End of an era

Apparently Margaret Thatcher once said that any man who reaches the age of 26 without owning a car can consider himself a failure. Up until now I was pleased to be branded a failure by Thatcher's kind of idealism, outliving her target date by 3 years. I've found living without a car not too difficult for the past decade of adulthood. I've got very good at finding cheap train tickets, knowing where I can get to on what train/bus lines and blagging lifts out of friends more "successful" than myself. So it was with a heavy heart that I finally conceded that I needed to buy myself a car. Ironically the event that spurred this was my imminent (I hope!) qualification as a commercial energy assessor, someone who can issue Energy Performance Certificates for Commercial buildings. This looks likely to involve visiting lots of sites that are in the middle of nowhere, on industrial estates and other places hard-to-access by train/bus.

I was primarily looking for something with the lowest CO2 emissions per km (which pretty accurately translates into a high mpg), I didn't want a hybrid because I wouldn't be doing that much city driving, and I was going to need a bigger range than current electric vehicles offer, so I narrowed it down to half a dozen small diesel cars. The murky world of second hand car sales was all new to me and luckily I managed to avoid the hard sell at dealerships and got a good deal out of a private sale on the first car I saw, a 2002 Citroen C3. I picked it up in Wakefield and it took two and a half hours to drive from there to the Hope Valley in heavy traffic, longer than it would have taken by train, my eco-karma was clearly not amused!

Once you have a car, of course, you are tempted to use it all the time - the upfront investment is so large, and the marginal cost per journey so small (often smaller than a bus or train fare), that it makes economic as well as convenience sense to do so. I almost found myself driving to and from north wales twice in 5 days this week, until the old self kicked in and I realised dossing with friends for a couple of nights in between trips was a cheaper, greener and altogether less stressful option. This seems to be the crux of the problem of getting people out of cars and onto public transport - we have to not just make public transport cheaper, faster and more convenient, but we have to make the cost per journey of car travel more expensive. It might be hard to do with the actual purchasing of cars, but it wouldn't seem unfeasible to make insurance and road tax something that we paid for on a "per journey" rather than "per year" basis, and this would be much fairer as well - currently you pay the same amount of road tax whether you drive 20,000 miles a year or 2000 miles a year.