Driving is an addiction like smoking and drinking, but seemingly much harder to give up. It may be that the alternatives are just too awful to contemplate.

Despite congestion, the rocketing cost of fuel and the dire warnings of environmentalists, we are just as dependent on our cars as we were more than a decade ago, according to a report from the RAC Foundation. Half of us have never used the bus.

Car dependency has increased steadily since 1993, except in London. The distances travelled by car have increased by 17 per cent.

Three quarters of us have a driving licence, up from two thirds just over a decade ago.

Nearly two thirds of women drive, compared with less than half in 1993, while in the same period the proportion of men behind the wheel has risen from 75 to 80 per cent.

There are now so many buses in London that the congestion-charged motorist can barely move for them.

Elsewhere bus use has declined by 13 per cent, and only 19 per cent of those surveyed admitted to regularly using one. A growing proportion never use them at all.

Users of public transport today are generally the same ones who used it in 1993, the report says. There appear to be few new converts to the idea of leaving the car at home.

One exception is the nation’s railways, where there has been a 40 per cent increase in train use over the period.

Commuters who have to stand on their journey to and from work may disagree with the report’s interpretation that the increase comes from a greater willingness to use the train for occasional trips rather than as the transport of choice.

The form of transport with the smallest carbon footprint is cycling, but despite the crowds gathering to see the English leg of the Tour de France last weekend, we are not donning the Lycra as much as we would like to think.

Over the period there was little change in the proportion of people cycling regularly, at 7 per cent of the overall population and 5 per cent of Londoners.

Transport for London, however, claims that the number of regular cyclists in the capital has increased by half since the congestion charge was introduced in 2002, despite the perils of sharing the road with all those red buses.

Men, the report says, are more likely to cycle regularly than women, and the greatest increase in pedal power over the past five years has been among 55 to 64-year-olds.

Elizabeth Dainton, the research development manager at the RAC Foundation, said: “It is clear from this research that we are still a very car-dependent nation. Trying and experiencing new things is part and parcel of our everyday lives, but where transport is concerned we tend to stick with what we know.”

She added: “If the nation is to be weaned off car dependency, public transport needs to provide a much better alternative than it does now.”

Then more people might find out what a bus is. It’s a vehicle you can’t smoke or drink in.