The Other Half and I have been determined to cut our car use for some time, reducing it back to or below where we used to be 10 years ago in London.
It’s a considerable to goal to achieve as we used to live within five minutes walk of a tube station, were just around the corner from a bus stop, had no children, had no livestock and almost everything we needed was either within walking distance or within walking distance of public transport.
Today, we live 2.5 miles out of a village with an infrequent train service and limited facilities, we’re 15 miles from the nearest town with most facilities, we’re not on a bus route, we have two young children, we have livestock that need to go to slaughter, and we have all the necessities of a working croft to fetch and transport.
Whenever I’ve suggested to people that they should consider curbing their own car use, urban dwellers tend to be a bit embarassed before trotting out their excuses but country dwellers are much more defiant, stating that “it can’t be done”.
Apparently, you need at least two cars to survive in the country these days because of the pressures of time, children’s activities, modern lifestyles, safety and the like.
Twelve months ago I swapped our then second car, a Land Rover Discovery, for a pedal trike and have used it almost every day since then.
I’ve managed to transport children to school, football. nursery and other activities, I’ve managed to go shopping, and I’ve managed to transport quite a bit of hardware that’s been needed on the croft.
All without using the remaining car, a Land Rover Defender.
Of course, I’ve still had to use it from time to time—taking the Wee ‘Un to swimming lessons 15 miles away, doing the fortnightly shopping (down from weekly and coinciding with the Big Lad’s swimming lessons), taking animals to slaughter, and collecting loads too heavy for the bike (750kg is a wee bit too much even for me).
With my car use trimmed right back, we turned our attention to the Other Half.
She works 19 miles away with no public transport to directly link our village to the small town where she works.
The OH can’t work any closer to home than that at the moment as there are no vacancies at nearest secondary school to us, but she reduced her journey by 20 miles when she accepted her current post.
It was a good start, but the OH wanted to do more and eventually managed to organise a once a week lift with various work colleagues who live reasonably close to us.
That was Tuesdays sorted and it has become a long-running arrangement, but again we felt she could improve on this.
As of last week, she has.
Two work colleagues have moved to the village or close by, with one actually working in her department, making it much easier to organise lifts or car pooling as meeting times and finish times tend to be the same.
The OH now drives one of her colleagues to work three days a week, then the colleague drives her three days the following week. The Tuesday lift continues to operate.
The net effect is to cut the OH’s work journey in half as she’s now using our car for just five days a fortnight.
My transfer from car to bicycle cut our family’s car use by 40 per cent.
When the OH drove to work daily, her commute made up just under 80% of our remaining car journeys, or 48 per cent of our original use (7,980 miles of 16,500 miles a year). She’s now halved that.
It means that in 12 months we’ve cut our car use by 64 per cent, without suffering any major inconvenience.
In other words, we’re doing 10,560 miles less a year, saving 1,600 litres of diesel a year and spending, based on today’s prices, £1,664 less a year.
If we take into account the longer commute to the OH’s previous job, when she did an extra 8,400 miles a year, then we’ve now trimmed a massive 18,960 miles a year from our family’s car use.
We’re buying 2,873 litres less diesel a year and, again in today’s prices, spending £2,988 less a year.
Of course, the financial gain is acutally much less as fuel prices have rocketed in the past 12 months—I have a fuel receipt for February 24, 2007 when we paid 90.2p a litre while today I paid £1.04 a litre.
Still, I think we can be quite pleased about our efforts, cutting 18,960 car miles a year is a huge achievement especially when we have the supposed disadvantage of living in the countryside where it’s supposedly “not possible to survive without two cars”.
Actually, it is.
And not only have we survived, but we’re still doing all those things that people believe you can only do if you have a car.
Blimey…if you’ve saved that much, you must be loaded!
I wish. Most of that saving went on heating oil (rising prices plus replacing the stolen batch), higher grocery prices (our weekly spend is up by nearly £7 on the same time last year for the same items), higher livestock feed prices, and higher electricity prices (with another rise due in April).
That’s the one really, really annoying thing about what we’ve achieved in terms of cutting our energy use over the past four years. Theoretically, we should be streets ahead financially having cut car use, heating oil consumption and electricity consumption by quite large amounts.
But, the cost of energy and the cost of living are rising faster than we can cut consumption. When we cut electricity consumption by 12% on the previous quarter, our electricity prices went up by 15%.
The irony is that we now get pinched much harder by energy price rises as we can make far fewer cuts than a household with two or three cars, four or five large TVs, heating set to 21C, umpteen gadgets recharging, tumble dry and dish washer churning away, etc. They have a lot left to switch off. We don’t.
Still, we have done something.
I find this very encouraging. We’re planning a move to the country and a million miles away from commuting. But while I might complain about it, I love the access to public transport London gives us, and not having a car. You give me hope that while we won’t be able to survive without a car at all, we will at least be able to keep its use to a minimum.
time for a new bike, I think!
You have to be very determined to cut through your own excuses, very organised but very relaxed at the same time (so plan multiple events for one trip, but don’t worry if you’re short of milk one night or your cupboard is missing a vital ingredient), and totally focused on the goal. When everyone does the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve, it can be very difficult to keep going and all too easy to slip.
In our case, we’re both bloody minded, stubborn gits, which helps a lot!
Wee are paying 110.9p a litre (diesel) in our local town. Barmey.
Diesel was £1.09 on Friday, but a new batch went in this morning, just before I arrived to get my 30 litres of petrol for the brush cutter and rotary hoe. (That’s our yearly fossil fuel allowance for croft jobs BTW.)
‘but don’t worry if you’re short of milk one night or your cupboard is missing a vital ingredient’
This take a while to get used to, especially if like me you only shop once a month and stick to it almost religiously (all apart from the odd thing very rarely).
I am 4 miles from the nearest shop so any journey I do is planned down to the last detail and I don’t just drive in for a pint of milk as it’s not cost effective.
It’s all about being organised. We’re now in a hamlet with no shops, the nearest village has some good shops (small supermarket, wonderful butcher, greengrocers) but the bus only runs once a day. I try to organise things so that I go into the village to do all the shopping/post office etc things in one go. If I don’t have to carry too much, I will use the bike (although not so good at that in winter!). We’ve a small moped for short journeys to nearest town, only using the car for transporting more than one person. As I hate supermarket shopping, I get those groceries delivered, rather than do the 20 mile round trip to the shop.
Well done for cutting down so much - and thanks for the blog, it reminds me to keep trying for a smaller footprint, especially on the days when it feels like a pointless exercise.
This is a great testimony. I have been cycling to the nearest train station (7 miles away, but on the other side of a deep gorge) for over a year now, and gradually people in my rural (and hilly) village are beginning to consider it feasible to ride instead of driving. I now know of two other people who started to imitate me.
Okay, I’ve edited my comment in accord with your “guidelines”, but I bet you still don’t publish it.
As soon as they prove to me scientifically that my turning off a few devices and driving my cars less will curb climate change, I”ll do so. And before you and your allegedly enlightened advocates of AGW theory start piling in, I’ve heard all of your arguments before and I remain unconvinced so I won’t be switching off and I won’t be stopping my car.
You and people like you want to drag us all back to a Dark Ages run by thwarted Marxist-Lenists masquerading as the green consciences of Queen Gaiea. Resources are there to be exploited and provide the things we need. Leaving them in the ground is as morally dubious as telling people they can’t eat when there’s food in the ground and on the trees.
I’ll drive my cars as much as I want and use as much fuel as I want, and no hippy is goint to tell me otherwise. I worked hard to buy them, I work to to pay to drive them, and I’ll enjoy them when I want without some stupid killjoys coming over all fascist and telling me not to.
I’m suspending comment on this post for a few days. Unfortunately, for every comment I can publish there are another five or six that have to be deleted.
As I keep saying, I will not tolerate comments that threaten violence or are obscenity laden torrents of vitriol.
By all means make your point or counter-argument with some force if you feel that is warranted, but there’s no need for naked hatred and viciousness.
If you feel that life as we know it will end if your car and choice of consumer lifestyles is taken from you, then by all means say so and set out your reasonings.
If you want to challenge the greenies/hippies/freaks/weirdos/commies for daring to impede progress or wanting to send humanity back to the Dark Ages, then do so — but without threatening to run them down or string them up.
When everyone has cooled down, comments will reopen.
Okay, time to respond to those earlier comments that were held up while comments were suspended.
PS, it’s not as simple as belief in climate change or not, or to what degree. There are many reasons to reconsider car use and reduce it.
If you don’t believe in climate change or don’t believe that vehicles contribute to climate change or believe that vehicular emissions are a major contributor to climate change, then perhaps you’d like to consider some other reasons.
Even if cars don’t contribute to climate change, would you agree that noxious and toxic pollutants are the result of burning fossil fuels in an internal combustion engine. If you do, isn’t that a good reason for reducing car use?
Do you accept the possibility of peak oil? Or failing that, that the era of cheap oil may be passing? If you accept either of those, then you might want to reduce car use to make oil stocks last longer and keep prices stable,
Do you accept that if there are more and more cars on the roads, then there will be more accidents? If you do, then reducing the amount of traffic would also reduce the number of accidents.
Do you accept that Western population are suffering from rocketing levels of obesity and related illnesses thanks to sedentary lifestyles (and poor eating habits, of course). If so, then walking or cycling more might go some way to alleviating this.
Do you accept it might just be fun to get out of the car occasionally?
All good reasons for reducing car use and I could list more, but I want to keep this reasonably short. There must be at least one scenario among these you could accept, surely?
DK, that sounds like a child’s response. I’ve got it, it’s mine and I’m going to do what I want with it, including break it, trash it or smash it. Nobody else is getting it. It’s mine, mine, mine. A bit sad, really, if you are a grown man (or woman).
Personally I’m not so keen on cars anymore. My biggest gripe with them is that the internal combustion engine is century old technology foisted upon us by the economic interests of Big Oil. The battery electric car is far more efficient than a Hydrogen fuel cell car, but we keep being told to wait for hydrogen. Could this be because Big Oil owns many of the patents for fuel cell cars, and that shipping us a combustible fuel in a tanker is a paradigm they are familiar with? They also own the patents for NiMh batteries and have essentially banned their use in Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV).
They fear the BEV so much because, in theory, you could charge it up from a windmill or a solar panel and then run it for free. They can’t figure out a way to put a meter between you and the sun.
This is my dream car now, in my fantasy charged up off a home renewables network of wind, solar and micro-hydro. A man can dream eh?
http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/
I’m also a fan of battery vehicles provided, as you say, the electricity is drawn from renewable sources. However, I do have some concerns about the trend away from fairly simply vehicles to ones that pack in all the junk to be found in modern fossil-fueled cars.
I drove a 1970s Enfield 8000 a few years back and loved it. The original did about 40mph flat-out and had a range of 50-60 miles, but this one had modernised electrics. It did 60mph and had a range of 100 miles, which is more than enough for most needs.
Of course, it only had two seats but it was lightweight, had excellent visibility, handled and accelerated well, and was a real peach. I’d love one.
Oh, and read Big Oil’s vendetta against the electric car
Oh dear… I wonder what set all that off? If there are some of us prepared to use our cars less, doesn’t that leave more oil for the people who don’t want to? I would have thought they would be happy to see us slogging along on our bikes to keep the price of petrol down for them…
whether climate change is or isn’t happening, there’s nothing wrong with reducing the carbon footprint, because it saves you money…if that’s not a reason to turn off plugs and reduce car use then i dont know what is!
Well done stonehead