Safe Speed Forums

I'm not denying the inherrent stability of a short drawbar or 5th wheel system, but I'll guarentee you that 99% of the towing incidents involving cars/SUVs are down to badly loaded trailers, lack of maintenance and general lack of knowledge on the part of the driver.

Yes, I can feel the trailer when towing with the car, but its properly loaded with the correct amount of nose weight, so I can quite happily cruise at a nice legal 60mph . The only time I get into trouble is with the tramlines on the A34 south of Newbury.

When we came back from Cornwall on the Sunday of bank holiday weekend I lost count of the number of caravans that were dangerously badly loaded, weaving around the road at 40mph. There was even one that passed us while we were stopped in a layby that was giving off a nice smell of overheating brakes (travelling UP hill) which we later passed on the hard shoulder of the motorway after it had suffered a blowout.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

As interesting as the towing arguement is (no really - I will need to start towing my little plane on a trailer next year, and some of it will be on wet grass), I think there is a more important point here.....


Whatever vehicle a person choses to run - the choice is almost certainly governed by the vehicle's other uses outside commuting.


We have well established that public transport is all but useless for most people with productive jobs and thus a private car is all but essential.

People DO have lives and requirements outside of work though and this is where the choice of vehicle is steered away from pure fuel efficiency.

So long as we in the UK are limited to the number of vehicles we can have by taxation and insurance laws (why not just insure the driver and pay for fuel??) we are forced to choose a vehicle when can fullfill ALL our requirements, but is far from optimal for any.


In short, our cars reflect the ultimate transport compromise.


If we scrapped road tax and the need to insure vehicles individually (or remove the need to insure them at all?? All insurance companies have ever done for me is create hassle and cost me money whilst achieving the square root of piss-all), then we could own and use as many vehicles as we could afford to buy, and run them purely for the purpose it was bought for.


For example I could buy a small thrifty car to go to work, a long car for my large loads and shopping, and a diesel 4x4 for towing stuff.


As I said, so long as my wife and I can only have 1 car each due to money wasted on per-vehicle basis, we must own cars which can satisfy all our needs and use them wastefully on less onerous tasks.

Can't have it all ways..................

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Most? Are you sure about that?

Most people get public transport to my current place of work. Most people got public transport to my last place of work. I could go on but then unlike the rest of you, I've never worked in the country (why isn't there a yokel smiley ) either that or I'm not doing a productive job.
Public transport is the only realistic means of shifting large numbers of people into and out of a central location.

I get the impression that some on SS are, in essence, ideologically opposed to public transport?

I'm not - I think GOOD public transport is a GOOD thing. BAD public transport is counter-productive...

I think what annoys people is that its advocates often seem to imply that PT is somehow morally superior to private transport, and that PT (especially the railways) enjoys very large subsidies, while drivers are taxed through the nose.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Speaking generally, I think people tend to be opposed to anything that's been stuffed up their nose by government.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Am not "Idealogically opposed" to public transprt!

I am "Ideologically opposed" to people who are "Idealogically opposed" to Private transport!

Especially up in "Animal Farm" where the "Pigs" that chant most loudly the Mantra of "Public transport good, Private cars bad" tend to be the ones benefitting from cheuffer driven officeil transport.

I suppose that they consider this to be "Public Transport" because the public pays for it all through our taxes!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Grief! We must all have VERY big noses then - that covers a lot of ground!!!!!

But seriously, if the govt wanted to stuff a properly organised, well managed and resourced, integrated public transport system up my nose (without restricting my right to use private transport) I reckon I could make it fit

The councillors in Stockport are proposing the implementation of a number of residents' only parking zones where the residents would have to pay £60 a year for the privilege of parking on their own street.

But the councillors propose to exempt themselves from this, as they claim they need to visit lots of homes on council business. You couldn't make it up

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

You're forgetting one rather large practical snag that quite a few people would face in this scenario - where the hell do you park them all??? At present we're living in an apartment building which, on the paperwork at least, claims to offer 2 spaces per apartment. In reality it offers a single allocated space plus enough visitor spaces and on-street parking (which is also shared with the houses on the other side of the close) for perhaps half of the apartments to have a second car (provided they weren't then also expecting anyone to visit by car...).

Next month we're *fingers crossed* finally moving into a house, which has enough off-street parking for our Omega plus either one other vehicle of similar size or two small (Corsa, Polo etc.) sized ones, and then room for one car on the road outside, but this is the most generously-provisioned parking we've seen on any of the houses we looked at - most had off-road space for one or two cars at most (provided at least one of them was tiny).

There's also the problem that, as vehicles get larger, they stop being able to fit into the off-road spaces and garages provided with older houses. Or, if your brand new home happened to have been designed by complete muppets, you may even find that the newly-provided spaces/garages are too small... A year or two before I left Newcastle there were some new executive apartments built overlooking the river. Now you'd think that, being exec apartments, the designers would have figured out the owners would be more likely to own larger rather than smaller cars, and so require wider rather than narrower garages, yes? No. Oh dear

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Chris

I used to work in Slough, I currently work in Maidenhead. Neither are what you'd consider to be out in the sticks, both have decent rail links via the Great Western main line, and Slough at least has a half-decent (compared to other similarly sized towns) network of bus routes. I was one of the few people not to drive to work at my last job, and I'm one of the few who doesn't (at the moment, at least) drive to work at my current job...

For anyone working in a large urban area (London, Manchester etc.) who also lives near to a suitable public transport route, then commuting by PT isn't a particularly difficult choice. For those of us living/working in not-quite-so-big urban areas, commuting by PT can often be, at the very least, something you'd need a damn good reason to do, and at worst be impossible.

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Chris

good grief!

ok so 4x4's aren't sensible if you use mainly use them in an urban environment? so what?

Bl00dy hell where will it end, before i buy my next car will i have to complete a permission form including business case and enviromental impct assessment and gain permission from the local village informant before getting permission to spend my own money?

I've just completed a 9 hour day with 5 hours driving on top. Basically travelling all over the uk ensuring that parts of our national infrastructure are maintained in a safe, efficient manner. I am now lying on my sofa watching my big telly with my car and mrs civil engineer's TT (a gas guzzling 4x4) on the drive.

4x4's are less efficient? who cares? I'll spend my highly taxed salary however I see fit.

If you don't like it then I suggest you can......

Fair point Twister It's yet another snag then which reinforces the case that we must all buy one vehicle which can fulfil all of our needs though!

Jonsher - fair point, and I personally had hoped to get transferred to our premises next to the city bus station so I could use PT to work..... Alas this will not now happen and I shall stay where I am. This is still in the city, but needs 3 bus connections and a 20 min walk up a steep hill (and down again at night ) to get to work. Best of all - due to 4 different buses needed to get me within a few miles of one of the city's largest industrial estate from my home, 20 miles away, I would get 3hrs a day less at home with my young family and it would cost me approx £2.75 a day more than running a V6 through rush hour.

Unfortunately my job involves liasing with our clients who demand that we work office hours. Consequently we are very limited in our abilities to travel at off-peak times (I do drive in at 6am to miss what I can, but I can't leave before it all kicks off again. I'm absolutely damned if I'm going to stay back late, spending all my waking hours in an office just to avoid contributing to congestion though).

All public transport achieves in Aberdeen is congestion. Empty buses (no-one uses them - they're routes and times are sodding useless) simply take up road space and get themselves stuck on busy junctions.

In Aberdeen public transport only serves to hold up the cars.

The council now want to turn the roads into HOV routes for 3 or more occupants. That means any eco warriors with Smart Cars can't use them

Me? I'll just go to the sex shop for a doll called Cindy and another called Shirley and sit them in the passenger seats like everyone else is planning

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Sport Utility Vehicle.... what "sport" exactly requires the use of a big, fat, slow, unstable vehicle that is so compromised it is good at nothing?

What are they good at? Posters have pointed out that an suv takes up less space than a Mondeo. So, being as it's much taller and has wobbly suspension, she's not going to be madly stable and because it is smaller than a Mondeo isn't going to be particularly spaceous either.

What about off road ability? To take a car off the road is needs to be different to one that is used on the road. Off road cars need to be tall, with long travelling soft suspension to keep the wheels in contact with the ground over rough terrain. However, to go on the road cars need to be low to the ground with firmer suspension. But because most people buy the specialist off roader and bizzarly never go off the road, manufactures make them more suitable for on road use. This compromises their off road ability making them useless for working off road. So you end up with a car that is marked as an "off roader", gets used as an "on roader" is isn't particularly good at either.

Should I arm my hatch back with big knobbly tyres and pull 40 ewes around the Welsh mountains? Or fill it with chain saws and get a job with the forestry commision? Narr, I drive on the road and need a car specialised for the job.

I just wish I had the brain wave that is selling a product that is good at nowt, making it desirable and selling it at a premium.

Round here, most buses would be ineligible for that most of the time! It's a pointless waste of time and money to pay people to drive big, expensive polluting vehicles round in circles all day on the off-chance that somebody want to use them from time to time.

Does anyone have any figures for the real total cost per passenger mile of a typical bus route compared to a private motor car? I seem to remember reading figures that showed the typical single decker would need to be at least 25% full to match the cost of a car. That was a few years ago and it might be worse now.

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Peter Humphries (and a green V8S)

Not sure I understand your point. That you wouldn't buy one is clear. Are you supportive or opposed to a ban and/or punitive taxation of these vehicles?

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You obviously haven't been in an X5 with sport suspension and 315/35 x 20 rubber. Useless off-road but who cares.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

And that's just the kind of selfish additude that the anti 4x4 brigade are talking about! (joke!!)

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

Me neither.

I just don't know of any good, reliable, inexpensive, clean, convenient public transport...

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus

I do... Unfortunately, it's in Spain!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev