Are you engaged in a culture war? Perhaps you didn’t realise; you just thought you were leaving work in time to collect a child for sports practice, before going to the shop on the way home and then maybe the cinema later.
The problem is that you did that in a car, because there was no other convenient way. You thought you were just one of the 42 million people in Britain with a driving licence driving one of the 34 million cars here and doing normal daily things. But no: turns out you’re engaged in a moral battle and you’re on the wrong side of it.
‘Dear culture-war motorists, look to the future,’ headlines a story in The Guardian by transport writer and train enthusiast Christian Wolmar (with whom I agree on some things).
To those who think that drivers are being directly and aggressively targeted by the people they elect, via the introduction of congestion charges, high taxes and low speed limits, Wolmar has this to reveal: it’s true. “Here’s the rub: ultimately, the opponents are right. This is an attempt to make life more difficult for motorists, in order to improve the situation for people not travelling in large metal boxes. That does and should involve a raft of measures. Parking spaces need to be removed, access to town centres limited to deliveries, congestion charges imposed.”
Good to see an admission, at last, that there is a culture war over driving. Not that it wasn’t pretty obvious but, hey, don’t we like to give people the benefit of the doubt?
I don’t think it’s driving licence holders – comfortably more than half the population – who started it. Yet honestly they’ve been terribly good about it so far, extremely submissive in the fight that they maybe didn’t even know was being waged on them.
They’ve been paying more and more for the ever cleaner and safer cars they needed, accepting ever greater control and regulation, increased camera surveillance, great risk of unfair parking or yellow-box fines levied by unscrupulous car park operators and the councils who get the receipts.
But now at least we know it’s official. The thing that’s usually left unsaid has been said: there is a war being waged against the car driver, as if drivers are some obnoxious minority that needs to be stamped out, rather than your mum on the way to the doctor, your son on the way to work or one of the many other users of a type of vehicle that’s so successful/convenient/brilliant that there are more cars than households.
We continue to drive because it’s better and more convenient than any alternative – still, often, the only realistic way to do what we need to in the time we have. And despite everything (and I hesitate to admit this, because it will give them ideas), mystifyingly it’s still often the cheapest way to go places. Last year, two TikTokers bought a Citroën C1 and drove it from Stoke to London and back, saving £138 over taking the train.
Still, if you think taking a train is expensive, try not taking one: British taxpayers subsidise rail transport to the tune of £11.9bn every year, despite the fact it has 1.7 billion paying passengers.
