every form of urban transport is its own kind of hell. This morning, as five packed buses sailed past my stop at King’s Cross without so much as a pause for the driver to laugh unfeelingly at the woebegone faces of the crowd of commuters getting ever later for work, I considered my options. Walking would have taken an hour. My bike was broken. I haven’t been smart, or flash, enough to try buying a scooter. And the Northern Line was out of action, as ever.
Driving, though, was out of the question, even though I’d already made a dawn run into the congestion zone, so had been relieved of £8 as well as £3 for the parking meter. A day’s parking where I was heading near Spitalfields would have added another £20 or £30 to the day’s transport bill - if I could find a space, and spare the time every couple of hours to rush out, find pound coins, feed meters, and dodge the wardens hiding behind every lamp-post. I knew from previous bitter experience that I would, sooner or later, turn up that crucial one minute too late - and end up with a £50 ticket anyway. There was no real alternative. I waited for the bus.
The real achievement of London’s bureaucrats in the last decade hasn’t been to make public transport better. It’s simply been to make driving such a uniquely unpleasant experience that even the grim alternatives they now offer don’t look quite so bad.
E-mail Urban Fox here
