We don’t all need electric cars, we need less cars

34 comments

1. You wouldn’t be able to survive living in a village without access to a car.

2. I started cycling to work 4 or 5 years ago, just 5k each way, I do get wet the odd day alright, but honestly cycling home in the evening it’s my favourite part of the day.

3. And as soon as there is a public method of getting me and my kids and bags/buggies etc from home, to school and then the child minders, and into work, without taking 2+ hours (a route that takes 30 mins in the car) – I’m 100% on board…

4. People are not going to give up their cars until there is public transport in place.

   The last train from Connolly to anywhere west of Maynooth is at 7.15pm.

5. The reason people in cities use cars is because the cities are so sprawling and low-density that public transport is less efficient and inconvenient to use.

   Right now we have a situation in many cities where from the family home the kids have to go to school X kilometers in one or more directions, the shops are Y kilometers in another direction, and work is Z kilometers in another direction. There’s no easy way for all those needs to be met by public transport without a fair bit of inconvenience, but using a car it’s one round journey.

   You don’t reduce car usage by banning them, you reduce usage by giving our cities higher density. Look at the concept of transit-oriented development, which basically means building a train line and designating areas along it for high-density mixed-use developments only.

6. I would love to cycle more if it didn’t mean taking my life in my hands. The infrastructure where I am simply isn’t safe for cyclists. I’d love to take public transport but there’s no public transport route that would get me there In less than an hour, whereas its about 15 mins in a car.

7. The environmental mantra has reduce and reuse before recycling but most people forget the reduce part.

8. Ireland hasn’t been completely designed around cars over the past century. If that was the case, you’d have six lane stroads, stack interchnages, and underground parking pretty much everywhere. Ireland wasn’t designed around anything at all.

9. I just don’t see how not having a car is going to work as someone who is living in the country. I work from home which means I don’t drive that often but I’d get nowhere without it. EV’s would need to be made a lot more affordable before I could switch.

10. Unless you live in one of the big cities, a car is a must in Ireland. Public transport in the rest of the country seems to either be aimed to get you into Dublin (look at the rail network on the west) or runs so infrequently that it’s useless for the majority.

    This can be fixed, but it’s a bit of a chicken or egg first problem. Few ppl are using public transport because it’s so infrequent and unreliable. Public transport is like this, because few people use it as they drive instead.

11. Spoken like someone that lives in a place with half decent public transport.

    Ill be waiting a good fucking decade for a Bus to bring me to me to work in Mayo.

12. Two weeks ago it would’ve cost me £13.80 each way to make the drive to Dublin or £5.09 each way for Belfast, with fuel prices coming down it currently costs £11.37 to Dublin and £4.32 to Belfast, a train ticket to Dublin is £28.50 and the cheapest public transport option to Belfast is an £11 summer rambler bus ticket, I’ll stick with my car thanks

13. Fewer

14. Aye, that photo is from Berlin. Massive efforts right now to make it more bike and pedestrian friendly. It’s working, and some streets look so much better without cars now here.

15. Less cars, more public transport and the fucking public transport shouldn’t be run for profit for fucks sake.

16. Absolutely, less cars on the road should be the goal. To do that we need huge investment in several types of subsidized public transport. Buses and trains need to run for longer and more regularly. They also need to be cheaper where possible

17. There’s an inflection point too – when enough people switch cars for bikes, it makes the road safer for biking, which makes more people inclined to take up biking, in a positive feedback cycle.

    I went to a town centre first meeting for Clara (in Offaly) and for the first time people didn’t freak out when I said “your kid should be able to safely bike 2 km to school”. Of course, the footpaths are choking on people’s cars parked all over the damn place right now. Because it’s too dangerous to let your kid bike. Because of the cars.

18. One part of the debate that’s never entertained in Ireland is that there is a clear alternative to the car that is ¹Cheaper to purchase and on fuel, ²Greener to produce and maintain, ³Eases traffic congestion and ⁴Readily available…: Motorbikes/Scooters

    Most cars on the road every morning with commuters are only occupied by 1 person, these people could use a motorbike or scooter and massively reduce congestion while also saving loads of fuel and emitting far less greenhouse gases.

    This isn’t a perfect final solution but should be considered seriously as part of the transition to a greener future while accommodating the unique situation in this country that we have quite a dispersed population that isnt easily served by public transport no matter how much we wish it could be otherwise.

    This is the norm in many other countries, we are very blinkered here in thinking that the only options are bus/train Vs car. 🤷

19. Electric and self driving cars are just a bad alternative to public transport for most people.

    Get more cycle routes, cheaper and more bus routes with more trains. Far better for us as a whole.

20. There needs to be a focus on loops and adding transport hubs that aren’t Dublin.

    I’m T1 diabetic so every year I have to have my eyes tested, because of these tests you are unable to drive for up to 6hrs after taking the drops due to how blurry your eyesight gets from them. I currently live in mullingar.

    They sent for me to have my eye test in Navan, and while yes Navan is technically the closest, if you have to use public transport, eucharistic I would considering the eye test, it would take me 4hrs to get to Navan as I would have to go through Dublin first. So I’d be spending roughly 10 hrs of my day to get an eye test that takes 30 minutes.

    Luckily I could get it rescheduled to be in Sligo Town which has a train and bus line too it.

    There needs to be transport hubs, You shouldn’t have to go east just to go west. There should be transport hubs in the Midlands, Ulster, Munster and Conaught.

21. Even the systems in the bigger cities are fairly useless.

    To get a train from Galway to Cork (two of the largest cities in the country) you have to go Galway > Limerick, Limerick > Limerick Junction, Limerick Junction > Cork

22. I can never get angry at more pedestrianisation, It’s one of the reasons why the likes of Amsterdam, Tokyo or Stockholm are all famous for being such attractive cities, but the reality of the situation is fewer cars just isn’t possible when 90% of this country is inaccessible without one.

    I recently had to pull out of a stag do last minute because I couldn’t get a bus from Carlow to Wexford at the right times. Ridiculous stuff, either had to leave before it started or sleep in a ditch and wait around for one the next evening.

23. *fewer cars

24. The public transport system in ireland is an embarrassment idk how we call ourselves a country with the lack of infrastructure.

    People want less people moving to Dublin yet the transport outside Dublin is non existent.

25. > Over the past century

    Not quite. There were probably 20 cars for 300 people in our village in Kerry in the 1980s.

    Also you are missing the fact that cars, whatever their environmental impact, have had a massive positive effect on women’s independence in Ireland over the past three or four decades. It used to be the case that most women in rural areas wouldn’t go further than a couple of miles from their home save for maybe a couple of times a year, if even _that_ often.

    Unless you plan to replace all the pro-car infrastructure with a nationwide network of reliable, interconnected, frequent, low cost, 24 hour public transport links, then this is a non starter unless you want people confined to their homes.

26. Of course people who live in rural Ireland need to own cars to get anywhere, but I’ve noticed that a huge number of people who live in Dublin City own cars when they really don’t need to.

    I think there is still a ‘car culture’ where a lot of people feel like owning a car is part of being an adult, even if they live a 15 minute cycle from where they work, a 5 minute walk from a busy shopping street, and have access to frequent public transport to get anywhere in the city.

    Of course improvements to pedestrian, cycling, and public transport infrastructure are necessary for reducing car usage, but I think the culture around our relationship with cars needs to change as well. A lot more people could live car free today – and save money doing so – if they just gave it a go.

27. There is a group trying to get a light rail for Galway for years. They have plans made up to where it could go and how it could be implemented. It would literally transform the city.

    They are called GluasForGalway

    But I fear it will never happen; current planning laws in Ireland, people’s reluctance to give up personal cars, serial objectors that hate change etc…..

    .

28. Public transport here is far too dear. That and the Nearest train is 15 fucking miles away

29. I can fly from Dublin to Brussels return for 20 Euros. Try getting a return tain anywhere in the country for that price.

30. I’d LOVE to live in rural Ireland, but it’s just not possible without a car.

    IMO, the problem isn’t too many cars, it’s a lack of viable *alternatives* to cars.

31. I live in the countryside and am about 26 miles away from work. In order to get there without a car I’d have to walk to the nearest bus stop to get a bus into town then get another bus towards my work and get there either an hour too early or an hour too late as there is no bus that gets there at the right time.

    Its the same for after work. Either leave an hour early or wait for an hour after work for a bus to take me back to the nearest town to my house then another bus home.

    I think I’ll keep my car.

32. 

33. This is ignoring the fact that if you live outside of Dublin a car is necessary. I live about 10-15k outside Galway and we basically have no reliable public transport but even if there was a reliable public transport it would barely get used and would be a massive waste of money. I could cycle in to town whenever I wanted to meet up with friends or go to school but it just isn’t convenient so I’ll get a lift 99/100 times. Even if my family lived in the centre of Galway city we’d still need a car. We can’t just get a bus to any other part of the country to visit family or go on a day trip because those bus routes don’t exist and will never exist. I imagine you could manage without a car in Galway/cork/limerick but it’s be fucking miserable and it’d be completely impossible to do so in the smaller towns throughout the country where people need to travel to get to work. Sure you can say ‘let’s invest in public transport’ but there will never be buses connecting every town and village to each other and if a government tried to do that it’d be an enormous expense for very little gain and if you wanted to save the environment you’d be better off just spending that on electric vehicle grants, renewables and carbon capture technology

34. Ah here we go again.

    To be a bit vulgar, do you expect me to haul 2 of my kids, one of them a baby so there’s a buggy involved, their food, spare clothes because they will shit themselves, some of their toys, and a bunch of other baby gear, to the nearest non existent public transport point, and then when we get to the closest stop, just continue on foot for unknown number of kilometres into the picnic area or some other amusement zone?

    Or do you want Ireland’s population to decline dramatically by couples not having kids?

    Or maybe, just maybe, we need a good coexistence of cars and a solid public transport system. As well as nice walkable towns and cities where you can go easily to the shop on foot. We are now building estates which are pure housing, nearest shop is 30 minutes on foot. So you need to have a car just to go buy fucking milk.

    The cars are not the problem. It’s an absolute lack of planning for pedestrian life that’s the problem (including public transport).