The car is currently the dominant travel mode in the UK, whether measured by distance, frequency or duration of travel. Even so, statistics show that the average car is idle for over 23 hours out of 24. But while stationary for over 95 percent of the day, the car, while waiting in some convenient location, embodies the potential for travel and this potential for spontaneous travel is one of the psychological attractions of the car. Reducing car dependence is not easy. In motorised places the infrastructure maintains and reproduces the continued use of the car - "The whole country is geared for the car" complained one respondent interviewed in Stradling et al. (1998, 1999). Land use planning decisions over the location of origins (eg homes) and destinations (eg work, school, retail and entertainment opportunities) may even be seen as requiring car travel. Car dependence can be reduced: by modifying the opportunities for travel through improving the availability and accessibility of alternative modes; by modifying the inclinations and preferences towards travel by alternative modes, for example by marketing public transport (Stradling, 2002b) or de-marketing the car (Wright and Egan, 2000), and by modifying the lifestyle patterns that generate obligations to travel from current origins to present destinations. Persuading people out of their cars or even persuading them to vary the amount and proportion of car use in their quotidian multi-modal travelling sounds initially like an unwelcome imposition on an unwilling populace, but in Scotland today, according to the authors study of a sample of Scottish adults, 31 per cent of drivers would like to use their car less, 40 per cent of drivers are interested in reducing their car use, 44 per cent of drivers agree that reducing their car use would make them 'feel good', and 62 per cent say they would like to reduce their car use but feel constrained by the lack of practical alternative ways to meet their current transport needs (NFO System Three Social Research and Napier University Transport Research Institute, 2001). (Author/publisher) For the covering abstract see ITRD E116881.
Samenvatting